If there ever was a scenario for shooting The Birth of a Nation, it disappeared a long time ago. Raymond Allen Cook claims that sometime in early 1914, Dixon and Griffith spent several weeks working on such a scenario in a loft in New York’s Union Square.1 This may be true, although Dixon’s demands for financial compensation for the rights to his work (and dissatisfaction when the full amount was not forthcoming) make it unlikely. In any case, there was probably already a scenario of sorts, the one prepared by Frank E. Woods in 1912 for the unsuccessful Kinemacolor version of The Clansman. Early prints of The Birth of a Nation contain a credit for a “Story by D. W. Griffith and Frank E. Woods.” The film’s copyright also jointly credited the scenario to Griffith and Woods.2 What appears most likely is that Griffith and Woods worked closely together as they had at Biograph to refashion Dixon’s novels (with some additional material from his play) into a narrative treatment that could be used at the start of filming. The fate of that original scenario (as well as his improvised way of working) was suggested by Griffith in an article he published in 1917:
At an early stage of the work, after the rough outlines have been filled in, the scenario is thrown away. The building and rebuilding of the story, the piecing of the intimate bits and the discarding of the useless go right on … from day to day.3
For the characters in the story, Griffith and Woods seem to have decided to use Dixon’s novel The Clansman—rather than the play of the same name—as the basis for their scenario. Some characters, of course, had been common to both novel and play (Dr. Cameron, Ben Cameron, Austin Stoneman, Elsie Stoneman, Silas Lynch, and Gus) and naturally went into the film. Other characters from the novel who had failed to make it into the play were now reinstated: Mrs. Cameron, Margaret Cameron, Stoneman’s housekeeper/mistress Lydia Brown, and his son Phil. Griffith had a liking for “family” stories, and most of the additions to the cast list of the play were clearly intended to build the film fundamentally around the struggle between (and within) two families by establishing a counterpoint between the Southern Camerons and the Northern Stonemans.4 Thus, in the film, Phil Stoneman acquired a younger brother, Tod, and Ben Cameron two such brothers, Wade and Duke. Moreover, Gus’s victim, Marion Lenoir in the play, became Flora, youngest daughter of the Camerons, in the movie.5 The Camerons’ faithful black servants reappeared under the names (Mammy and Jake) accorded them in the novel rather than the play (which, oddly, revived the names Nelse and Eva, originally given by Dixon to the “faithful souls” in The Leopard’s Spots).
As well as building up the “family” angle for the film, Griffith and Woods probably determined at an early stage to simplify the story line by cutting minor characters from the play (Helen Lowell, Nellie Graham, Dick, and General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan). They almost certainly decided to remove most of the national “political” struggles of the novel (Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, his successor as president, versus “radicals” Secretary of War Stanton and Congressman Stoneman) and the local political struggles (involving Lynch and Governor Shrimp) of the play. Lincoln still appeared in several scenes of the film, and there was one sequence showing a confrontation between Lincoln and Stoneman over the form postwar Reconstruction should take; but otherwise the film would largely turn its back on political drama to favor a combination of spectacular drama and familial melodrama.
Perhaps the most crucial difference between Dixon’s work and the film planned by Griffith and Woods was its starting point. Whereas the novel began in the final days of the Civil War and the play with the South Carolina elections of 1867, the film expanded Dixon’s story backward to the eve of the war. For the family stories the film was telling, this shift allowed Griffith to flesh out the Civil War as a conflict between “kith and kin” who were divided by very little apart from geography. It also made much sense in terms of the commemorations of the Civil War that were then taking place. Griffith, who had himself made eleven Civil War films, was hardly unaware that the year in which he planned to release his first really major “spectacular” picture was likely to see perhaps the biggest celebration of all: the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of the war.
The Clansman, therefore, would be both a “family” film and a Civil War film. Moreover, as Griffith’s later comments made plain, he visualized the picture from the beginning as a melodramatic “chase” movie with the Klansmen riding to the rescue. In the end, there are actually two chase sequences: the Klan rides first to rescue Elsie Stoneman from Silas Lynch, and subsequently (in a virtual recreation of the climactic scene of The Battle of Elderbush Gulch) to save assorted Camerons and Stonemans from the attack by black soldiers on the log cabin in which they have taken refuge.
