D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  Additionally, in the heat of the struggle, the NAACP also found itself moving beyond its early emphasis on private protest and legal action toward the tactics of more militant public protest (including demonstrations, marches, and meetings) that would characterize the civil rights movement later in the twentieth century. While the NAACP failed in its main objective, which was the immediate suppression of The Birth of a Nation, it emerged stronger from the struggle. What soon became clear, however, was that the battles of 1915 and early 1916 against the film were only the first shots in what would be a very long campaign.

  7

  Griffith’s View of History

  A few days before Griffith gathered his cast together to announce his intention of filming The Clansman, Lillian Gish noticed that “his pockets were crammed with papers and pamphlets.” Unusual for a Griffith film, the director felt obliged to consult printed source materials before embarking on rehearsals and shooting. Even after shooting began, Gish recalled, he still carried around with him pamphlets, maps, and books “which he read during meals and the rare breaks in his hectic schedule.”1 Although Griffith had already made films based on historical events before The Clansman, including several “Civil War” pictures, clearly there were crucial differences between them and his new project. Like Dixon, who also claimed to have mastered huge amounts of reading before writing his two novels about the Klan and consequently justified his fiction in terms of its “historical accuracy,” Griffith defended his greatest movie as a faithful representation of the events of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.2

  When Griffith set out to turn The Clansman into a film, the loyalties of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras were still very much a part of the American political and cultural scene. Despite his own personal engagement with the “Southern” point of view represented in Dixon’s novels and play, the director must have known that many Northerners and some Southerners would reject it as biased and inaccurate. He consequently set out to demonstrate that the version of history offered in The Clansman was carefully researched, factually based, and accepted by most contemporary American historians. Whether Griffith realized this possibility from the beginning, the claim that his film represented history would later become a powerful argument in resisting attempts at censorship. But seeing himself as involved in showing history on screen also mirrored both the director’s aspirations so far as the status of cinema was concerned and his idiosyncratic view of how history would soon come to be constructed and understood.

  Griffith believed that associating cinema with history would help legitimate it as an art form. “The foremost educators of the country,” he noted, “have urged upon motion picture producers to put away the slapstick comedies, the ridiculous sentimental ‘mush’ stories, the imitation of the fiction of the cheap magazines and go into the fields of history for our subjects.” Griffith went further in articulating ambitions for his medium. “The time will come …,” he declared in an interview in March 1915, “when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.” He foresaw a time when public libraries would have viewing booths. Anyone interested in learning about an episode in Napoleon’s life, he maintained, would no longer be faced with “consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, … confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen.” Instead, Griffith believed, the curious investigator would be able to approach the subject through the medium of film. She or he would receive “a vivid and complete expression” of the episode concerned, having been “present at the making of history.”3

  Griffith appears to have perceived filmed re-creations as a more objective alternative to written history. “All the work of writing, research, collating, and reproducing,” he argued, “will have been carefully attended to by a corps of recognized experts.” Like many political reformers during the so-called “Progressive Era,” Griffith thought that judgments and decisions were best left in the hands of impartial experts. He apparently believed that there was some essential core of “truth” about the past waiting to be found and disseminated. Academic historians only confused the issue by their disagreements, and in any case, their teachings reached only a small elite. “The truths of history today,” Griffith declared in a pamphlet attacking censorship of the movies, “are restricted to the limited few attending our colleges and universities; the motion picture can carry these truths to the entire world, without cost, while at the same time bringing diversion to the masses.”4 In interviews, he argued that the camera was “the instrument with which history is beginning to be written” and that “in time it [would] … be used exclusively in place of typewriters.” Having predicted screening rooms in libraries, Griffith went on effectively to foresee the advent of domestic access to “historical” films (the equivalent of today’s videocassettes, DVDs, and history channels on cable TV) by suggesting that “when one wants to refresh one’s mind about a historical incident,” each house would have a “receptacle” for the films concerned and a screen to show them on.5

  Griffith’s defense of film as history itself formed part of an ongoing struggle that, as Lee Grieveson has shown, began toward the end of 1906 and pitted those who regarded cinema as a dangerous, subversive influence that required careful monitoring and policing against those who defended it as a positive, educational force. Griffith had been a consistent advocate of the idea that cinema could have a useful social role. For example, he had made several films foregrounding the dangers of alcohol, and in his 1916 pamphlet attacking film censorship, he claimed that motion pictures—by offering an alternative form of entertainment—“keep men away from saloons and drink.” Yet between The Birth of a Nation’s Los Angeles première on February 8, 1915, and its New York opening at the beginning of March, the U.S. Supreme Court (on February 23) had come down firmly on the side of critics of the movies when it decided, in the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, that motion pictures had no educational or informative function. They were, in fact, “a business pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit,” and, in consequence, could not protect themselves from censorship by claiming the free speech protections of the First Amendment to the Constitution.6

