D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

72. “Pressure from Negroes Too Strong for ‘Birth’: Taken Off in Detroit,” Variety, February 18, 1931, 24; Acting Secretary to the Honorable Frank Murphy, February 19, 1931; Herbert J. Seligman to John P. Fletcher, April 2, 1931; “‘Birth of a Nation’ Film Barred by Philadelphia Mayor,” clipping dated September 4, 1931; Roy Wilkins to Governor Harry H. Woodring, October 13, 1931; Roy Wilkins to Mrs. Myers, Kansas State Board of Motion Picture Reviews, November 5, 1931; Governor Harry H. Woodring to Roy Wilkins, November 23, 1931; all in NAACPP. Also see Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 219–21, 262, 267–68.

  73. Walter White to Dr. James H. Gillespie, June 15, 1931; Dr. H. Cicero Edwards to Walter White, June 22, 1931; Walter White to Police Commissioner Mulrooney, September 18, 1931; all in NAACPP.

  74. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 89, 92–93; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 257. Some years later, a British critic commented that the speeding up of the sound version of the film “renders ineffective a number of scenes, and particularly damages the beautiful performance of Mae Marsh, the delicacy and nervous excitability of whose playing become ludicrous when thus arbitrarily galvanised.” L.G.A., “The Birth of a Nation,” Monthly Film Bulletin 20, no. 228 (January 1953): 4; cf. Lindsay Anderson, “Birth of a Nation,” Sight and Sound 22, no. 3 (January–March 1953): 129.

  75. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Seen on Way Out,” Tribune [Washington, D.C.], August 6, 1938, NAACPP.

  76. Walter White to Estelle Sternberger, September 5, 1935; Jack Nadel to Walter White, September 6, 1935; both in NAACPP.

  77. “Film Course for Adults Will Be Given at N.Y.U.,” Herald-Tribune [New York], August 30, 1937; Walter White to Dean Ned H. Dearborn, September 8, 1937; both in NAACPP. Mob violence and lynching were major issues during the Depression, when Hollywood produced a cycle of anti-lynching films, including Fury (1936). The Black Legion was an organization resembling the Klan that attacked immigrants in the Midwest during the 1930s. See Melvyn Stokes, “The Ku Klux Klan as Good and Evil in American Film,” in Les Bons et les Méchants dans le Cinéma Anglophone, ed. Francis Bordat and Serge Chauvin (Paris: University of Paris 10-Nanterre), 224.

  78. E. George Payne to Walter White, September 16, 1937, NAACPP; Walter White to Dean E. George Payne, September 17, 1937, NAACPP; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 313–16.

  79. “New York U. Drops Plan to Use ‘Birth of a Nation,’” NAACP press release, September 24 [1937]; Robert R. Gessner to Walter White, September 30, 1937; Class Notes, “History and Appreciation of the Cinema, Session II: October 4, 1937, The Movies Come of Age”; Archer Winsten, “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Surprises Old Admirer,” Post [New York], October 5, 1937; all in NAACPP.

  80. “Birth of a Nation,” NAACP Press Release, October 8, 1937; Charles H. Houston to the Board of Education, City of New York, October 5, 1937; Memorandum from Roy Wilkins to Charles H. Houston, December 8, 1937; all in NAACPP.

  81. Gertrude E. Ayer to Walter White, February 10, 1938; “Birth of a Nation,” circular dated January 17, 1938, the Stone Film Library, Inc.; David H. Moskowitz to Roy Wilkins, October 14, 1937; Roy Wilkins to Henry C. Turner, president, Board of Education, February 11, 1938; Harold G. Campbell, superintendent of schools, to Roy Wilkins, March 23, 1938; all in NAACPP.

  82. “Author of ‘Birth of a Nation’ Sues to Stop Showing of His Own Film,” Call [Kansas City], July 16, 1938; “‘Birth of Nation’ Seen on Way Out,” Guardian [Boston], August 13, 1938; both in NAACPP.

  83. W. A. Robinson to Walter F. White, January 12, 1939; Walter White to W. A. Robinson, January 15, 1939; Walter White to Jackson Davis, General Education Board, January 16, 1939; Walter White to Fanning Hearon, Association of School Film Libraries, January 18, 1939; all in NAACPP.