Casting the Film
One afternoon in spring 1914, Lillian Gish later remembered, Griffith took her aside from the set of Home Sweet Home which was then being filmed on the Reliance-Majestic lot in California and asked her to stay on after the end of the working day. It was a typical thing for Griffith to do in the early stages of a new film project. Later, with most of the eventual cast of The Birth of a Nation assembled, Griffith broke the news of his plans to turn Dixon’s story into a film and swore everyone to secrecy.6
The subsequent process of assigning roles in the new film was not always a simple one. One of those Gish remembered as present when Griffith announced his project was Henry B. Walthall. A Southerner (born in Alabama) who had started, like Griffith, as a stage actor, Walthall had been a member of the Griffith company for five years. With his “patrician’s face—coal-black hair waving off a splendid forehead,” the director thought him in many ways ideal for the leading role of Ben Cameron. But Griffith also ideally wanted an actor who would somehow “epitomize all the heroes of The Lost Cause” and would have preferred someone “at least six feet tall with a powerful physique.” Walthall was too much on the small side (“about five feet six”), slightly too old for the part (he was in his late thirties), and though Griffith charitably never mentioned it, had a drinking problem. But no younger, physically more imposing actor was ever identified, so Griffith finally resolved to give Walthall the role (trying to head off possible criticism of his size by giving him the affectionate label “The Little Colonel” in intertitles and attempting to make him look younger by wearing wide-brimmed hats to soften the light on his face).7
If Walthall, as the male lead, was a little old for the role, the striking thing about the actresses playing the female leads is how amazingly young they all were. Lillian Gish, who played Elsie Stoneman, was only twenty in the summer of 1914; Mae Marsh, acting the part of Flora Cameron (“Little Sister”) was eighteen; and Margaret Cooper, cast as the oldest Cameron sister, Margaret, was only nineteen. All three, as they would acknowledge in their later interviews and writings, were essentially Griffith “creations,” and all had become movie actresses to some extent by accident.
Lillian Gish and her younger sister, Dorothy, came from a theatrical background. Their father had deserted the family, and their mother, to make ends meet, had turned to the stage. Both Lillian and Dorothy were child actresses and toured the country for several years with stock companies. At some point, the Gishes became friendly with a similar all-female theatrical family, the Smiths. Later, Lillian’s mother attempted to abandon the touring lifestyle for a time by opening an ice-cream parlor in East St. Louis. There was a nickelodeon next door showing a film called Lena and the Geese. When Lillian went to see it, she realized that the girl playing Lena was none other than young Gladys Smith. Shortly after this, both the nickelodeon and the Gish ice-cream parlor were destroyed by fire. Abandoning St. Louis, the family traveled to New York in search of work on the stage. Sometime in the summer of 1912, Lillian and Dorothy set off to visit Gladys Smith at the Biograph studio. After some initial confusion (Gladys Smith was now known as Mary Pickford), they met their friend, who introduced them to D. W. Griffith. What began as a social visit quickly turned professional: Griffith was impressed by the sist
ers, especially Lillian, and was in need of two young girls for roles in a melodramatic chase film, An Unseen Enemy. Ignoring their protests, he swept them off into an instant rehearsal with other members of the Biograph company, including Walthall, Lionel Barrymore, Elmer Booth, Harry Carey, and Bobby Harron. Lillian remembered Griffith firing an actual gun to induce the expressions of real fright he wanted on the girls’ faces. The next day, they reported back to the studio for the shooting of the film itself.8
Lillian Gish and D. W. Griffith. Gish would entitle her autobiography The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me. (Epoch/The Kobal Collection)
