Family Background and Youth
Griffith was born on January 22, 1875, at a farm known as Lofty Green, located in the north of Kentucky about twenty miles east of Louisville. He was the sixth of the seven Griffith children to survive into adulthood. His family claimed that their roots in the New World could be traced back to the early eighteenth century, when a man with the title of “Lord Brayington” had been exiled from England, apparently for political reasons. Settling in Somerset County, Maryland, he abandoned his title and took his wife’s maiden name, Griffith, as his own. His son, Salathiel Griffith, served in the Revolutionary War, afterward being appointed sheriff of Somerset County. Salathiel’s son, Daniel Wetherby Griffith, carried on the family’s military tradition by fighting with the Virginia militia as a corporal during the War of 1812. His own son, Jacob Wark Griffith, was born in October 1819.1
D. W. Griffith on Set. (Epoch/The Kobal Collection)
When Jacob reached the age of twenty-one, he decided to become a doctor and apprenticed himself to two medical practitioners in Shelby County, Kentucky, where his father was farming. Eventually, he set up in practice on his own and in 1845 bought a horse to bear him on his rounds. Life as a country doctor, however, could not have proved very satisfying to the young man. A year later, revealing a restlessness that would dog him for much of his life, he went off to fight in the Mexican War. Jacob served for a year with the First Regiment of the Kentucky Cavalry, mainly as a surgeon, and saw action at the battles of Buena Vista and Saltillo. In September 1848, a year after leaving the army, he married Mary P. Oglesby. From Jacob’s point of view, the match was a good one: Mary’s father, Thomas Oglesby, was one of the wealthiest men in Oldham County, which adjoined Shelby County. The young couple moved into a five-room house given them by her father and Jacob returned to the practice of medicine.2
Very little is known about Mary Oglesby Griffith. Surviving photographs of her in middle and old age show a rather sad-faced, severe-looking woman, but this may have been because years of hard work and disappointment had etched themselves on her features. She was apparently intensely religious and her devotion to Methodism, already strong, only deepened as a result of her family’s later economic misfortunes. She was clearly very reserved and, outwardly at least, cold and detached in personal relationships. A fairly grim and silent personality, however, may actually have been a mask for her true nature. David W. Griffith would later remember the shock of finally discovering, when she was around seventy years old, that her “stern, cold, hard exterior covered a tremendous emotional and an affectionate nature that was terrible in its intensity.”3
Certainly, Mary’s earnest appeal was not strong enough to keep Jacob at home. Dissatisfied with the rewards of medicine—or frustrated at his economic dependence on his father-in-law—he jumped at the opportunity offered by the California gold rush to try to make a fortune of his own. In May 1850, he set off, together with some Oglesby relations, on a large wagon train heading for the West Coast. For a time, indeed, until dismissed for his bad temper, he seems to have acted as captain of the train. But his wider ambitions appeared to be realized. After two years of hard work prospecting, Jacob set off homeward with $16,000 in his pocket. The journey went well until he reached Louisville, just a few miles from home, where he managed to lose everything he had through gambling.4
Compelled to return to medicine and helping out at times on his father-in-law’s farm, Jacob seems to have hidden his frustrations by developing a gift for oratory (this may be the origin of his nickname as “Roaring Jake” Griffith) and involving himself in politics. In 1854, the year when American politics was transformed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, bringing about the birth of the Republican Party, he was elected to a term in the Kentucky legislature. Jacob was not particularly distinguished as a politician (there is no evidence that he was affected by the intense battles of his time) and he served only one term. Richard Schickel suggests, however, that his political career may have been cut short by his father-in-law’s death in 1856, leaving him for the first time in his life with considerable property to manage. His wife’s inheritance included part of the Lofty Green farm (the rest going to her brother), the main house, five slaves, and numerous herds of livestock.5
Superficially, during the next few years, Jacob’s life became more settled. He ran his farm and Mary bore him two sons and two daughters (a son had earlier died during infancy). Neither farming nor family life seems to have satisfied him permanently, however. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, though now forty-two years old, he set off to raise a company of cavalry to fight under his command for the Confederacy.6 In many respects, this was a quixotic thing to do. Kentucky was one of the four border states whose position crucially influenced the course of the war (“I hope I have God on my side,” Abraham Lincoln remarked, “but I must have Kentucky”). Though it had not followed the Upper South into the Confederacy, Kentucky opposed the idea of coercion and refused Lincoln’s call for troops. Initially, it tried to stay neutral in the conflict. But in September 1861, responding to a Confederate invasion, the Kentucky legislature finally declared for the Union. Therefore, in the following month when Jacob Griffith was sworn in to the Confederate Army, he could not claim that he was joining out of loyalty to his state. His motivation may have had something to do with the slavery issue (Jacob and his wife owned slaves and Oldham county was a center of pro-slavery sentiment). Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that what truly motivated Jacob to volunteer were his endemic restlessness and his instinctive desire for action and adventure.
