In many scenes in the second part of the film, it is possible to trace the influence of Pike or Dixon or, commonly, both. One of the most revealing sequences is the succession of shots claiming to represent the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1871.95 In The Prostrate State, Pike had described the atmosphere in the black-dominated House as “the slave rioting in the halls of his master.” Dixon took over this idea in The Clansman, calling his chapter on the House “The Riot in the Master’s Hall,” and Griffith appropriated Dixon’s title as the introduction to this section of Birth (shot 839).96 Pike’s assumption, in discussing the legislature, was that most black members were freed slaves who had no real idea how to behave in a deliberative body.97 They dressed in odd and eccentric ways; both Pike and Dixon had them wearing “second-hand … frock coats,” “stove-pipe hats” of many different styles, and “coarse … garments of the field.”98 This eccentricity of dress was also foregrounded by Griffith, notably in his depiction of the black politician with the check suit (shots 848, 850, 855). Some perceptions migrate more-or-less unaltered across the three works. All three mention the dignified but impotent group of twenty-three white representatives who opposed Radical Reconstruction (shots 839, 859–60).99 Pike has the members of the legislature chewing peanuts, Dixon describes the same scene, and Griffith has a shot of two legislators also eating peanuts (shot 844).100
Other ideas transform and evolve over time. Pike wrote in general terms of the black man’s fondness for whiskey, of the garrulousness of African American members of the House (“Sambo can talk”), of the “heavy brogans” many wore on their feet, and the black member protesting at being called to order by the Speaker by putting his feet on his desk. Dixon personalized some of these issues in the form of Ulster county representative “Old Aleck,” the talkative ex-slave, who tries to go barefooted until the speaker rules that all members must wear shoes (brogans in Aleck’s case) and shows his annoyance with the Speaker for calling him to order by placing his feet (clad only in socks) on top of his desk. Elsewhere, Dixon wrote of the “reek … of stale whiskey” in the chamber and the floor “strewn with corks … and picked bones.” Griffith eliminated the character of Uncle Aleck from his film but used an intertitle to introduce “The honorable member from Ulster,” a black man who is shown drinking surreptitiously from a bottle of whiskey. He also showed a black legislator taking off his shoes and putting his feet on his desk, prompting the Speaker’s ruling that shoes must be worn. Griffith gave a visual connotation to Dixon’s reference to “picked bones”: he has another African American member eating a chicken leg (almost a cliché in the American cinematic depiction of blacks by 1915) (shots 845–47, 849–54).101 On one major issue only is there no linkage between the three: Dixon and Griffith both refer to the passage of a bill permitting the intermarriage of blacks and whites, but since no such law was actually passed Pike does not mention it.102 Finally, what Griffith thought of as “research” was sometimes done rather sloppily. Pike identified 101 Republicans in the House in 1871, this group being composed of ninety-four blacks and their white allies. Dixon wrote of ninety-four blacks and seven “scallawags [South Carolina-born collaborators] who claimed to be white.” Griffith seems to have ignored Pike on this point and clearly misread Dixon: his inter-title in Birth (shot 839) erroneously asserted that the majority of the House was made up of 101 blacks.103
The scholar referred to most in the intertitles of The Birth of a Nation probably influenced Griffith least. The second part of the film began with the word “Reconstruction,” immediately defined as “The agony which the South endured that a nation might be born.” It was suggested that the “blight” of Civil War did not end with the coming of peace. An intertitle followed that attempted to disarm contemporary critics of the film by claiming that “This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today” (shots 620–21). The next three intertitles were all described as “excerpts” from Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People (shots 622–24). Clearly, Griffith believed it in his interest to have the president appear to legitimate the “history” in Birth. This explains both the special showing of the film at the White House and the quotations from Wilson’s earlier historical work. An examination of the intertitles and what Wilson had actually written suggests, however, that Griffith was at the very least rather inexact in the quotations he used and that, in each case, his selective excerpts altered to a degree the original meaning (see table 7.1).
In the first extract from Wilson, Griffith removed the sentence immediately preceding the start of his quotation. This implied that while African Americans had enjoyed a numerical majority in three states, they had never really held power themselves in any of them. The idea of a politically dominant “black” South, therefore, as suggested in the second Wilson quotation, was little more than a figure of speech. The second quotation, by ignoring the preceding sentence in the original text, made it appear as if the “overthrow of civilization” that Wilson had perceived as most evident in the villages had, in fact, been virtually universal across the South. Griffith’s third quotation also made it seem that the Klan was the only response by Southern whites to the threat posed by blacks (and specifically, as his film asserted, by black men to white women). In fact, Wilson believed that the Klan itself was only part of the wider determination of white Southerners (“by fair means or foul”) to get rid of corrupt carpetbag regimes that clung to power by means of black votes.