Mary Warne Marsh—renamed Mae Marsh by Griffith, perhaps to avoid having two Marys in his company—also had a sister, in this case an elder one, who was an actress. Marguerite Marsh had begun her career on the New York stage. After rejoining her family in Los Angeles, she started to make films. In January 1912, Mae, wanting to follow in her sister’s footsteps, persuaded Marguerite to take her along to the Biograph studio. There she met Griffith, who seems to have been impressed. Mae Marsh was later given a role in A Siren of Impulse, released in March 1912. Her first starring role, in Man’s Genesis, came about because neither Blanche Sweet nor Mary Pickford would appear in a film wearing a grass skirt that showed their bare legs. Partly because he liked rotating his company and probably partly because he was still annoyed at their behavior, Griffith subsequently ignored the resentment of Pickford and Sweet to give the leading female role in The Sands of Dee to Marsh. When Griffith and his company returned to New York, Mae Marsh remained in Los Angeles, where she appeared in two Kalem productions. After Pickford decided to leave Biograph, however, Griffith wired her to come and join his company on a permanent basis. She also followed him to Majestic, appearing in several of his 1914 releases.9
Anthony Slide points out that unlike other Griffith actress, such as Gish and Marsh, Miriam Cooper “was not a delicate beauty.” Dark-haired and athletic, she had been educated first at convent schools and then at the Arts Students League and the Cooper Union High School in New York. She became a model while still in school for well-known painter and photographer Harrison Fisher. She seems to have done a day’s work around 1910 as an extra on a Griffith film, but most of her early film work—again as an extra—was with the Kalem Company. Kalem, indeed, invited her to join their stock company in Florida, and with the reluctant consent of her mother, she accepted. In 1912 and 1913 she appeared in over 100 Kalem pictures, sometimes as a leading lady, at other times as an extra. In December 1913, Griffith invited her to become a member of his company at Majestic. His reasons for doing this are unclear. He may have seen and observed something special in her Kalem productions (he was an enthusiastic moviegoer),10 or Mae Marsh, who appeared in two Kalem pictures in 1912, may have met and recommended Cooper to him. Her first film for Griffith (which also featured Marsh and Gish) was Home Sweet Home.11
Separated from Linda Arvidson since 1911, there is little doubt that Griffith was attracted to many of the young actresses in his company. Years later, Cooper remembered being told by Marsh that she sometimes (behind his back) called Griffith “Mr. Heinz” because he liked to be surrounded by “57 Varieties” of girls.12 It would be a graceless and pointless task to speculate on the precise nature of the relationship between Griffith and his young female stars. Almost none of them ever commented on the subject (though Miriam Cooper did later claim to have rebuffed the director when he tried to kiss her).13 What is important is that Griffith, in his films, associated blondeness with innocence and frailty, which perhaps helps to explain why Lillian Gish was given the part of Elsie Stoneman.
Because Gish and her sister had joined the Griffith company comparatively recently, Lillian suspected that she might only be an extra in the big film Griffith planned. But during an early rehearsal, Blanche Sweet, whom Gish and many others assumed would be given the role of Elsie Stoneman, was absent. Griffith, pointing at Gish, said “Come on, Miss Damnyankee, let’s see what you can do with Elsie.” The scene being rehearsed was the “near-rape” one in which Silas Lynch, the mulatto leader, proposes to Elsie and, when she rebuffs him, chases her round the room intent on forcing his attentions on her. Gish recalled that in the excitement of the chase (and her desire to impress Griffith), the pins came out of her very long blonde hair so that it tumbled down below her waist. When she finally “fainted,” Lynch held her in such a way that her hair and feet “almost touched the floor on both sides of him.” Gish believed she appeared “very blonde and fragile-looking,” in comparison to the dark Lynch (played by Griffith’s assistant George Siegmann in black-face), and watching Griffith’s reaction, began to feel that the role might be hers.14
Certainly, from Griffith’s point of view, the slender Gish could appear more vulnerable in the role of Elsie than could Sweet, with her fuller, more mature figure. Gish had already demonstrated her aptitude for playing innocent victims, most notably as the woman who loses both her unfaithful husband and her baby in The Mothering Heart (Biograph, 1913). Moreover, as Richard Dyer has pointed out, she offered an ethereal whiteness on screen that both underlined the feminine purity of Elsie and emphasized the miscegenational contrast with the black and threatening Lynch.15 Finally, in considering Griffith’s selection of Gish for the role of Elsie, it is worth remembering that, as Richard Schickel notes, he “was beginning to be romantically taken with her.”16
