51. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” 19–27, 29, 31.
52. Ibid., 12.
53. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/ideology/criticism (1),” originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 216 (October 1969), 11-15, trans. Susan Bennett, in Nick Browne, ed., Cahiers du cinema, Vol. 3, 1969-72: The Politics of Representation (London: Routledge/BFI, 1990), 58-67; “John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln, a Collective Text by the Editors of Cahiers du Cinéma,” originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 223 (August 1970), 29-47, trans. Helen Lackner and Diana Matias, Screen 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1972): 5–44.
54. On the construction of Lincoln’s historical reputation, see Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
55. Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Dell, 1969), 13.
56. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1890).
57. William Henry Herndon and Jesse William Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life … The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincolnby William Henry Herndon (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1889).
58. Cornelius Regier, The Era of the Muckrakers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), 17.
59. Regier, Era of the Muckrakers, 13–14, 20–21.
60. Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1945), 96–97; Mary E. Tomkins, Ida M. Tarbell (Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1974), 38; Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 161; Harold S. Wilson, “McClure’s Magazine” and the Muckrakers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 73–74.
61. Spears, The Civil War on the Screen, 65, 67–70; Robert C. Roman, “Lincoln on the Screen,” Films in Review 12, no. 2 (February 1961): 87–90; Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, 180.
62. Roman, “Lincoln on the Screen,” 89–90.
63. Robert Lang, “The Birth of a Nation: History, Ideology, Narrative Form,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 23.
64. In the original film, indeed, as cited above, African Americans were shown being deported en masse back to Africa (this sequence, titled “Lincoln’s Solution,” was cut after protests at an early stage in the film’s exhibition). Cuniberti, Birth of a Nation, 166–67.
65. Spears, The Civil War on the Screen, 75; Schickel, Griffith, 551.
66. Vlada Petric, “Two Lincoln Assassinations by D. W. Griffith,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 347–48, 350.
67. The fact that Northern and Southern whites in the film take refuge together against the marauding blacks in what Michael Rogin terms a “Lincoln log cabin” is clearly a conscious attempt to link national (white) unity with perhaps the most famous icon associated with the Lincoln legend. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 281.
68. Peter Noble, “A Note on an Idol,” Sight and Sound 15, no. 59 (Autumn 1946): 81–82; “The Birth of a Nation,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 61 (Spring 1947): 32.
69. William Archibald Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (New York: Macmillan, 1897); William Archibald Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907). On Dunning, see Philip R. Muller, “Look Back without Anger: A Reappraisal of William A. Dunning,” Journal of American History 61 (1974): 325–38. On the Dunning/Bowers view of Reconstruction, see Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction 1865–1877 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 3–23.
70. E. Merton Coulter, The South during Reconstruction 1865–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), xi.
71. Stern, “Griffith: 1—“The Birth of a Nation,” 35–36; Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, Vol. V, Reunion and Nationalization (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902); Albion Winegar Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand and the Invisible Empire (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1880); Walter L. Fleming, The Prescript of [the] Ku Klux Klan (an undated pamphlet); J. C. Lester and D. L. Wilson, The Ku Klux Klan: Its Origins, Growth and Disbandment, intro. by Walter L. Fleming (New York: Neale, 1905, originally published 1884); John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865–1877 (Columbia, S.C.: State Company Publishers, 1905); Testimony Taken by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1972).
72. Stern, “Griffith: 1—“The Birth of a Nation,” 35–36. According to Stern (36), the books by Tourgée, Lester, and Wilson, and Reynolds, together with the Ku Klux Klan Report, and Fleming’s pamphlet, also came from Dixon. Anthony Slide comments that Dixon provided Griffith “with a trunkful of books from his library” before shooting started on Birth of a Nation. Slide, American Racist, 74.
73. This could in fact have been either Fleming’s 1905 book on Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905) or, more likely, the 64-page untitled pamphlet he had published a year before dealing with “Public Fraud in South Carolina” and other matters, including the local constitution of the Klan (Morgantown, W. Va.: n.p., 1904).
74. James S. Pike, The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government (New York: D. Appleton, 1874); J. J. McCarthy to editor of the News, in Indianapolis News, December 10, 1915, DWGP.
75. Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) was the greatest battle of the Civil War, with total casualties on both sides of 51,000. See James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (London: Penguin, 1990), 664. Though many, both blacks and whites, were the subject of Klan violence during Reconstruction, it is unlikely that the death toll came anywhere near this figure. The congressional “Ku Klux” Committee, for example, estimated that there had been seventy-four murders by the Klan in Georgia and 109 in Alabama. Albion W. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand by One of the Fools; Part II, The Invisible Empire, A Concise Review of the Epoch on Which the Tale Is Based (New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1880), 436–37.
76. Otto H. Olsen, Carpetbagger’s Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgée (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1–2, 14–21, 23–24, 26–28, 73–74; John Hope Franklin, “Editor’s Introduction,” to Albion W. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), x.
