D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  Act II begins six months later. The Camerons’ house is about to be sold to pay taxes. The faithful Nelse tries to prevent this by chasing away Gus, one of the Camerons’ former slaves who is now an army officer, and seizing the “Auction Sale Today” flag Gus has been trying to attach to the house. Ben tells his father that he has received a telegram from Governor Shrimp booking every room in Cameron House. Silas Lynch is also coming to Piedmont and it seems obvious to the Camerons that he is intent on forcing the sale of the house. Ben mentions to Dr. Cameron that General Forrest is in Piedmont and the night before he had asked if Ben would become the chief of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina. Shrimp and Lynch arrive and Lynch admits that he aims to buy Cameron House at the auction for himself and a white bride. To forestall opposition to his plans, Lynch asks Shrimp for a proclamation disarming the state’s six white military companies (one of which is led by Ben Cameron). Although initially reluctant, Shrimp agrees to issue the proclamation when Lynch offers to support his candidacy for the U.S. Senate. The auction begins, and just as Lynch is about to succeed in winning the house, Elsie Stoneman arrives and outbids him. Elsie and Ben are reconciled, but she still insists that Ben must win her father’s approval for their marriage. Elsie leaves to meet her father at the station. General Forrest now appears, and Nellie Graham is excited to meet him, though Dr. Cameron makes it plain to the head of the Ku Klux Klan that he is opposed to any further violence. At this point, however, Shrimp and Lynch arrive with an escort of soldiers and Shrimp announces his decision to disband the six white military companies. When Ben and his father object, they are both arrested.79

  At the beginning of Act III, Flora Cameron has just come to the end of her thirteenth birthday party. Gus is watching her stealthily from behind a fence. When Ben appears, Flora tells him that Gus has given her a box of candy. Ben angrily throws the box away and warns her not to allow someone like Gus near her again. He tells his father that the blacks are growing bolder and to save white womanhood he and others may have to use force. Dr. Cameron, however, believes that a reaction against radical rule has already set in. After he and Ben had been released after their first arrest, Shrimp had not dared interfere with them again. Flora, however, paying no attention to Ben’s warning, sets off to go down to the spring to feed her tame squirrel. She is followed by Gus. In the meantime, Stoneman arrives, passes on to Elsie his discovery that Ben is the leader of the Klan in the state, and asks her to give him up. Elsie promises her father that if what he says is true, she will certainly do so. When she confronts Ben, however, he shows his complete trust in her by admitting that he is the Grand Dragon of the Klan. Elsie, while flattered by that trust, tells him that he must choose between the Klan and her. Nelse’s wife, Eve, now appears, looking for Flora, and Ben sends her to bring Flora back from the spring. But Eve is soon back, panicky and holding Flora’s bonnet. Flora has disappeared. A crowd gathers to search for her. They are to signal once she is found: one shot if she is alive, two shots if she is dead. A neighbor mentions that he has seen Gus sneaking along the river bank. Then two shots are heard. The Klan meets, to try Gus. He denies committing the crime but is mesmerized by Dr. Cameron and relives what has happened. He sprang out at Flora and in her desperate attempt to escape him, she jumped over the cliff and drowned in the river. Ben, believing that the time has come to disarm all blacks, summons the Klan to assemble. He also orders that Gus be hanged from the balcony of the Court House until dead and his body left on Lynch’s doorstep.80

  Act IV begins with Lynch planning to take the offensive. Intending to hang Ben Cameron, he attempts to blackmail Governor Shrimp into temporarily leaving the state and appointing Lynch acting governor. In the meantime, Stoneman has been provided by the president with a proclamation of martial law, to be used when he wishes. A civil warrant is issued for Ben’s arrest and in the absence of any other lawyer, Stoneman volunteers to prosecute him for treason and conspiracy. When Ben arrives for his trial, Stoneman tries to persuade Elsie to testify that he is a member of the Klan, but she refuses and declares her love for the accused man and his people. Stoneman responds by using the president’s proclamation to establish martial law and sets off for Washington. Ben is arrested by the military and Lynch arranges an immediate court-martial. Elsie is staggered to learn that the court-martial has already sentenced Ben to be shot. Lynch delays the execution of the sentence and offers to commute it completely. In return, he obviously hopes that Elsie will be his wife. When he touches her, however, she becomes hysterical and faints. Lynch has two of his black assistants carry her to an adjoining room. At this point, Stoneman returns, having convinced himself that he must intercede on Ben’s behalf for the sake of his daughter. But when Lynch tells him that a court-martial has already ordered Ben’s execution, he is quickly reconciled to what seems a fait accompli. Buoyed up by the feeling of camaraderie between them, Lynch confesses that he is in love with a white girl. Stoneman encourages him in this until he learns that Elsie is the object of Lynch’s affections. He is furious and informs Lynch that their relationship is over. Hearing Elsie scream, however, he draws his revolver. Lynch draws his own gun and instructs one of his minions to shoot Elsie if he hears a struggle or shot from the room in which he and Stoneman are confronting one another. He then sends for a minister to marry him and Elsie. Stoneman raises his revolver to fire the shot that will save his daughter from Lynch by leading to her own death. Before he can fire, the door is flung open and Klansmen burst into the room. Ben (who has been rescued first) takes off his costume and Elsie falls into his arms. Stoneman, having finally seen the light, promises Ben that the army will be withdrawn and normality restored.81