If who would play Elsie was unclear at first, there seems to have been little doubt in Griffith’s mind who would be the other white female leads. The part of Flora Cameron was by no means an easy one since, as Griffith remarked, it ran “the gamut from comedy to the height of tragedy.” Moreover, the actress playing Flora would have to age five years or so in the movie. While Griffith claimed to have rehearsed Mae Marsh in the part to make sure she could do it, there is no evidence that he ever seriously considered anyone else. Marsh would remember being virtually type-cast for the role. “You remind me so much of my little sister. You are a little sister,” Griffith said when offering her the part.17 Moreover, he explained to Photoplay (October 1916), Miriam Cooper was the obvious choice for Flora’s elder sister because she—despite her Northern upbringing—“was a perfect type of the beauty prevalent below the Mason and Dixon line.” Indeed, Griffith insisted, he had kept Cooper “in the company for all the months between the idea that I might make the picture until the work began, because I knew she would be an exact ‘Cameron’ girl.”18
The other members of the Cameron family were played by Spottiswoode Aitken (Dr. Cameron) and Josephine Crowell (Mrs. Cameron), both established members of the Griffith company, with Maxfield Stanley as Wade, the second son, and J. A. Beringer as Duke, the youngest.19 Ralph Lewis, who would soon become stereotyped as a screen villain, had the role of Elsie’s father, the Honorable Austin Stoneman. Elmer Clifton played the eldest Stoneman boy, Phil, and Bobby Harron assumed the role of Tod, the youngest. The colored servants of both families were played by white actors and actresses wearing blackface: Jennie Lee was the Cameron’s Mammy and William de Vaull was Jake, with Mary Alden as Lydia Brown, Stoneman’s housekeeper, and Tom Wilson as the other Stoneman servant. Elsie’s white maid was played by Miriam Cooper’s sister, Lenore.
The decision to have no black actors in major roles in the film would later be one of the many grounds on which Griffith would be criticized. He himself declared that “on careful weighing of every detail concerned, the decision was to have no black blood among the principals; it was only in the legislative scene that Negroes were used, and then only as ‘extra people.’”20 This was a remarkable statement, both for what it did say and what it did not. It minimized the role of African Americans in The Birth of a Nation. In reality, quite a number of black extras were used: they were housed in separate “barracks” near the Griffith lot.21 They appeared much more often than Griffith suggested: Gish, for example, remembered their presence in the scene in which the visiting Stoneman boys were taken out to visit the cotton fields and the plantation
, and blacks can also be identified in the closing stages of the film in the battle for Piedmont.22 (One black actress, Madame Sul-Te-Wan, who would remain close to Griffith for the rest of his life, was visible in at least three shots.)23 Instead of defending his decision not to use black actors in major roles in terms of their unavailability in California, or the expense of bringing them from the East Coast, or his preference for working with the actors from his own company (some or all of which Griffith and his defenders would later argue),24 it is highly revealing that the director’s attempt to explain himself was initially couched in terms of straightforward racism: the desirability of excluding “black blood.”
Since there were no makeup men or women, Mary Alden (as Lydia Brown), George Siegmann (as Silas Lynch), and Walter Long (as Gus) had to make themselves up as mulattoes (Alden and Siegmann) or as a pure black (Gus) by using burned cork. They must all have known that especially in close-up, there was no chance of being mistaken for the real thing. As Karl Brown, Bitzer’s assistant, would later recall, Long “made no effort to look like a real Negro. He put on the regular minstrel-man blackface makeup, so there could be no mistake about who and what he was.”25 Wearing minstrel makeup, of course, associated The Clansman as a film with the codes of another form of popular entertainment.26 It may also have created the freedom (even the expectation) that the character concerned would behave more histrionically than would otherwise have been the norm. Besides the fact that the three principal characters who were “colored” were clearly labelled as villains, they were also the only characters in the film to show anything in the way of real passion—as when Lydia Brown has a fit of frustration over her treatment by Charles Sumner, Lynch plans to rule a “Black Empire” with Elsie as his queen, and Gus chases Flora while literally (thanks to the help of a bottle of hydrogen peroxide) foaming at the mouth.27
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