  84. “Riotous Film Costs Exhibitor $1,400 Fine,” Rocky Mountain News [Denver], April 20, 1939 [transcript]; W. F. Turner to Thurgood Marshall, October 4, 1939; “City Right to Ban ‘Racial Hatred’ Movies Is Upheld,” Post [Denver], February 1, 1940; “Denverite Is Fined $200 for Showing ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Post [Denver], February 28, 1940; “Denver Movie Censorship Law to Be Fought in State Court,” NAACP press release, n.d.; Roger Baldwin to Walter White, April 25, 1939; all in NAACPP. Also see Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 192–98. Birth was banned by the Milwaukee board of censors in 1939. Ibid., 245.

  85. Arthur Garfield Hays to Nate Goldstick, Corporation Counsel’s Office, Detroit, May 1, 1939, copy in NAACPP.

  86. Roger Baldwin to editor, The Crisis, April 17, 1940; Morris Fine [The American Jewish Committee] to Thurgood Marshall, May 25, 1939; “Theatre Man Arrested for Showing ‘Birth of a Nation,’” NAACP Press Release dated May 20, [1939?]; all in NAACPP. Also see Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 185–86.

  87. Roger Baldwin to editor, The Crisis, April 17, 1940, NAACPP.

  88. Irwin Esmond, director, Motion Picture Division, to Thurgood Marshall, October 31, 1938, NAACPP.

  89. Dr. James J. McClendon (“Mac”) to Walter White, May 1, 1939 (White wrote to RR on this letter “Show to B[oar]d. in its discussion on Roger Baldwin’s letter”); Walter White to RR [Richetta Randolph?], “Memorandum Re ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” June 13, 1939; Roger Baldwin to Walter White, June 17, 1939; all in NAACPP.

  90. R. B. Eleazer to Will Hays, March 25, 1940; Charles C. Webber to Will Hays, March 26, 1940; Will H. Hays to Dr. Stephen S. Wise, March 29, 1940; all in NAACPP.

  91. Walter White to Will Hays, March 21, 1940; Carl E. Milliken to Walter White, March 25, 1940; both in NAACPP.

  92. “Excerpts from NAACP Press Releases Re ‘Birth of a Nation,’” n.d., 1–2, NAACPP; Peter Noble, “The Negro in The Birth of a Nation,” reprinted in Silva, ed., Focus, 132. On the OWI, see Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: Patriotism, Movies and the Second World War from “Ninotchka” to “Mrs. Miniver” (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2000), passim, and Robert Fyne, The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II (Lanham, Mass.: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 9–10, 42, 48–49, 52–53, 56, 58, 64, 97, 159.

  93. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 92. In October 1947, for example, the film was revived at Harry Brandt’s Republic Theater in New York. The NAACP began to picket the theater and, after one week, the film—which was losing money—was withdrawn. “Excerpts from NAACP Press Releases Re ‘Birth of a Nation,’” 3, NAACPP.

  94. Slide, American Racist, 199; Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 102–104, 245, 273–74.

  95. Robert J. Landry, “‘Race’: Boxoffice But Booby-Trapped,” Variety, January 8, 1958, p. 15. I am very grateful to Tom Doherty for bringing this article to my attention.

  96. Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, 2000), 242.

  97. Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 385.

  98. Roy Aitken commented that he and his brother Harry had made many 16mm prints of the film since most university projectors could not handle the 35mm size of film used in ordinary movie theaters. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 92. Screenings of the film on college campuses also attracted intense controversy. In 1959, for example, the University of Cincinnati planned to show Birth as part of a silent film festival. The film was withdrawn after protests from the local NAACP. After would-be viewers and newspapers complained at this suppression, the movie was reinstated. Film Daily, March 30, 1959, cited in Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 8.

  99. May C. Nerney to Desha Breckinridge, September 16, 1915, NAACPP; cf. J. Mott Hallowell to James Michael Curley and Stephen O’Meara, n.d., reprinted in Fighting a Vicious Film, 26.

  100. The Crisis 12, no. 2 (June 1916): 87.

  101. Duncan C. Milner to Dr. [Charles E.] Bentley, April 13, 1918, NAACPP. On East St. Louis, see “The Massacre of East St. Louis” in The Crisis, September 1917.

  102. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photopla
y: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 87–90, 94–111, quotation from 221.

  103. A survey of 37,000 high school students in 1923 revealed that The Birth of a Nation was still the favorite movie for Southern boys. Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 28.