  The Clansman was an immediate hit as a play. It opened in Norfolk, Virginia, on September 22, 1905, and made a profit of $50,000 during its first week. It toured much of the South in the next few weeks, performing in cities from Richmond to New Orleans. Although it met opposition in some places (part of the audience booed and hissed in Columbia, South Carolina), most of those who saw the play were highly enthusiastic.82 It was particularly successful in Dixon’s home state of North Carolina. In Winston-Salem, “men fought madly for choice seats” and in Raleigh audiences proved “wildly enthusiastic.”83 Local newspapers in a number of places, however, were quite critical. “What a pity there is no way to suppress The Clansman,” mourned the Montgomery Advertiser. In the view of the Charleston News and Courier, it was “one of the most remarkable exhibitions of hysterics to which we have been treated.” Another South Carolina paper, the Columbia State, summarized Dixon’s message as “Hate the negro; he is a beast; his intention is to rob and murder and pollute; he should be transported or annihilated.”84

  From the beginning, fears were expressed that the play would provoke conflict between the races. It was “hazardous to the peace of whites and blacks,” commented a Norfolk newspaper, predicting that its tour of the South would be “like a runaway car loaded with dynamite.” “We shall be agreeably surprised,” declared a Winston-Salem editor, “if innocent blood is not upon the head of the Reverend Thomas Dixon Junior before he reaches New Orleans,” and a Charlotte commentator feared “it will leave behind a new trail of lynchings.” To the Chattanooga Daily Times, it was simply “a riot breeder … designed to excite rage and race hatred.”85 The violence foretold by many came close to breaking out when the play was performed in Atlanta. Tensions between the whites in the stalls and blacks in the balcony prompted the theater’s management to keep the lights on throughout the performance and suspend the sales of soda pop to prevent the bottles from being used as missiles. Eventually, the police stormed the balcony and made a number of arrests.86 More crucially, argues Pete Daniel, Dixon’s play was a factor contributing to the later outbreak of the Atlanta race riot (September 22–24, 1906), which left up to forty blacks dead. Walter White, subsequently executive secretary of the NAACP, who as a boy observed the riot firsthand, would also in his autobiography blame Dixon for helping to provoke such violence.8
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  Criticism and controversy, however, did not deter the crowds who flocked to see the play: by the time it reached New Orleans in December, it was being hailed as “the greatest theatrical triumph in the history of the South.” The fact that many white Southerners should have greeted the play—with its open advocacy of white supremacy—with such warmth is unsurprising. More remarkable (and revealing), when The Clansman moved on from New Orleans into the Midwest, it continued to attract overflowing crowds. Partway through the Midwestern tour, Dixon returned to New York to help rehearse another cast for the New York opening. Although there were many objections and protests before the play started its run at the Liberty Theater (where The Birth of a Nation would be exhibited nine years later) in January 1906, New York audiences reacted enthusiastically. The cast also worried about the possibility of violent protest when the play opened at the Wheiting Opera House in Syracuse—once a staging post on the Underground Railroad helping escaped slaves to reach Canada—but theatergoers responded favorably to the production. Only in Philadelphia was there any real trouble: four weeks into its run at the Walnut Street Theater, a riot broke out during a performance and the play was banned.88

  While audiences declined to some extent after the first enthusiastic year, the two Clansman companies continued to perform across the country for several more years.89 Encouraged by the success of the play, Dixon also adapted his anti-socialist novel The One Woman for the stage. In October 1906, as director-producer-author, he began to tour with the new production. The lead role of Frank Gordon was initially played by Lawrence Griffith, the stage name of a young actor from Kentucky whose real name was David Wark Griffith. The company also included Griffith’s then wife, Linda Arvidson. After two months on the road, Dixon discharged the Griffiths (Arvidson later claimed that he had engaged a leading man at half the salary paid her husband).90

  Through his three novels and two stage plays, Dixon had made a considerable fortune. Living in New York again since 1905, however, he allowed himself to be tempted by speculations on Wall Street and lost everything in the stock market “panic” of October 1907. Fortunately for Dixon, the last of his trilogy of Reconstruction novels, dealing with the dissolution of the Klan, had been published in July before the crash. Selling almost a million copies, The Traitor made it possible for him to save his home and begin to rebuild his fortune.91 During the next few years, Dixon completed a second trilogy of novels, this time on socialism: The One Woman was followed by Comrades (1909) and The Root of Evil (1911). Yet from 1907 onward he gave more and more of his attention to the theater. A stage adaptation of The Traitor in 1908 was followed a year later by The Sins of the Father, the first play written by Dixon that was not based on one of his novels.92 It revolved around a theme very close to Dixon’s heart: the dangers of miscegenation. It also led to yet another twist in Dixon’s enormously versatile career. The day after a performance in Wilmington, North Carolina, he went with the cast to the beach. According to Dixon’s biographer, while they were swimming, the actor playing the lead role was killed by a shark. Since Dixon was the only one who knew the lead actor’s lines, he took over the role, and when reviewers praised his performance he toured with the company for almost a year as an actor. He then returned to New York where he spent the next two years following his various occupations as novelist, playwright, producer, director, and actor.93