  It was because of the wording of this decision that Griffith reacted so strongly to an editorial of the New York Globe that claimed on April 6 that his film had revived “the passions of the Civil War period,” rekindled sectional animosities, and fomented racial hatred “for purely sordid reasons”: to “make a few dirty dollars.” In an angry response, published on April 10, Griffith complained that these allegations damaged his reputation and insisted that his film portrayed “historic events” and, firmly grounded “upon the authenticated history of the period,” told “a story which is based upon truth in every vital detail.”7 Griffith did, of course, protest too much: The Birth of a Nation might have endeavored to put across a particular view of history, one with which the director sympathized, but it was essentially an entertainment made “for profit,” as the Supreme Court had suggested. By claiming to be representing history, Griffith was attempting to conceal this—in much the same way as, by wrapping himself in the cloak of free speech, he covered up the fact that he wanted this freedom in order to express racist sentiments.

  Michael Rogin, defining history in terms of “contingencies and conflicting interpretations,” believed that Griffith’s idea of depicting the past on film offered “not an avenue to history but its replacement.”8 However, Griffith’s consistent faith in what he variously called “the pictorializing of an epoch” or the “picturization of history as it happens”9 was in some ways only a visual variant of the declared aim of Leopold von Ranke—founder of the school of scientific “history” that emerged in the nineteenth century—to see the past Wie es eigentlich gewesen (how it essentially was). To achieve this objective, Ranke and other scholars had sou
ght to examine the most authentic primary source materials—referred to by Ranke as the “purest, most immediate documents” from the period concerned—“to understand the past as the people who lived in it understood it.”10 Ranke’s belief that an objective “truth” could be gained from the exhaustive exploration of primary documents was mirrored in Griffith’s perception that “truth” could be established by thorough investigations into the past by “recognized experts.” Once this was accomplished, Griffith assumed, historical events and personalities could accurately be represented on film, opening up the possibility of popular access to history.

  In taking aim at those who taught American history in higher education, Griffith—even though he probably did not know this—was criticizing a vulnerable target. In the last years of the nineteenth century, under the influence of German ideas on specialized research, the breakdown of the old classical curriculum in higher education, and the emergence of modern universities, history had become increasingly professionalized. This was symbolized by the growing dominance of university teachers within the American Historical Association (founded in 1884) from the mid-1890s onward. In American history, the steady professionalization of the discipline was demonstrated by the publication of the twenty-six-volume “American Nation Series” (almost all by authors with graduate training) between 1904 and 1907 and the organization of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in 1907.11 Yet the professionalization of history was paralleled by the virtual collapse of the once-lucrative general market for history books. More and more, historical scholars teaching in universities found the books they wrote being read only by colleagues or students. In this, they differed from the amateur (or at least more literary) “gentlemen-historians” of the nineteenth century whose works had circulated also among nonspecialists.12

  With professional historians reaching only a small minority of the population, Griffith apparently believed that the path was clear for motion pictures to bring history to the masses and entertain them at the same time. In making The Birth of a Nation, he went to considerable lengths to establish it as a “historical” film. Birth was characterized by what Mimi White has termed an “insistent historical referentiality.”13 Some of the characters in the film are drawn from history (Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, John Wilkes Booth) or resemble a real figure. Austin Stoneman, for example, was fairly closely based on Republican congressman Thaddeus A. Stevens of Pennsylvania. Like the real Stevens, Stoneman has a club foot. Also like the real Stevens, he has a mulatto housekeeper named Lydia.14 The other mulatto in the film, Silas Lynch, was also based to some degree on fact: South Carolina had not one but two mulatto lieutenant-governors: Alonzo J. Ransier (1870–1872) and Richard H. Gleaves (1872–1876). Apart from their mixed-race background, neither had anything else in common with Lynch.15 In physical terms, the actors representing historical figures were chosen because they resembled their real counterparts: Joseph Henabery (Lincoln), Howard Gage (Lee), Donald Crisp (Grant), and Raoul Walsh (Booth) seemed, in the opinion of Jack Spears, to have stepped straight from the pages of “a book of Civil War daguerrotypes by [Matthew] Brady.”16