Although Wilson plainly sympathized to a considerable degree with the South (he had grown up in Virginia), his History was in reality much more balanced in its discussion of Reconstruction than Griffith would have wished. According to Wilson, it was the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery by the House of Representatives, not the restoration of white supremacy in the South, that marked the real beginnings of American nationhood (“Men dreamed … that they had that day seen a new nation born”). He blamed the early difficulties facing the freedmen on the fact that slavery had encouraged their habits of dependence. To Wilson, the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865 had been unavoidable: the plight of former slaves, many of them refugees, meant that it had become “obviously necessary that, for a time at least, Congress should take the care of the negroes under the direct supervision and care of the government.”104 Wilson agreed that most Southern states were mismanaged by corrupt radical governments—his statistics on South Carolina’s fallen taxable values and rising taxes were taken straight from Pike105—and that huge debts were accumulated. But he also anticipated later “revisionist” arguments by emphasizing that corruption in the South was in no sense unique: there were many comparable scandals (Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring) in the North.106 Wilson was also surprisingly understanding toward the motives of members of the Republican Party who imposed Reconstruction on the defeated South; he pointed out that some supported the radical program despite their misgivings because they felt it necessary to do something to protect African Americans and to prevent the old leaders of the South from returning to power, and he also absolved the Republicans from implementing a deliberate plan to ruin the South.107
TABLE 7.1. A comparison of Griffith’s intertitles with Wilson’s text
Where Wilson differed most from Griffith was in his treatment of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had been, Wilson observed, “a very tempting and dangerous instrument of power for days of disorder and social upheaval.” In the beginning, “sober men” had advised upon and curbed the activities of the hooded order. As time went on, however, such control proved increasingly impossible to exercise as the Klan was drawn deeper and deeper “into the ways of violence and outlawry.” “Men of hot passions who could not always be restrained,” Wilson commented, “carried their plans into effect. Reckless men not of their order, malicious fellows of the baser sort who did not feel the compulsions of honor and who had private grudges to satisfy, imitated their disg
uises and borrowed their methods.” The number of abuses grew: “Brutal crimes were committed; the innocent suffered with the guilty; a reign of terror was brought on, and society was infinitely more disturbed than defended.” In contrast with Griffith’s later film, which depicted the Klan as rescuing white women from the threat posed by black men, Wilson made it clear that the Klan itself attacked female targets. “The more ardent regulators,” he wrote, “made no nice discriminations. All northern white men or women who came into the South to work among the negroes, though they were but school teachers, were in danger of their enmity and silent onset.” According to Wilson, the Klan was deeply unchivalrous. It was also short-lived and relatively unsuccessful. Instead of overthrowing Radical regimes and triumphantly restoring white supremacy by force, as The Birth of a Nation suggested, the original Klan had been effectively destroyed by new federal laws of 1870 and 1871 and the determined actions of President Grant.108
The Ku Klux Klan
The Birth of a Nation began as a film based on Thomas Dixon’s novel about the Ku Klux Klan. Although Dixon would later claim that some of his earliest memories dealt with the Klan (including watching the hanging of a black convict convicted of raping a white women), it is impossible to established the correctness of his assertions. What is clear, however, is that Dixon’s uncle, Colonel Le Roy McAfee, had been one of the Klan’s local leaders in North Carolina and that Dixon’s father had been a member of the hooded organization. Dixon, whatever the accuracy of his childhood recollections, belonged to a family that looked favorably on the Klan.109 Griffith’s view of the Klan seems to have been more complicated. By the time he was born in 1875, the Klan had largely ceased to exist. It had been active for some time in Kentucky, and when Griffith started reading The Clansman, he began to remember the stories his cousin, Thurston Griffith, had once told him of the Klan.110 Yet the reputation of the Klan was at best equivocal in Griffith’s home state. Kentucky had the dubious distinction of having been the only state outside the old Confederacy in which the Klan had been of importance. But since the state had never undergone Reconstruction, the Klan there had not been able to present itself as a protest against “Black” Republicanism (the Democratic Party never lost its control of the state in the postwar period). While the state had contributed more men to the Union side than to the Confederates, many communities had been deeply divided, and the Klan was a continuing symptom of that division.111 Before he began to consider making The Clansman, indeed, Griffith himself had shown a degree of hostility to Klan-type organizations. In 1911, he had made The Rose of Kentucky, a one-reel film criticizing contemporary Klan-style night riders.