  Failure as a Movie

  At some point, Dixon also decided to try his luck in the new motion picture industry. Large audiences were flocking to the nickelodeons in New York and other cities. The thought of involvement in something so new must have been an important attraction to so restless and ambitious a man as Dixon. He was probably also aware that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had already been filmed three times.94 Dixon may have felt that it was necessary to carry his cultural war with Mrs. Stowe into the new medium. On September 26, 1911, George H. Brennan of the Southern Amusement Company (the company formed to produce The Clansman as a play) signed a contract with Charles E. Ford of the Kinemacolor Company to create a new company, to be known as the Kinemacolor-Clansman Corporation. The objective of the new company, as its name implied, was to produce a motion picture based on Dixon’s play.95

  Many people assume that there were no attempts to use sound in films until the late 1920s and color until the 1930s. In reality, there were many earlier attempts to introduce both.96 The British company Kinemacolor had produced two color films, The Royal Visit to India and The Durbar at Delhi, which had caused something of a sensation. Kinemacolor of America, a separate but allied company, set out to import the color process into the United States. At first they encountered opposition from the Motion Picture Patents Company, a powerful association of production companies that was trying to monopolize the movie market. Kinemacolor was consequently forced to set up its own studios, first at Allentown, Pennsylvania, then at Whitestone Landing, New York, and finally, in 1912, in Hollywood, California.97 The fact that Dixon obviously wanted his play to be filmed at the cutting edge of film technology was thoroughly consistent with his insatiable ambition. The Clansman, after the success (and controversy) of its initial production, had survived to become a popular play with traveling stock companies. Brennan had apparently sold the management of Kinemacolor on the idea that the actors with one of these companies, the Campbell MacCullough Players, would repeat their roles on film. As the company moved across the South, scenes could be shot on location in former antebellum plantations or on battlefields. Yet William Haddock, the man assigned by Brennan to direct, found it very hard to do much shooting with the company constantly on the road. Although he persuaded MacCullough to remain for two weeks in Natchez, Mississippi, where several scenes were shot, McCullough then insisted on returning to the tour. At that point, with $25,000 supposedly spent and with little more than a reel of film to show for it, Kinemacolor halted production. Several explanations were later advanced for the failure of the project: the photography was so poor that there was never a print that could be used, Haddock’s direction was inadequate, the acting by the stock company was inappropriate to the medium of film, the script needed continual revision to transform Dixon’s original play into a workable motion picture. Since the film has long vanished and no records apparently survive, it is impossible to establish the actual reasons for its abandonment.98 After the failure of the Kinemacolor project, Dixon seems to have approached a number of other film companies. No one showed any interest in what Dixon referred to as his “historical beeswax.”99

  Born in a Confederate state during the last months of the Civil War, Thomas Dixon Jr. had passed his early childhood during the Reconstruction era. While his later career involved a succession of jobs, and considerable periods spent living in the North, Dixon never forgot the North Carolina of his youth. Increasingly obsessed, by the early twentieth century, with what he saw as the dangers of interracial relationships and the threat they supposedly posed to the future of the Anglo-Saxon race, Dixon wrote several novels set in the South that warned against such racial admixture. Deliberately, in fact, Dixon set out to create a master narrative of Southern history and race relations that would challenge and replace that associated with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Whereas Mrs. Stowe had focused attention on the sufferings of black slaves at the hands of antebellum whites, Dixon depicted the “anguish” of Southern whites at the hands of free postwar blacks. The Ku Klux Klan (in which several members of Dixon’s family had once been involved) provided the main heroes of his fiction. The cultural impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been greatly increased by its transformation into a play; Dixon set out to do the same by converting his novel The Clansman into a successful theatrical production. Yet Dixon had apparently failed to emulate Mrs. Stowe’s legacy in one crucial respect: he had not succeeded in having a film (or films) based on his work. But his luck began to change in 1914. Film director D. W. Griffith developed an interest in The Clansman project. The eventual result of the collaboration of Dixon and G
riffith would be The Birth of a Nation.

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  David Wark Griffith

  In 1914, when his path crossed that of Thomas Dixon Jr. for the second time in their lives, David Wark Griffith was already a commanding figure in American cinema. The principal director for the Biograph company since 1908, Griffith had produced more than four hundred motion pictures before quitting Biograph in late 1913 to produce longer films. Griffith’s interest in using Dixon’s story of The Clansman as the basis for a film was to lead to the release of The Birth of a Nation. It was also in many ways to transform the American film industry. To appreciate Griffith’s part in making The Birth of a Nation as well as his creative role in early American cinema, it is necessary to know something of the man himself.