D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  100. “Audience Cheers and Weeps over ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Daily States [New Orleans], March 13, 1916; “National—‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Washington Herald, May 11, 1916; Sun [Baltimore], March 14, 1915; all in DWGP.

  101. See, for example, Evening Sun [New York], April 10, 1915, DWGP.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. The title of this chapter is derived from the work of the Boston branch of the NAACP which, in the spring of 1915, produced a forty-seven-page pamphlet bringing together criticism of The Birth of a Nation from many different sources. It was entitled Fighting a Vicious Film: Protest against “The Birth of a Nation.”

  2. May Childs Nerney to Butler R. Wilson, April 5, 1915, NAACPP. “We have reason to believe,” Nerney observed, “that this committee must have been rather carefully selected to get such a judgement.”

  3. Lester F. Scott to Dr. J. E. Spingarn, April 12, 1915, NAACPP.

  4. See Lester F. Scott, Vice-Chairman of the National Board of Censorship, to J. E. Spingarn, April 12, 1915, NAACPP.

  5. Moving Picture World, April 24, 1915. Also see Evening Sun [New York], April 2, 1915; New York Commercial, April 2, 1915; Journal of Commerce [New York], April 2, 1915; Brooklyn Times, April 2, 1915, DWGP.

  6. E. Burton Ceruti to May Childs Nerney, February 3, 1915, NAACPP; Dr. Chas. E. Locke and E. Burton Ceruti, “To the Honorable The City Council of Los Angeles, State of California,” February 2, 1915, NAACPP; Schickel, Griffith, 246–47.

  7. Dr. Chas. E. Locke and E. Burton Ceruti, “To The Honorable the City Council of the City of Los Angeles, State of California,” February 2, 1915, 1–4, NAACPP.

  8. Ibid., 3–4.

  9. E. Burton Ceruti to May Childs Nerney, February 3, 1915, NAACPP.

  10. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 51. By early March 1915, the NAACP national secretary was informed that bills for legal censorship were pending in seven more states: Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, and Tennessee. “RR,” “Memorandum for Miss Nerney,” March 9, 1915, NAACPP. On the censorship framework in the United States in 1915, see Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 57–60.

  11. U. S. Congress, House of Representatives, Motion Picture Commission: Hearings before the Committee on Education … on Bills to Establish a Federal Motion-Picture Commission, 63rd Congress, 2nd session, Nos. 1 and 2, 1914, Part 1, 3–4, 56–62; Part 2, 79.

  12. Minutes of the Meeting of the NAACP Board of Directors, January 5, 1915, Box A-8, NAACPP.

  13. “N.A.A.C.P. Notes,” The Crisis, March 1915, 246; from the NAACP, Fifth Annual Report (1914), report of the Chairman of the Board of Directors, February 12, 1915, in The Crisis, April 1915, 293. If Congress passed “Jim Crow” laws for the District of Columbia, the NAACP worried, this might encourage imitation in the Border States and perhaps farther North.

  14. “N.A.A.C.P. Notes,” The Crisis, March 1915, 247.

  15. John M. Cooper, Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 208. “It is the purpose of the Association to bring a succession of cases to the Supreme Court until it has placed that Court on record on Jim Crow cars, segregation and the race question in general.” The Crisis, August 1915, 200.

  16. Cooper, Pivotal Decades, 78.

  17. “The Movie Picture and the National Character,” Review of Reviews, September 1910, quoted in Mast, Movies in Our Midst, 61.

  18. On the stereotypes of blacks in early movies, see Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, chapter 1, especially 8, 10, 13–14. According to Cripps (especially 8, 11, 12–13, 18–19, 21–22), the earliest “nonfiction” American films did not represent blackness in a racist manner. It was only later, as scriptwriting, directing, and editing developed and greater emphasis was placed on producing fictional characters and narratives, that racist modes of representing blacks emerged. Both Daniel J. Leab and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart reject this notion that blackness was represented differently at first and that racism emerged only later. Stewart, in particular, argues that early cinema participated “in a larger effort on the part of a dominant and diverse white population to suppress and ignore rising Black voices of self-determination, politicization, and protest.” She observes that “even these earliest images are heavily informed by Black representations in [white-dominated] literature, vaudeville, newspapers, and cartoons and by Black iconography on postcards and other commercial products.” Moreover, Stewart argues, tropes of blacks washing babies in an attempt to make them white or eating watermelons were used “to demonstrate Blacks’ natural inferiority and predictability.” Equally, early films responded to increasing interracial contact in American society itself by foregrounding themes of race-based substitution and masquerade. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), 8, 11; Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 51–53, 56, 66–90, quotations from 51, 67, and 78. On the rare attempts to criticize unfavorable African American stereotypes in a black newspaper (Chicago Defender), see Everett, Returning the Gaze, 56–57.