77. Olsen, Carpetbagger’s Crusade, 35–37, 41–51, 56–57, 61–72, 74, 79, 86, 90–91, 93–115, 118, 121, 146–48, 159, 167–68, 172–73, 179, 184–87, 191, 208, 220–21.
78. See Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (1961), Chapter 36.
79. See, for example, Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (1961), Chapter 28.
80. Stern, “Griffith: 1—“The Birth of a Nation,” 35.
81. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (1961), 183–88, 190.
82. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (1880), 385–86, 394.
83. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (1880), 414–17. The battle, Tourgée noted, “was almost always Shiloh,” a fact reflecting the Southwestern roots of the Klan. Ibid., 397.
84. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (1880), 407. Another source used by Griffith in preparing the film observed that Klansmen not only wore robes to disguise themselves, but that they also covered their horses to make them harder to recognize as well. This too was done in the film. Lester and Wilson, Ku Klux Klan, 93–94.
85. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (1880), 425, 428.
86. Ibid., 422–23.
87. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand (1880), 419–22; Lester and Wilson, Ku Klux Klan, facing 58 and 97. In both cases, the uniforms had been captured by federal forces. Walter L. Fleming, “Introduction,” ibid., 43–44.
88. Stern, “Griffith: 1—“The Birth of a Nation,” 35–36.
89. The uniforms of the Klansmen in Birth of a Nation are very similar to those worn by the night riders in Griffith’s T
he Rose of Kentucky (1911).
90. Robert F. Durden, James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850–1882 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1957), vii–viii, 3, 13–14, 16–19, 30–31, 37–38, 45–46, 51, 161–62, 167–68, 185–86, 195–97, 201, quotation 31.
91. Pike, Prostrate State, 4, 11–12, 56–57, 67, 89.
92. Durden, Pike, 205–206.
93. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 126. On Dixon’s tendency to “borrow” without attribution, see Frances Oakes, “Whitman and Dixon: A Strange Case of Borrowing,” Georgia Review 11, no. 3 (Fall, 1957): 333–40.
94. Pike, The Prostrate State, 44, 180, 183–86, 222–24, 266.
95. Curiously, although an intertitle specified that the film would deal with the session of 1871, the very next title claimed that the facsimile of the House was actually based on a photograph of 1870 in the Columbia State newspaper (shot 839). Mimi White emphasizes the importance of this “gap between the source and the filmic representation.” White, “The Birth of a Nation,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 218.
96. Pike, The Prostrate State, 12; Dixon, The Clansman, 263; The Birth of a Nation, shot 839.
97. Pike, Prostrate State, 15–16, 42.
98. Pike, Prostrate State, 10; Dixon, The Clansman, 264–65.
99. Pike, Prostrate State, 13, 94; Dixon, The Clansman, 264, 267; The Birth of a Nation, shots 839, 859–60.
100. Pike, Prostrate State, 20; Dixon, The Clansman, 266; The Birth of a Nation, shot 844.
101. Pike, Prostrate State, 10, 17, 20, 226; Dixon, The Clansman, 265–66; The Birth of a Nation, shots 845–54. On the chicken-eating cliché, see, for example, Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 13–14; Bogle, Toms, 7–8.
102. Dixon, The Clansman, 268; The Birth of a Nation, shots 866–74. South Carolina indeed passed a law banning interracial marriage in 1865. This law would not be repealed (by referendum) until 1998. See Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 91–92.
103. Pike, Prostrate State, 14, 44; Dixon, The Clansman, 264; Birth of a Nation, shot 839.
104. Wilson, A History of the American People, vol. 5, Reunion and Nationalization, 7, 17–18.
105. Wilson, History, 47; Pike, Prostrate State, 252–53.
106. Wilson, History, 48–49, 89–92, 95–96; cf. Stampp, Era of Reconstruction, 177–80.
107. Wilson, History, 38, 49–52.
108. Ibid., 59–60, 62–64, 74–76. On October 12, 1871, Grant issued a proclamation that singled out nine counties of South Carolina where Klan activity was at its worst and calling on members of all illegal organizations there to give up their guns and disguises within five days. When his proclamation was ignored, he suspended habeas corpus rights in the counties concerned and 200 arrests were made—arrests that were “promptly” followed by prosecutions and convictions in federal courts. Ibid., 75–76.
109. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 13–14; Cook, Thomas Dixon, 23–24.
110. Henry Stephen Gordon, “D. W. Griffith Recalls the Making of The Birth of a Nation,” Photoplay Magazine 10 (October 1916), reprinted in Silva, Focus, 57.
111. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (London: Harper and Row, 1971), 89.
112. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 88.
113. Schickel, Griffith, 21.
114. Hart, The Man Who Invented Hollywood, 27.
115. Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” 38.
116. Linda Williams points out that in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, black characters Cassy and Emmeline take revenge on Simon Legree for the murder of Tom by wearing white sheets (suggesting they are ghosts) around Legree’s house. Playing the Race Card, 63–64.
