149. John R. Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction (New York: Neale Publishing, 1913). Lynch, who had served as a U.S. senator from his state during Reconstruction, was later described by Kenneth Stampp as “an able Mississippi Negro politician.” Era of Reconstruction, 218.
150. For one protest against the insult to ex-Senator Lynch, see Dr. Chas. E. Locke and E. Burton Ceruti, “To the Honorable the City Council of the City of Los Angeles, State of California,” February 2, 1915, 1–4, NAACPP. Lynch himself wrote to the Chicago Tribune criticizing The Birth of a Nation as being “grounded on historical misrepresentation, without having a single actual fact as the basis of its existence. It is fiction pure and simple, painted from a diseased and prejudiced imagination.” John R. Lynch to editor, Tribune, May [?], 1915, printed in “Voice of the People—‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Tribune [Chicago], June 1, 1915, DWGP.
151. For the original story, see Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 641 (also Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 174–75); Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” 39, n. 32; Schickel, Griffith, 268.
152. “D. W. Griffith, Producer of the World’s Biggest Picture, Interview with D. W. Griffith,” American [New York], February 28, 1915, 9, reprinted in Geduld, Focus on D. W. Griffith, 28.
153. Joseph Smith, The Spanish-American War: Conflict in the Caribbean and the Pacific 1895–1902 (London: Longman, 1994), 102; Frank Freidel, The Splendid Little War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), 33.
154. Thomas Cripps, “The Absent Presence in American Civil War Films,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 14, no. 4 (1994): 371; Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 26.
155. Maldwyn A. Jones, The Limits of Liberty: American History, 1607–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 412.
156. See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 204–207, 212–19; John F. McClymer, “The Federal Government and the Americanization Movement, 1915–24,” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives 10, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 22–41; Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).
157. “Seen on the Screen,” Herald [Chicago], May 27, 1915, DWGP.
158. Kagan, “Two Classic War Films of the Silent Era,” 1.
159. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 271. Rogin also points out that Griffith omitted “the greatest destruction at Petersburg, the one suffered by black troops sent into the crater opened up by Northern mining under Southern lines.” Ibid.
160. Kagan, “Two Classic War Films,” 1.
161. Tara McPherson, “‘Both Kinds of Arms’: Remembering the Civil War,” Velvet Light Trap no. 35 (Spring 1995): 7.
162. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
163. Jane Gaines comments that Birth was “perhaps the first successful example of the mass media production of a group identity through exclusion and scapegoating.” Gaines, Fire and Desire, 265.
164. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-century America (London: Verso, 1990).
165. Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 4–5. I am grateful to Dr. Arlene Hui for bringing this point to my attention.
166. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 32–36, 68.
167. Jean Boissel, Gobineau biographie: mythes et réalité (Paris: Berg International, 1993), 119; Paul A. Fortier, “Gobineau and German Racism,” Comparative Literature 19, no. 4 (Fall 1967): 341–42; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 147.
168. Edward A. Freeman’s Comparative Politics (1874) provides a good illustration of the first of these tendencies and John W. Burgess’s Political Sciences and Comparative Constitutional Law (1890) of the second. See Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 148–50.
169. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 9–10, 12–23.
170. Ibid., 12, 16–17.
171. George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 98–99; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 160–61, 182–85.
172. On Adams, see Holt, ed., Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876–1901: As Revealed in the Correspondence of Herbert B. Adams.
173. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 149.
174. For Dixon’s “decidedly muddled” thinking on race, see Slide, American Racist, 144.
175. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 44, 62–6, 77, 128, 131, 159, 174, 179.
176. Ibid., 165, 172, 179, 184–85, 209–10, 213, 215.
177. Ibid., 178–79.
178. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 65, 156, 168, 172–73, 230, 243, 290–91, 294; Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 148, 152–56.
179. Smith, The Spanish-American War, 195, 198; David Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 241–42; Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 190–91.
180. See Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Higham, Strangers in the Land, 145–46.
181. Henry Adams to Charles M. Gaskell, April 28, 1894, in The Letters of Henry Adams, Vol. IV: 1892–1899, ed. J. C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, and Viola Hopkins Winner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 185.
182. Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Racial Superiority,” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (1901): 67–89; Julius Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1972), 156; David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 42; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 172.
183. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race;or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: C. Scribner, 1916); Higham, Strangers in the Land, 156–57.
184. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 231.
185. Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 17. According to Brian Gallagher, “the film’s black characters are defined and limited by their inevitable and inherent excesses.” In terms of whites, they always appear as the “other,” and this otherness is presented in the first half of the movie as “comic relief.” In the second half, however, it can no longer be contained and—in “the morally inverted world of Reconstruction”—is depicted as “the motive force of tragedy.” Gallagher, “Racist Ideology and Black Abnormality in the Birth of a Nation,” 68, 71.
186. Allen W. Trelease points out that the program of black legal and political equality “was rendered all the more noxious [to many Southern whites] by the common assumption that it would lead inevitably to social mixing.” Trelease, White Terror, xxxviii.
187. Williamson, The Crucible of Race, 253.
188. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
189. Precise estimates of the number of lynchings vary. Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States 1889–1918 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1919; reprint 1969), 29, gives a comparatively high figure. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of
Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 271, has slightly lower figures. On the phenomenon of lynching generally, see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002).
190. Sorlin, The Film in History, 108.
191. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 155.
192. Baker, Following the Color Line, 30–31.
193. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 354–55; Williamson, Crucible of Race, 253, 255.
194. On the riot and the founding of the NAACP, see Charles F. Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), vol. 1, 9–30.
195. Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 9, 10, 12, 15, 19–20, 29–66, 100–43.
196. Jones, Limits of Liberty, 321.
197. Anon., White American (San Francisco, n.p., 1914); Higham, Strangers in the Land, 186.
198. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 173.
199. Ibid., 164–69, 171, 175, 191.
200. Wilson vetoed the second of these bills exactly ten days after watching The Birth of a Nation at the White House. See Wilson to the House of Representatives, January 28, 1915, Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 32, 142–44.
201. The Crisis (January 1915); Chairman [Joel E. Spingarn]’ Report, Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the NAACP, January 3, 1916, 4, NAACPP.
202. Robinson, “In the Year 1915: D. W. Griffith and the Whitening of America,” 174.
203. “Miscegenation” was a word coined by two Democratic party publicists, David G. Croly (the father of Herbert Croly) and George Wakeman, during the presidential election campaign of 1864. Attempting to undermine support for the Republican Party, Croly and Wakeman suggested that its leaders, including Lincoln, supported intermarriage between the races. See David G. Croly, George Wakeman, and E. C. Howell, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (London: Trübner, 1864); Sidney Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864,” Journal of Negro History 34, no. 3 (July 1949): 274–343.
204. David H. Fowler, Northern Attitudes towards Interracial Marriage: Legislation and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic States and the States of the Old Northwest, 1780–1930 (New York: Garland, 1987), 273. On the basis of Fowler’s information, there were actually forty-two attempts, all of which failed. Ibid., 271, n.1.
205. If anti-miscegenation laws were oldest in the South, they were most complicated in the West. See Arlene Hui, “Miscegenation in Mainstream American Cinema: Representing Interracial Relationships, 1913–1956” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2006), 28–29.
206. Tacitus, as quoted in Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 12.
207. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 210, 213, 215.
208. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 109–10, 144–45; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 295–96. Interbreeding between black men and white women, it was suggested, would have exactly the opposite effect, encouraging racial deterioration. Ibid.
209. The depiction of Lydia and Silas Lynch on screen seems to suggest that women and men of mixed race are both less in control of their passions and more dangerous than “pure” blacks. In the film’s distinct hierarchy of races, mulattoes inherit their brutality and primitivism from their black inheritance, but their white blood is responsible for endowing them with political and organizational skills. Michael Rogin points out that the liaison between Stoneman and Lydia foregrounds the idea of the mulatto, born of interracial relationships. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 269. Some contemporary critics of Birth commented that while the film presented blacks preying on white women as the main avenue to interracial relationships, most mulattoes—as the product of such relationships—had been born because Southern white men had sexually exploited their female slaves. Letter by Ross D. Brown, published in “People’s Forum—The Birth of a Nation,” Muncie Star January 18, 1916, DWGP; Francis H. Rowley, “A Reproach to Our City,” Fighting a Vicious Film, 36–37.
210. States proposing laws against intermarriage included California, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin. NAACP Sixth Annual Report, 1915, The Crisis (March 1916), 248. Also see minutes of the Meeting of the NAACP Board of Directors, February 2, 1916, and Annual Meeting of the Members of the NAACP, February 12, 1915, both in NAACPP.
211. See Chairman [Joel E. Spingarn]’s Report, Minutes of the NAACP Annual Meeting, January 3, 1916, 4, NAACPP; The Crisis (March 1915), 246.
212. On this fight sequence, see Melvyn Stokes, “Structuring Absences: Images of America Missing from the Hollywood Screen,” Revue Française d’Études Américaines no. 89 (June 2001): 47–50.