  19. Cripps, Slow Fade, 25, 30.

  20. Dan Streible, “Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films,” in The Birth of Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi, 182–83, 185–86, 192–93; Everett, Returning the Gaze, 49, 51.

  21. May Childs Nerney to Mrs. S. B. Henderson, May 24, 1915, NAACPP.

  22. Russell, quoted in Everett, Returning the Gaze, 67. For contemporary attacks on the play in black newspapers such as the Afro-American Ledger [Baltimore] and the Iowa State Bystander, see ibid., 60–62, 65.

  23. Garth Jowett, “‘A Capacity for Evil’: The 1915 Supreme Court Mutual Decision,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 9, no.1 (1989): 59–78; John Wertheimer, “Mutual Film Reviewed: The Movies, Censorship, and Free Speech in Progressive America,” American Journal of Legal History 37, no. 2 (1993): 158–89.

  24. “D. W. Griffith Speaks against Censorship Law Pending at Albany,” Clipper [New York], March 13, 1915, DWGP. The bill to set up a censorship board for New York State had been introduced into the legislature by Assemblyman Mitchell. Ibid.

  25. Captioned “A Plea for the Art of the Motion Picture,” this intertitle—the longest in the entire film—grandiloquently insisted that “We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word—that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare (shot 3).”

  26. Francis G. Couvares notes that white radicals such as Floyd Dell were embarrassed to find themselves allied with D. W. Griffith in defense of “free speech” and argues that in the long term their dislike of restraints on freedom of expression was correct. Not only would such restraints limit how racial and social issues were depicted on screen, but they would also finally lead to the Production Code (1930) and the Production Code Administration (1934). Couvares, “The Good Censor: Race, Sex, and Censorship in the Early Cinema,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 236–38, 247.

  27. William L. Chenery, “The Guide Post,” Record Herald [Chicago], April 13, 1915, DWGP. On this point, also see Staiger, Interpreting Films, 141; Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 55.

  28. May Childs Nerney to Joseph P. Loud, May 6, 1915; Mary White Ovington to May Childs Nerney, March 5, 1915; both in NAACPP. May Nerney sometimes signed herself “Mary Nerney,” but used May as her Christian name on most occasions. She appears here, for the sake of consistency, only as May.

  29. R. W. Stewart to May Childs Nerney, April 24, 1915, NAACPP.

  30. Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors, July 12, 1915, NAACP Board of Directors, Box A-8; Roberta J. Dunbar to May Childs Nerney, October 1, 1915; both in NAACPP.

  31. “It is not speakers we need,” wrote May Childs Nerney
, drawing the appropriate conclusion from the experience of Kansas City, “but people who can organize, who can conciliate, who can get different cliques to work together. That is the immediate problem.” May Childs Nerney to Dr. Charles E. Bentley, June 2, 1915, NAACPP.

  32. May Childs Nerney to Mrs. Anna Gillis, July 27, 1915; Nerney to Rabbi Rudolph I. Coffee, June 7, 1915; both in NAACPP.

  33. “Summary,” Minutes of the Annual Meeting, January 3, 1916, 34–35, NAACP Board of Directors, Box A-8, NAACPP.

  34. May C. Nerney to Charles S. Macfarland, March 26, 1915; May C. Nerney to D. W. Griffith, February 25, 1915; both in NAACPP.

  35. May C. Nerney to E. Burton Ceruti, February 25, 1915; W. D. McGuire Jr. to J. E. Spingarn, April 12, 1915; May C. Nerney to the Reverend Charles F. Macfarland, March 26, 1915; Memo entitled “National Board of Censorship,” February 27, 1915; all in NAACP.

  36. See May C. Nerney to Miss Walters, secretary to Oswald Garrison Villard, March 1, 1915; May C. Nerney to Paul Kennaday, March 1, 1915, both in NAACPP. With one member of the National Board of Censorship’s general committee away from New York, McGuire sent his ticket to Holmes, an NAACP vice-president. W. D. McGuire to May C. Nerney, February 27, 1915, NAACPP. There were apparently ten supporters of the NAACP in the audience for the film’s actual première on March 3. The Liberty Theater was refusing “to admit any colored people” but the NAACP hoped to have “at least two very fair colored people” present for this performance. May C. Nerney to Dr. Jacques Loeb, March 3, 1915, NAACPP.