117. Dixon, The Clansman, 318–26.
118. Publicity for The Birth of a Nation insisted that the Klan had been founded by the descendants of Scottish highlanders and that the “St. Andrew’s cross” had been “the conventional sign of Scottish clans.” “Scottish Clans Revived in Carolinas,” Record [Boston], May 13, 1915, DWGP.
119. David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), 8–9.
120. William P. Randel, The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy (Philadelphia: Chiltern Books, 1965), 53.
121. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 10, 9.
122. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 18–19; Stanley F. Horn, Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866–1871 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 232, 238–41; Randel, The Ku Klux Klan, 55; Trelease, White Terror, 71, 369–70, 373, 378, 388–89; Simkins and Woody, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 509.
123. Trelease, White Terror, xxviii.
124. Ibid., xx.
125. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 146.
126. In reality, the burning of white owners’ barns, stables, and saloons by African Americans seems to have been a protest against the far more numerous aggressions committed by whites against blacks. Trelease, White Terror, 363–64, 366.
127. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 9. Other battles were sometimes cited. Shiloh (Pittsburgh Landing, April 6–7, 1862), however, reflected the Southwestern origins of the Klan, since the battle had taken place approximately eighty miles to the west of the Klan’s birthplace in Pulaski, Tennessee.
128. The Klan’s main strength was in the nine counties of the South Carolina piedmont in which President Ulysses S. Grant later (October 12, 1871) suspended habeas corpus: Spartanburg, Laurens, Union, Newberry, York, Chester, Fairfield, Lancaster, and Chesterfield. Horn, Invisible Empire, 217, 235; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 10, 16; Trelease, White Terror, 115, 353.
129. Horn, Invisible Empire, 218–21, 230; Trelease, White Terror, 350–52.
130. Horn, Invisible Empire, 225–27; Randel, The Ku Klux Klan, 54–55; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 13; Trelease, White Terror, 356–58.
131. Trelease, White Terror, 364–5; Horn, Invisible Empire, 222.
132. Horn, Invisible Empire, 227.
133. Trelease, White Terror, 371–72.
134. Sun [Baltimore], March 25, 1916, DWGP; Schickel, Griffith, 277; Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 277.
135. Schickel, Griffith, 286; the Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, “The Birth of a Nation,” in Silva, Focus, 102-103. “New York accepted it [Birth] in the light of an educational entertainment,” Griffith claimed. “Fifteen schools came to see the picture in lieu of a history lesson.” “Seen on the Screen,” Herald [Chicago], May 27, 1915, DWGP.
136. The first black regiments raised were in Louisiana and Kansas. The first black regiment to be formed in the North was the 54th Massachusetts. See McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 84 n, 500, 563–65.
137. Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 9. The first Africans to arrive in the British colonies in America were allegedly the twenty blacks who landed at Jamestown in 1619 from a Dutch frigate. John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 56. One month earlier, the Virginia colonists had been granted the right to hold an annual general assembly. To Philip S. Foner, the conjunction of the two events emphasized “the contradictory nature of American democracy: the establishment of representative government on the one hand, and the institution of forced labor on the other.” Foner, History of Black Americans: From Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 186–87.
138. D’Ooge, “‘The Birth of a Nation’: Symposium on Classic Film Discusses Inaccuracies and Virtues,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 53, no. 13 (June 27, 1994): 264, 266.
139. For Pennsylvania protests at the depiction of Stevens/Stoneman in the film, see “Stoneman Was Stevens,” Franklin Repository [Chambersburg, Pennsylvania], May 2, 1916, DWGP; “Would Suppress ‘Birth of a Nation,’”
Sunbury Daily Item [Sunbury, Pennsylvania], May 10, 1916, DWGP; Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 222), “The Birth of a Nation” Picture, introduced by Congressman Benjamin K. Focht, 64th Congress, 1st Session, May 10, 1916, copy in NAACPP.
140. Stevens’s Lydia Smith was transformed in the film into Lydia Brown.
141. For Dixon’s highly critical view of Stevens, see Dixon, “Reply to the New York Globe,” April 10, 1915, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 76.
142. Franklin, “The Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History,” 20. For a contemporary criticism of the film’s view of Stevens, see “The Birth of a Nation: An Editorial,” The Crisis, 10 (May–June 1915), reprinted in Silva, Focus, 64–65.
143. Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 92, 365. The estate was initially left to his nephew with the condition that he give up drinking—a condition Stevens shrewdly judged would not be met.
144. G. B. D. “The Birth of a Nation,” The Moon Journal [Battle Creek, Michigan], February 4, 1916, DWGP.
145. Schickel, Griffith, 555.
146. On Phillips, see John D. Smith and John C. Inscoe, eds., Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A Southern Historian and His Critics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).
147. Franklin, “The Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History,” 23. Franklin seemed just as convinced of the influence of Griffith’s film fifteen years later. See D’Ooge, “The Birth of a Nation: Symposium on Classic Film Discusses Inaccuracies and Virtues,” 266.
148. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” American Historical Review 15, no. 4 (July 1910): 781–99. Du Bois extended this argument a quarter of a century later in W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935).
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