  104. Alice Miller Mitchell, Children and Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 141.

  105. Caroline Bond Day, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States, foreword and notes on the anthropometric data by Earnest A. Hooton, Harvard African Studies, no. 10 (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum of Harvard University, 1932), 126.

  106. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 134. Sklar’s view of the Payne Fund studies reflects the critique of them by Raymond Moley and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, a view that was politically motivated. For a more recent, balanced assessment of the studies, see Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Also see Shearon A. Lowery and Melvin L. DeFleur, Milestones in Mass Communications Research: Media Effects (New York: Longman, 1995), Chapter 2.

  107. Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 196–213, quotation from 212.

  108. Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 150. Blumer pointed out, however, that “the meanings which movie-goers may get from the same picture are diametrically opposite.” To support this proposition, he cited two very different reactions to The Birth of a Nation: one female subject of his survey admitted that the film increased her racism while another remembered “crying because the poor colored people were so mistreated.” Ibid., 180–81.

  109. Ruth C. Peterson and L. L. Thurstone, Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 35, 38, 60–61, 64–65

  110. Peterson and Thurstone, Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children, 35.

  111. William H. Short to [W. E.] Burghardt Du Bois, October 27, 1927; “Memorandum to Mr. White from Mr. Seligmann,” dated November 16, 1932; both in NAACPP.

  112. Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations,” 368, 380.

  113. Ibid., 368–69, 370.

  114. Douglas Cameron Moore, “A Study of the Influence of the Film The Birth of a Nation on the Attitudes of Selected High School White Students toward Negroes” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1971).

  115. Staiger, Interpreting Films, 139–53.

  116. Rick Halpern, “Organized Labor, Black Workers, and the Twentieth Century South: The Emerging Revision,” in Race and Class in the American South since 1890, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 61–64, 67–72; Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 68; Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 5, 316.

  117. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 503.

  118. Seymour Stern, “Suppression of Showing Marks 25th Year of Birth of a Nation,” New Leader, March 16, 1940, 3; Staiger, Interpreting Films, 139, 146–48.

  119. Peter Noble, “A Note on an Idol,” Sight and Sound 15, no. 59 (Autumn 1946): 81–82.

  120. D. W. Griffith, “The Birth of a Nation,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 61 (Spring 1947): 32.

  121. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 177.

  122. Schickel, Griffith, 602. Stern labored unsuccessfully on the projected biography for almost two decades. All that finally appeared were a series of notes on the production of Birth of a Nation. See Stern, “Griffith: 1—The Birth of a Nation,” 1–210.

  123. Seymour Stern, “Griffith Not Anti-Negro,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 61 (Spring 1947): 32–35.

  124. He reiterated much the same critique of The Birth of a Nation in a book published the following year. See Noble, “The Negro in The Birth of a Nation,” The Negro in Films (London: Skelton Robinson, 1948), 33–43.

  125. E. L. Cranstone, “The ‘Birth of a Nation’ Controversy,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 63 (Autumn 1947): 119.

  126. Seymour Stern, “The Griffith Controversy,” Sight and Sound 17, no. 65 (Spring 1948): 49–50. In its preceding issue, the journal had published “without comment” a translated article by Sergei Eisenstein criticizing The Birth of a Nation as an “ultra-reactionary” picture “which celebrated the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, a fascist organisation.” S. M. Eisenstein, “Purveyors of Spiritual Poison,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 63 (Autumn 1947): 103.

  127. V. J. Jerome, The Negro in Hollywood Films (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1950), 19–20.

  128. Seymour Stern, “D. W. Griffith and the Movies,” American Mercury 68, no. 303 (March 1949): 308–19; Stern, “The Cold War against David Wark Griffith,” Films in Review 7, no. 2 (February 1956): 49–59.

  129. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 87–88. The meeting seems to have occurred in 1926, with Aitken remembering it as happening six months before the emergence of “rumors of sound pictures.” Ibid, 88.

  130. Roy Wilkins to MPPDA, February 10, 1933; Carl E. Milliken to Roy Wilkins, February 11, 1933; both in NAACPP.

  131. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Will Have Sequel,” News and Observer [Raleigh, North Carolina], October 22, 1937; Jonathan Daniels to Walter White, November 15, 1937; Walter White to Jonathan Daniels, November 22, 1937; all in NAACPP.

  132. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 93–95. Harry Aitken apparently paid Dixon $2,500 out of his own pocket for his work on the screenplay. Ibid, 95.