  37. May C. Nerney to E. Burton Ceruti, March 4, 1915, NAACP; May C. Nerney to the Reverend Charles S. Macfarland, March 26, 1915, NAACP; Frederic C. Howe, “Might Lead to Serious Race Riots,” in Fighting a Vicious Film, p. 33.

  38. May C. Nerney to E. Burton Ceruti, March 2, 1915, NAACPP.

  39. May C. Nerney to the Reverend Henry S. Coffin, March 11, 1915; untitled note, signed May Childs Nerney, March 6, 1915; May C. Nerney to Stephen S. Wise, March 8, 1915; all in NAACPP.

  40. NAACP to Moving Picture Firms, March 11, 1915; Kalem Company to NAACP, March 16, 1915; both in NAACPP.

  41. NAACP to George H. Bell, Commissioner of Licenses, March 12, 1915, NAACPP.

  42. Schickel, Griffith, 275. Chief Magistrate William McAdoo, though sympathetic to the NAACP’s position, ruled against them since he believed nothing could be done to stop the film legally unless a breach of the peace had actually occurred. Ibid.; May C. Nerney to Lillian Wald, March 9, 1915, NAACPP.

  43. W. D. McGuire Jr. to May C. Nerney, March 15, 1915; May C. Nerney to E. Burton Ceruti, March 18, 1915; May C. Nerney to Jane Addams, March 13, 1915; May C. Nerney to Caroline M. Dexter, March 13, 1915; all in NAACPP. The NAACP later was able to identify seven of the minority of committee members who had opposed the film’s passing: Chairman Howe; Mrs. Howard S. Gans; Orlando P. Lewis of the Prison Commission; Dr. Charles S. Macfarland, general secretary of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America; J. K. Paulding; Mrs. Miriam S. Price; and Dr. J. P. Warbasse of Brooklyn. “Memorandum on ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Founded on Dixon’s ‘Clansman,’” n.d.; secretary to Miss Nerney to J. Milton Sampson, October 25, 1915; both in NAACPP.

  44. Osborne was appointed on the advice of Moorfield Storey, “who offered personally to contribute to the expense of the case,” Oswald Garrison Villard of the New York Post and others. May C. Nerney to Members of the Board of Directors, March 17, 1915, NAACPP.

  45. May C. Nerney to Members of the Board of Directors, March 17, March 18, 1915; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, March 19, 1915; both in NAACPP. On the attempt to influence the Mayor, see Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture, Birth of a Nation,” in Silva, Focus, 117–18.

  46. May C. Nerney to Glesner Fowler, May 18, 1915, NAACPP.

  47. May C. Nerney to Samuel R. Morsell, June 3, 1915, NAACPP.

  48. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Trial Set for Wednesday,” Call [New York], March 20, 1915, DWGP; May C. Nerney to J. E. Spingarn, March 29, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney to Helen Lansdowne, March 31, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney to Frederic C. Howe, April 1, 1915, NAACPP; “Film Play Hearing Adjourned,” Post [New York], April 1, 1915, DWGP; May C. Nerney to Rosalie M. Jones, April 7, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney to William H. Baldwin, April 12, 1915, NAACPP; “Anti-Negro Film Case Is Again Postponed,” Call [New York], April 17, 1915, DWGP.

  49. Minutes of the Special Meeting of the Board of Directors, March 23, 1915, NAACP Board of Directors files, Box A-8, NAACPP.

  50. “Films and Births and Censorship,” Survey, April 3, 1915; “Howe Objects to the Clansman Film,” Evening Post [New York], March 24, 1915, DWGP; “Censorship Board Splits on Dixon’s ‘Clansman’ Film,” World [New York], March 24, 1915, DWGP; “Fears Riots from Movies,” Mail [New York], March 24, 1915, DWGP.

  51. May C. Nerney to George E. Wibecan, March 26, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney to Dr. Stephen S. Wise, March 26, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney to Major R. C. Wendell, March 27, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney to J. E. Spingarn, March 29, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney to Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, March 30, 1915, NAACPP; “Fighting Race Calumny,” The Crisis (April 1915): 41.

  52. Moore, as quoted in Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 233.

  53. See May C. Nerney to Lillian D. Wald, March 11, 1915; Nerney to Jane Addams, March 11, 1915; both in NAACP.

  54. May C. Nerney to Berkeley G. Tobey of New Republic, March 31, 1915, NAACPP.

  55. The Crisis (May 1915): 33.

  56. Anderson was collector of internal revenue for the Second District of New York. When he left his post at the beginning of April 1915, one newspaper praised him for standing the test of occupying “the most important [office] every [sic] held by a colored man under the government.” “By Their Fruits,” Editorial, New York World, April 1, 1915, Booker T. Washington Papers—Library of Congress.