Two factors seem to have been crucial in persuading the director of the viability of The Clansman project. The first was the visual possibilities he could see in the story. As Griffith later confessed, on first reading Dixon’s novel he “skipped quickly through the book until I got to the part about the Klansmen … I could just see these Klansmen in a movie with their white robes flying.”112 The second was the continuing influence of Griffith’s adored father. Although Lieutenant-Colonel Griffith had never been a Klansman, he had been a cavalry officer. Reincarnated as the “Little Colonel,” he led the charges of the Klan in his son’s greatest film. Some of his stories of the Civil War period were incorporated into Birth; for example, the attempt to rescue a stranded Confederate food train (shots 344–54), which acts as the opening act of the battle of Petersburg in the film, was probably inspired by the attack led by “Roaring Jake” Griffith on a Union supply train.113 In making a “spectacular” film about the Civil War and Reconstruction, D. W. Griffith was also expressing filial loyalty. As he would later confess: “Underneath the robes and costumes of the actors playing the soldiers and night riders [my italics], rode my father.”114
Reflecting his own priorities, Griffith’s Klan in The Birth of a Nation differed considerably from the Klan of Dixon’s novels. Dixon’s Klan was organized—in some ways, as Russell Merritt observes, “over-organized, too much like a corporation to be an authentic folk movement.”115 Griffith localized the Klan; it is born when the Little Colonel, agonizing over the oppression of his people, sees some black children frightened by white children with a sheet over their heads (shots 913–24).116 The uniforms the Klansmen wear are loyally produced—all 400,000 of them—by the women of the South, and not a single member’s identity is betrayed (shot 970). Much of the ritual Dixon lovingly recounted (as, for example, in his account of Gus’s trial)117 is removed from the film; what ritual remains revolves around the Little Colonel’s reaction to the death of Flora Cameron, when he takes the small, now bloodstained Confederate flag Flora has been wearing as a belt around her waist and holds it up while simultaneously raising the standard of revolt, “the fiery cross of old Scotland’s hills.”118 He then quenches the flames of the cross in Flora’s blood (shots 1172–75).
By simplifying the Klan described by Dixon, Griffith’s Birth of a Nation encouraged false impressions of the organization in a number of crucial respects. Far from having its origins in the imagination of the fictional Ben Cameron in South Carolina, the Klan was actually founded in Tennessee in December 1865 by former officers in the Confederate Army looking for high-spirited entertainment.119 It did not spread to South Carolina until 1867, when R. J. Brunson, one of the original founders, organized dens in the state.120 The Klan as a whole was especially active after March 1867 when the dominant congressional Republicans brushed aside the protests of President Andrew Johnson to impose “Radical” Reconstruction on the defeated South. In April 1867, representatives of the Klan from several states met in Nashville to draw up a prescript or constitution.121 As time passed (and as Wilson later suggested), there were signs that the Klan was losing its support among the white social elite and becoming increasingly a fraternity for poorer whites. It correspondingly became a more and more brutal organization. In 1869, its Imperial Grand Wizard, ex-Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, formally disbanded it. Embers of the Klan still glowed, however, and those embers were finally extinguished by the Force Acts of 1870 and 1871, which provided that Klansmen could be tried for their crimes in federal courts. While the old Klan disappeared, its place was taken by a plenitude of other organizations dedicated to overthrowing the radical Republican regimes in the South, organizations with such whimsical names as the “First Baptist Church Sewing Circle” and “Mother’s Little Helpers.”122
In addition to its mythologized account of the Klan’s origins and rise, The Birth of a Nation was inaccurate in other significant ways. In South Carolina, the courts were never dominated by blacks as the film implied, and ex-Confederates experienced only “partial and temporary disfranchisement.”123 While blacks were in a numerical majority in the state legislature, they never really controlled the state. There was no real attempt by black leaders to make intermarriage between the races more acceptable. The rape of white women by black men, the nightmare of many white Southerners, was never a widespread occurrence.124 While law and order did collapse in many areas of South Carolina, this had much more to do with the aggressiveness of whites toward blacks than the other way around. Most of the justifications advanced by the film for Klan activity, therefore, were fallacious. On a more minor factual note, the burning of crosses was not a part of the ritual of the Reconstruction-era Klan. It was imagined by Thomas Dixon Jr., who in turn may have plagiarized it from the work of Sir Walter Scott, especially The Lady of the Lake (1810).125
On the other hand, some aspects of the portrayal of the Klan in the film were rooted in historical fact. The Klan did justify itself (however unreasonably) as a response to black criminality; the first shot of Klansmen is accompanied by an intertitle (shot 927) stating that they are terrorizing “a Negro disturber and barn burner.”126 The same scene emphasizes the belief of Klansmen in the superstition and credulity of blacks: a Klansman is shown drinking from a bucket, a direct reference to the legend (promoted by the Klan) that its members were the g
hosts of former members of the Confederate Army who had not had a drink since they were killed at the battle of Shiloh (shots 929–30, 932, 934–35).127 The name given to the Camerons’ hometown—Piedmont—accurately suggests that the main strength of the Klan in South Carolina was in the “up country” or “piedmont” area of the state.128
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