In going off to fight for the Confederacy, Jacob left his wife with four very young children. Perhaps he found, in the war, refuge from his failures as husband, father, and provider. At last, in the army, he discovered a way of life and a challenge that suited him. For all his weaknesses and faults, he was a brave man. He participated in many of the crucial battles of the war, including Shiloh, Corinth, and Chickamauga; was wounded at least twice; and was mentioned as “distinguished for gallantry” in dispatches. More surprisingly, perhaps, he turned out to be an able military leader: in March 1863, he was appointed lieutenant-colonel of the Kentucky Brigade. Thereafter, he would often command his own regiment, fighting under General Joe Wheeler (the two got on so well that they agreed to name their first postwar children after each other, condemning one of D. W. Griffith’s sisters to go through life with the unlikely Christian name of Wheeler). In 1865, after Lee’s surrender, Jacob was apparently commanding the escort to Confederate President Jefferson Davis (who was trying to reach the last two small Southern armies still fighting) when the entire group was captured by Union cavalry.7
After the war, nothing was quite the same. Jacob returned home with an injured arm, some useless Confederate money, and several souvenirs taken from the enemy. He found most of his slaves gone, debts piling up, and his wife in poor health. A few weeks after the war’s end, the Lofty Green farmhouse was destroyed by a fire. Although no one was injured (the Griffith family had prudently spent the Civil War years living in the neighboring town of Floydsburg), most of the house’s furnishings were destroyed. It would have taken a good deal of hard work and commitment to rebuild the farm and make it economically successful. Jacob lacked both the energy and determination—and perhaps even the motivation—to do so. He built a (much smaller) house for his family but was incapable of restoring the farm to its earlier prosperity. He started to sell the land off piecemeal and began to borrow money against the security of the farm itself (eventually taking out no fewer than three mortgages).8
Apart from producing three other children, David Wark Griffith being the second, Jacob did very little with the rest of his life. He was fond of reading aloud from Shakespeare and other literary classics. He was also something of an orator (and was elected again to the state legislature for a single term in 1877). He enjoyed dancing, gambling, and drinking. Above all, it seems, he liked to reminisce about his experiences during the Civil War. His son would later r
ecall Jacob claiming that he was wounded five times in all, including once when he was “virtually disemboweled” and had to be sown together by an army surgeon on the battlefield. In another of his stories, unable to ride a horse as a result of his wounds he led his men in a charge on the enemy from a buggy. Jacob’s stories not only turned him into a hero in the eyes of his son, but many would later find their way in some form into The Birth of a Nation. That picture, his son would later confess, owed “more to my father than it does to me.”9
In 1885, Jacob died suddenly and unexpectedly. His son would later blame that death on the “wounds and crude dressings” suffered by his father during the war. In reality, Richard Schickel notes, it may just as well have been from Jacob’s over-indulgence in food and alcohol.10 Whatever its cause, his father’s death when D. W. Griffith was only ten meant that the son would never see his father as he really was: a lazy, unsuccessful braggart who gambled and drank away his income. “Roaring Jake” would be remembered by his son through the uncritical eyes of childhood. He did not live long enough for D. W. Griffith to begin to appreciate that his father had feet of clay.
Griffith would later remember that his father had been particularly close to one ex-slave. This man, Griffith recalled shortly after making The Birth of a Nation, together “with the heads of four other families refused to leave the plantation; those four families were four important factors in keeping the Griffith family poor.” Griffith, deeply hurt by the criticism of his attitude toward blacks after the release of Birth, was obviously determined to disprove any charge of racism by demonstrating the benign paternalism with which African Americans had been treated by the Griffith family. He may, of course, have remembered only what he wanted to remember and what would create the best impression; it required a major imaginative leap to transform the small Griffith farm into a “plantation,” and in his unfinished autobiography, Griffith later reduced the four families of former slaves to two. Although he was probably right concerning “the peculiarly close relationship between the whites and Negroes” that existed in the Kentucky of his boyhood, it was also true that for many whites, probably including the Griffiths, this paternalist closeness was firmly grounded on, and ultimately limited by, the assumption of white superiority.11
The Experience of Poverty
Jacob’s death left the Griffith family in an extremely precarious financial situation. They now discovered that he had been paying high interest rates on several mortgages. To settle his debts, his widow was obliged to sell his personal effects, part of the land making up the farm, and eventually Lofty Green itself. D. W. Griffith would remember the family’s intense poverty in the first months after his father’s death: his school lunch consisted of a few slices of bread and an “apple butter” made in the fall that became increasingly sour as the winter progressed. With the sale of their home, most of the family moved to the farm bought by David’s eldest brother, Will, in nearby Shelby County. The move brought no change in their fortunes. Griffith would later describe this as “the most useless farm in the entire world” and retain unpleasant memories of their long and “losing fight against rocks, roots, bugs, and worn-out soil.”12
From his new home, Griffith went each day to a school that was even farther away than the one he had attended while living at Lofty Green (two and a half miles rather than one and a half). He would later recall being bullied there—and falling in love for the first time with a young girl with curly chestnut hair. Each day, before setting off for school, he got up before daylight to help milk the cows and perform other farmyard chores. (Like Thomas Dixon Jr., Griffith loathed farm labor.) There is no evidence that he did very well at school (Griffith would later confess that he “did not grow up overly bright”).13 He probably learned more in his earliest years from his eldest sister, Mattie, who after the sale of Lofty Green went off to Louisville to work as a teacher.