  The story of the Camerons and Stonemans plays out against the chronological background of the Civil War period. The personal drama is closely tied to the historical context by the interactions between the fictional (or semifictional) characters in the film and actual events or real people. Stoneman is seen conferring with both Senator Sumner and President Lincoln. Both the “Little Colonel” and Phil Stoneman command opposing units at the battle of Petersburg. Mrs. Cameron and Elsie Stoneman visit Lincoln to ask for a pardon for Ben Cameron, who has wrongly been condemned to death as a “guerrilla.” Both Elsie and Phil Stoneman are present in the audience at Ford’s Theatre on the night of Lincoln’s assassination. It is noticeable, however, that the link to real people largely vanishes in the second part of the film. Lincoln, of course, is dead and there is no further reference to Sumner after his early visit to Stone-man to urge a less radical policy than full power and equality for blacks.17

  Reference is continually made in intertitles to actual events (the first battle of Bull Run, the siege of Atlanta) and to real organizations (the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Union Leagues, and the Ku Klux Klan).18 Griffith also offered “historical facsimiles” or tableaux of some of the most crucial moments: Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers at the start of the war, the surrender of Lee to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865, and the appearance of the black-dominated House of Representatives in South Carolina in 1871.19 Each of these, the intertitles claimed, was based on a historical source.20 He also included elaborate historical reconstructions of the battle of Petersburg and Lincoln’s assassination. Finally, to emphasize yet further that his film was—as one intertitle claimed—“an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction period (shot 621),” Griffith began the second part of Birth with three extracts from the History of the American People by Woodrow Wilson, the former scholar who was now president of the United States. Later, he referred to another historical assessment by Albion W. Tourgée.

  The film’s publicists helped “sell” The Birth of a Nation by emphasizing the amount of “research” that had gone into verifying the “history” the film supposedly covered. “With the selection of the theme finally agreed,” noted the Kansas City Journal, “came the primary work of research to establish the historical truth of the narrative. Several professors of history from different universities worked three months compiling this data. Actual measurements of the battle ground [of Petersburg] were made and surveyors and engineers of military experience laid out an exact reproduction of these scenes.” Besides producing this farrago of nonsense, the Mitchell/McCarthy advertising team also spread many other fictions that helped legitimate the film in terms of history. Readers of the New York Sun, for example, were told that Griffith had “dug up many little known facts” in preparing his picture, one of which was that the Ku Klux Klan was “an indirect outgrowth of the Highland clans of Scotland.”21

  For Griffith’s reconstruction of crucial historical episodes, the film’s publicity machine went into overdrive. “Many of the scenes,” commented the Baltimore Star, “[including] President Lincoln signing the order for 75,000 troops and the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox, are historically accurate even to the chairs in the rooms and the pictures on the walls.” “Great accuracy and attention to detail and historical accuracy was given in the making of the picture,” noted the Waco Herald. “For instance, in the scene at Appomattox Courthouse, Gen. Grant is correctly represented in his fatigues uniform, dusty and travel-stained, whilst Gen. Lee is shown in the complete panoply of military dress.” The reconstruction of Lincoln’s assassination was perhaps the most significant in establishing the film’s “historical” credentials. “The incident,” declared the Milwaukee Sentinel, “was the product of many months of research in museums and historical libraries. Persons … who participated in the event, in one way or another, were interviewed.” Such detailed research, observed the Chicago Post, had disclosed that “the temperature fell just before the assassination,” so that Griffith asked “his Lincoln to … slip a warm cape over his shoulders” immediately before Booth’s fatal shot. Both Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, the Kansas City Labor Herald observed, “are depicted by Mr. Griffith in so realistic a manner as to startle with their realism even that fast-scattering few who were themselves a part of what was done in those momentous days.”22

  Considerable effort went into making The Birth of a Nation seem visually accurate so far as the Civil War sequences were concerned. A variety of reference works were consulted, including photographs by Matthew Brady and books including Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, The Soldier in Our Civil War by Paul F. Mottelay and T. Campbell-Copeland, and Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.23 The uniforms and frocks provided by Robert Goldstein’s company of thea
trical costumiers were mainly successful in conveying the “look” of the period. Genuine muskets of the Civil War era were purchased from a New York firm called Bannerman’s. “Huck” Wortman and his crew of carpenters set out to make copies of guns and their carriages that would appear genuine enough to viewers of the picture. Karl Brown recalled that even though “the gun carriages, and especially the trails of the cannon, were made of thin plywood, and the rivets were merely rounded wooden buttons glued in place, … they had been painted with a black paint containing graphite, so that they gleamed with the authentic sheen of polished iron.”24 Billy Bitzer, Griffith’s chief cameraman, would argue later that even the manner in which the film was shot gave The Birth of a Nation the same visual appearance as Brady’s Civil War photographs.25