213. As reviewer Mark Vance commented: “Griffith struck it right when he adapted the Dixon story for the film. He knew the South and he knew just what kind of picture would please all white classes.” Variety, March 12, 1915, reprinted in Silva, Focus, 23.
214. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 111–33, 178–79, 306–9; Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 273–81; Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 158.
215. Jack S. Blocker Jr., Retreat from Reform: The Prohibition Movement in the United States 1890–1913 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), 214, 216, 239.
216. McKelway, as quoted in Hugh C. Bailey, Liberalism in the New South: Southern Social Reformers and the Progressive Movement (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1969), 65.
217. Musser, Emergence of Cinema, 200.
218. Dan Streible, “Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films,” in The Birth of Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi, 170–90; Grieveson, “Fighting Films,” 44. On Johnson’s career, also see Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1975) and Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1983).
219. Quoted in Streible, “Race and the Reception,” 173.
220. Streible, “Race and the Reception,” 192–93; Grieveson, “Fighting Films,” 45–46. On the background to the Sims Act, also see Gilmore, Bad Nigger!, 75–93.
221. Alternatively, Richard Maltby has argued in more symbolic terms that “The Great White Hope longed for in saloons across the country finally appeared in 1915 … [as] Henry B. Walthall, D. W. Griffith’s Little Colonel.” Maltby, “The Social Evil, the Moral Order, and the Melodramatic Imagination, 1890–1915,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratten, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1994), 226, n. 23.
222. George Kibbe Turner, “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities,” McClure’s Magazine 28 (April 1907): 575–92; Turner, “Tammany’s Control of New York by Professional Criminals,” McClure’s Magazine 33 (June 1909): 117–34; Turner, “The Daughters of the Poor,” McClure’s Magazine 34 (November 1909): 45–61. The first and last of these articles were reprinted in Arthur and Lila Weinberg, eds., The Muckrakers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 389–429.
223. On the white slave panic, see Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law (New York: Garland, 1990); Ben Brewster, “Traffic in Souls,” Cinema Journal 31, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 37–56.
224. David J. Langum, Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality under the Mann Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 48, 75.
225. Langum, Crossing over the Line, 48–49.
226. Gilmore, Bad Nigger!, 95–96, 105–106.
227. Prosecutor, as cited in Langum, Crossing over the Line, 185. Johnson fled to Europe to escape his sentence but eventually, in 1920, gave hi
mself up to federal authorities and served his sentence.
228. Roberts, Papa Jack, 159–160; also see Gilmore, Bad Nigger!, 106–13.
229. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 100.
230. There has been little investigation of such spectatorship. For exceptions to this, see Gregory A. Waller, “Another Audience: Black Moviegoing, 1907–1916,” 3–25; Mary Carbine, “‘The Finest Outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,” Camera Obscura 23 (May 1990): 9–41; Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, passim.
231. Cripps, Slow Fade, 11.
232. Walker, interviewed in Brownlow and Gill, D. W. Griffith—Father of Film (1993).
233. African American writer Ida B. Wells mentioned the visit of “two [black?] women friends [who] came in to tell me that they had just been to see The Birth of a Nation and agreed with me that it was an outrage which ought never to have been perpetrated, nor allowed to be shown here [in Chicago].” Wells, quoted in Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 24. The Chicago Defender reported that black women had led the stone-throwing inside the theater that escalated into the September 1915 anti-Birth riot in Philadelphia (discussed in Chapter 6 above). It also printed a response to Birth from Mrs. K. J. Bills, a black woman who had lived in the South during Reconstruction. Bills had no quarrel with the first half of the film, which she thought to contain “historical facts which hold a person almost spellbound.” But citing her own memories, she dismissed much of the so-called history of the second part as fiction. As Bills remembered it, Klansmen had ridden round “very quietly, like thieves” to intimidate black neighbors. They had not engaged in romantic group charges on horseback. Everett, Returning the Gaze, 94, 90–92.
234. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthian Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 292, 295.
235. Samuel Edward Courtney to Booker T. Washington, April 19, 1915, Letters of Booker T. Washington, 13, 1914–1915, ed. Harlan and Smock, 274–75. Also see Advertiser [Boston], April 19, 1915, and Post [Boston], April 24, 1915, both in DWGP. It was also suggested that William Lewis, a black former U.S. assistant attorney general, agreed with the proposed endorsement. Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture, Birth of a Nation,” in Silva, Focus, 120–21.
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