The Griffith family struggled hard to make the Shelby County farm work. The burdens must have been especially heavy on Mary Griffith who, as her son remembered, had “never done work of any kind” before the Civil War. Now she tried to keep the family together by working endless hours. She even made all the clothes worn by David (and presumably the other children as well). Yet financial success eluded the family. Perversely, far from appreciating her sacrifice (and placing the blame on his father as the real cause of the family’s impoverishment), Griffith would later criticize his mother for her lack of business sense and compare her unfavourably with his aunt, Becky Oglesby, a shrewd farmer who put six children through college with her sales of butter and eggs.14
Finally, in 1889, Mary had had enough of farm life. Giving in to the urgings of Mattie and another sister Ruth, who had joined her in the city, she decided to move with her three youngest children to Louisville. If David Griffith is to be believed, the children greeted the prospect of a move to the city with great enthusiasm. It would mean the end of “back-breaking toil in the tobacco patch,” of milking, of plowing, and of “tediously long farm chores.” So, in midwinter, the family loaded all their possessions onto a two-horse wagon and with D. W. Griffith on top of the pile of furniture, drove to Louisville. When they reached the city and slowly made their way toward their new home, Griffith later remembered, they were met with cries of “Country jakes!” from jeering street urchins.15
Louisville
In 1889, Louisville was a prosperous and expanding city with a population of around 200,000. The Griffith family had no real share in that prosperity. They would have seven homes there over the next decade, and at each of them Mary would take in boarders. Nothing seemed to go right for the family. Mattie died of tuberculosis soon after the family arrived. And although David was able finally to attend a good high school, he left after one year to try to help solve the family’s financial crisis by taking a full-time job. For two and a half years, he worked in the J. C. Lewis Dry Goods Store, first as a cash boy and later as an elevator operator. In 1893, he left to take a position as clerk at Flexner’s Book Store. Not only was Flexner’s the main bookshop in Louisville at that time, but it was also a major focus of the city’s intellectual life. Louisville’s intelligentsia often gathered in the back room of the store after closing time to discuss literature and other “mighty subjects.”16
Griffith’s own interest in reading considerably antedated his employment at Flexner’s. It probably stemmed in the beginning from his father’s fascination with literature, especially Shakespearian plays, romantic poets, and novelists. When “Roaring Jake” died, although the county court directed that his personal effects be auctioned to settle his debts, it allowed his widow and her children to keep some of his books. Almost certainly, Griffith became familiar with these. Later, after his arrival in Louisville, he would spend a high proportion of his spare time at the public library. One of his friends from that time, Edward Rucker, would remember him reading Browning—and perhaps Tolstoy and Hardy—as well as histories of the Civil War. At some stage, then or earlier, he developed what would remain a lifetime passion for Dickens. Working at Flexner’s bookstore left him free to indulge his growing interest in literature; on one occasion, he was gently reproved by the head of the store, Bernard Flexner, for spending too much time reading when he should have been working.17
Louisville also made it possible for Griffith to develop the other great interest of his youth. He saw his first play—America’s National Game starring Pete Baker—at Macauley’s Theater, which specialized in “quality” drama and light opera. A few weeks later, he watched Julia Marlowe in Romeo and Juliet. After that, he would much later claim, “the die was cast” and he knew that he wanted to become an actor. In practice, it is unlikely that his ambition crystallized so quickly. For the moment, he tried to attend as many theatrical performances as his slender means allowed, including inexpensive melodramas and burlesque shows. At some point while he was with the Lewis store, he went on stage for the first time, performing as “the dunce” in an amateur production of The District Sch
ool. He had only one line. He also took singing lessons with Mrs. Annie H. Baustead, a popular local music teacher. From time to time, he found temporary “suping” jobs as a non-speaking actor with touring stock companies. When Sarah Bernhardt came to Louisville at the beginning of 1896, for example, he was one of the extras in Gismonda and The Lady of the Camellias.18
Becoming an Actor
Shortly thereafter, Griffith finally committed himself to a stage career. His decision may have had something to do with losing his job at Flexner’s; the Flexners had sold out and the new owner finally asked him to leave. Sometime in the spring of 1896, Griffith signed on with a traveling stock company. He would later recall that his family, and his mother in particular, were firmly opposed to this decision.19 Not only was the theater perceived by the Methodist church as sinful, but Griffith was also regarded as letting down the family tradition by embracing an occupation that was far from respectable. (Mary Griffith, something of a snob, apparently really wanted her son to become a minister.20) Yet while Griffith would not allow himself to be dissuaded from his new career, he did at least conceal his identity to some degree by performing throughout his acting career under a variety of stage names. Although he would become best known as “Lawrence Griffith,” from time to time he would also use other professional names.21
D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Page 9