  133. Louella O. Parsons, “Griffith to Remake ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Herald [Washington], January 4, 1938; Walter A. Gordon to Walter White, February 16, 1938; “Author of ‘Birth of a Nation’ Sues to Stop Showing of His Own Film,” Call [Kansas City], July 16, 1938; all in NAACPP.

  134. Carol Frink, “‘Birth of a Nation’ Movie to Be Remade as Talkie,” Times-Herald [Washington, D.C.], March 13, 1940; Walter White to Will Hays, March 21, 1940; Stephen S. Wise to Will Hays, March 26, 1940; R. B. Eleazer to Will Hays, March 25, 1940; George K. Hunten to Will Hays, April 3, 1940; Charles C. Webber to Will Hays, March 26, 1940; Mrs. Bernard G. Waring to Will Hays, March 28, 1940; Carl E. Milliken to Dr. Alice V. Keliher, April 10, 1940; Sylvia Wilcox Razey to Will Hays, April 1, 1940; all in NAACPP.

  135. Charles C. Webber to Will Hays, March 26, 1940; R. B. Eleazer to Will Hays, March 25, 1940; both in NAACPP.

  136. Francis S. Harmon to R. B. Eleazer, March 29, 1940; Francis S. Harmon to Frank R. Crosswaith, March 29, 1940; Francis S. Harmon to Mary Fox, May 2, 1940; Carl E. Milliken to Dr. Alice V. Keliher, April 10, 1940; Walter White to Dr. Everett R. Clinchy, April 22, 1940; all in NAACPP.

  137. Walter White to Walter Winchell, May 20, 1940, NAACPP.

  138. David O. Selznick to Sidney Howard, January 6, 1937, Rudy Behlmer, ed., Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 162. Selznick also made sure that the references to the Klan in Margaret Mitchell’s novel were removed from the film version of Gone With the Wind.

  139. On Selznick’s relations with the NAACP during the filming of Gone With the Wind, see Ronald Haver, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 250–51 and The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind, 1989 documentary; David O. Selznick to Katherine Brown, October 7, 1941, Memo from David O. Selznick, 274. Spectators of Gone With the Wind often found themselves comparing its spectacular effects to those of The Birth of a Nation. “The street scenes,” commented Sue Myrick to Margaret Mitchell, “are so fine I think the thing is a Birth of a Nation.” See Myrick to Mitchell, June 2, 1939, quoted in Ann Edwards, The Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), 280. One member of the preview audience for Gone With the Wind simply described it as “the greatest picture since Birth of a Nation.” Ibid., 281.

  140. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story,
4–5, 11, 13–19, 96.

  141. Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 96. Aitken may have confused the precise year of this final remake bid. Anthony Slide writes of King Bros. Productions launching such a project in 1960. Slide, American Racist, 198.

  142. Slide, American Racist, 203, 205. After the mid-1920s, with screenings infrequent and expenses of promotional efforts still high, Epoch apparently never declared dividends. Al P. Nelson and Mel R. Jones, A Silent Siren Song: The Aitken Brothers’ Hollywood Odyssey, 1905–1926 (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 185.

  143. Slide, American Racist, 206. Roy Aitken died in 1976.

  144. John Belton, “The Birth of a Nation,” Sight and Sound 45, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 85; Slide, American Racist, 206. The American Film Institute (AFI) had also acquired film materials relating to The Birth of a Nation. These were deposited with the Library of Congress. In 1972, Epoch launched a suit for copyright infringement against the AFI and dispatched federal marshals with a warrant to the Library of Congress in an (unsuccessful) attempt to seize the materials. Two years later, the suit was settled for $250. Slide, American Racist, 206. On the Killiam-Rohauer conflict, also see J. B. Kaufman, “Non-Archival Sources,” in Usai, The Griffith Project: Vol. 8, 108–10.

  145. Belton, “The Birth of a Nation,” 85; Slide, American Racist, 205–207.

  146. See Tommy L. Lott, “Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Black Film Theory,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 293.

  147. These statistics are based on “A Checklist of D. W. Griffith’s Film,” in Schickel, Griffith, 637–47.

  148. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 166.

  149. Louis Delluc, “Prologue” (1923), in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907–1939, Vol. 1: 1907–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 290.

  150. Schickel, Griffith, 326, 330–31, 334–35, 447; Delluc, “Prologue,” in Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 290.

  151. Schickel, Griffith, 340–41, 344–50.