  57. Charles W. Anderson to Booker T. Washington, March 31, 1915, Booker T. Washington Papers; Booker T. Washington to Charles W. Anderson, April 10, 1915, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 13, 1914–1915, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 259–60. Also on the meeting with the mayor, see May C. Nerney to G. Washington Butt, March 30, 1915, NAACPP; “May Tone Down Part of Anti-Negro Film,” World [New York], March 31, 1915, DWGP; “Mayor Hears Film Protest,” Telegraph [New York], March 31, 1915, DWGP; “Mayor Bars Brute as Negro on Film,” Tribune [New York], March 31, 1915, DWGP; “Promise to Tone Down Two Scenes of Vicious Photo Play,” New York Age, April 1, 1915, NAACPP.

  58. “Fighting Race Calumny,” The Crisis (April 1915): 42. “Of course,” confessed the national secretary of the NAACP, “if these [two scenes] are eliminated we would have no case legally.” May C. Nerney, Memo, March 31, 1915, NAACPP.

  59. J. E. Spingarn, chairman, Board of Directors, NAACP, to Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, April 1, 1915, NAACPP.

  60. “Negro Film Play Unfit, Mayor Says,” Tribune [New York], April 2, 1915, DWGP; “Mayor Is Asked to Aid the ‘Clansman’ Film,” The World [New York], April 2, 1915, DWGP; “Fight Negro ‘Movie’ Ban,” Press [New York], April 2, 1915, DWGP; “Mayor Advises Change in Scenes in Photo Play,” The Herald [New York], April 2, 1915; “Mayor Orders More Cuts in the ‘Nation,’” Sun [New York], April 2, 1915, DWGP.

  61. J. E. Spingarn to Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, April 6, 1915; Theodore Rousseau to J. E. Spingarn, April 6, 1915; May C. Nerney to George H. Bell, April 9, 1915; all in NAACPP. “I very much fear,” Nerney declared on April 8, “that we cannot put any more pressure … on the Mayor than we are now.” May C. Nerney to Verne E. Sheridan, April 8, 1915, NAACPP.

  62. May C. Nerney to George Packard, April 17, 1915, NAACPP.

  63. The controversy over The Birth of a Nation had a catalytic effect on the National Board of Censorship. Frederic C. Howe resigned as chair
man, almost certainly because of the board’s failure to support his stance on Griffith’s film. The board, realizing that it was losing ground to demands for formal censorship (demands that were aided by the nationwide agitation surrounding Birth), embraced a new purpose (encouraging better film quality) and consequently, later in 1915, changed its name to the National Board of Review. May C. Nerney to Butler R. Wilson, May 1, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney to Samuel R. Morsell, May 26, June 3, 1915, NAACPP; Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 52.

  64. “Still Showing Vicious Picture,” New York Age, March 11, 1915, NAACPP; Post [Washington, D.C.], April 25, 1915, DWGP.

  65. “Egg Negro Scenes in a Film Play,” Union [Springfield, Massachusetts], April 15, 1915; New York Times, April 15, 1915; Telegraph [New York], April 15, 1915; Telegram [New York], April 15, 1915; all in DWGP. Schaeffle was charged and convicted of creating a disturbance but sentence was suspended on condition that he left New York for California. Call [New York], April 27, 1915, DWGP. See also Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 176–77. For a provocative reflection on the significance of the egg-throwing incident, see Gaines, Fire and Desire, 219–22 and passim.

  66. May C. Nerney to J. E. Spingarn, April 19, 1915, NAACPP; May C. Nerney, “Memorandum for Dr. Du Bois,” dated May 7, 1915, NAACPP; “May Tone Down Part of Anti-Negro Film,” World [New York], March 31, 1915, DWGP; “The Regulation of Films,” Nation [New York] 100, no. 2601 (May 6, 1915), DWGP; Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors, April 13, May 10, 1915, NAACP Board of Directors, Box A-8, NAACPP

  67. “Dismiss Film Play Case,” Mail [New York], May 24, 1915, DWGP.

  68. S. S. Frissell to May C. Nerney, March 30, 1915, NAACPP.

  69. “The press,” commented the NAACP national secretary, “except papers like the New York Call, is closed to us.” May C. Nerney to Verne E. Sheridan, March 24, 1915, NAACPP.

  70. “Comments Heard at the Theatre,” in “Memorandum on ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Founded on Dixon’s ‘Clansman,’” n.d., p. 2, NAACPP; Elizabeth D. White to May C. Nerney, March 11, 1915, NAACPP; Fighting a Vicious Film, 17–18.