Fifty Before '50: THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)

 by JB

Film critic Dave Kehr labeled it, “the film you cannot show without apology,” and it sometimes seems that modern film history just wants us to forget all about it.

For the first few years of my teaching career in the mid-1980s, I screened D.W. Griffith’s seminal tale of the Deep South and the Confederacy, The Birth of a Nation, in my Film Studies class because I wanted my students to see firsthand where most film grammar had come from. I remember screening The Birth of a Nation one August day when the temperature in my unairconditioned classroom rose to 102 degrees. Clearly, this violated the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in our Constitution. Maybe I was engaging in “method teaching,” trying to capture for my students the oppressive heat of a real Carolina plantation.

Between the film’s cumbersome length and its reprehensible, racist message, I soon found other ways to teach the same material.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF: Part One: The War Phil Stoneman (Elmer Clifton) visits family friends The Camerons in South Carolina and falls in love with their daughter Margaret (Miriam Cooper). Phil shows Margaret’s brother Ben (Henry Walthall) a picture of his sister Elsie (Lillian Gish). Ben is instantly smitten. Unfortunately, all of this love business must take a back seat to the Civil War, which inconveniently starts during Phil’s visit. Both young men enlist in their respective armies. Both men see their younger brothers killed in combat.

Ben Cameron leads the final charge at the Siege of Petersburg and acquires the nickname "the Little Colonel." Ben is wounded, captured, and taken to a Union military hospital in Washington, D.C. There, he learns that he will be hanged. Ben’s mother (Josephine Crowell) arranges a meeting with President Abraham Lincoln (Joseph Henabery) and pleads for her son’s life. Lincoln pardons Ben, but is soon assassinated at Ford’s Theater. Phil and Elsie Stoneman are in the audience that night and witness the horrible event. In the wake of Lincoln’s death, Elsie’s father, US Representative Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) and other radical Republicans vow to punish the South.

Part Two: Reconstruction
Stoneman and his mixed-race assistant Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), travel to South Carolina to observe Reconstruction. Lynch is elected lieutenant governor, newly freed blacks stuff the ballot box, and white people are denied the right to vote. The South Carolina legislature is now mostly black. Of course, none of this ever happened, although Austin Stoneman is loosely based on Thaddeus Stevens.

Ben fights back by forming the Klan. Yes, THAT Klan. Elsie breaks up with him. Ben’s sister, Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) is followed by Gus (Walter Long), a newly freed slave. Gus asks Flora to marry him. Frightened, she runs into the woods and winds up on a high, dangerous outcropping. Flora tells Gus not to come any closer. Gus comes closer; Flora leaps to her death. While hiding out in a saloon, Gus starts shooting people. The Klan hunts down Gus, tries him, finds him guilty, kills him, and delivers his corpse to Silas Lynch's house. Of course, none of this ever happened.

After discovering Gus's murder, Lynch orders a crackdown on the Klan. He also secures the passing of legislation allowing mixed race marriages. Flora’s father, Dr. Cameron, is arrested for possessing a Klan uniform. Phil Stoneman and some of the doctor’s faithful black servants spring him from jail. The group escapes with Cameron’s daughter and Phil’s intended, Margaret. Their wagon breaks down, and they find a small cabin in the woods in which to hide. Two former Union soldiers agree to hide them. Of course, none of this ever happened. The point of the narrative seems to be that the North and South needed to take up arms against invading hordes of newly-free renegade Negroes. This is not history; it’s a racist’s paranoid fantasy.

Elsie, learning of Dr. Cameron's arrest, visits Lynch to plead for his life. Lynch tries to force Elsie to marry him. Stoneman reveals himself a hypocrite when he becomes infuriated that the mixed-race Lynch means to marry his daughter. Elsie gets the attention of undercover Klansman spies and cries out for help. When the news reaches Ben, he goes to rescue Elsie. The Klan gather with Ben leading them. They ride triumphantly into town and take control of it. Lynch is captured. Meanwhile, a crazed, black militia attacks the cabin in the woods where the Camerons are hiding. The clansmen save them. The Klan force the freed slaves to give up their arms. Margaret Cameron marries Phil Stoneman, and Elsie Stoneman marries Ben Cameron. Of course, none of this ever happened. Because the film contains reenactments of real, historical events (The Civil War, Lincoln’s assassination) did Griffith’s first audiences assume the rest was true too?

Jane Addams, American social reformer and the founder of Hull House, was among the first to see the film and voiced her immediate reaction in an interview published by the New York Post on March 13, 1915, just ten days after the film was released. "One of the most unfortunate things about this film is that it appeals to race prejudice upon the basis of conditions of half a century ago, which have nothing to do with the facts we have to consider today. Even then it does not tell the whole truth. It is claimed that the play is historical, but history is easy to misuse.”

A few cursory words about the artistry of The Birth of a Nation: the man who virtually invented "movie grammar" was a virulent racist. Griffith and Thomas Dixon (who wrote the book The Clansmen, upon which the film is based) present a history that is so grotesquely wrong and simplistic, it could be an ugly cartoon. We know that this is not history, we know that it is not the truth, we know it is the worst kind of propaganda... and yet Griffith’s skill with the nascent tools of filmmaking sweeps us along and the film continually whispers for us to “just go with our emotions.”

Because Griffith was such a genius at directing actors, framing shots, planning out sequences, and editing them for maximum effect, the finished film is a strange amalgam of beautiful technique and reprehensible intent. The film is historic in other ways as well. It’s the first American feature film to run over 12 reels, it was shown in legitimate theaters with a top price of $2.50 (back when the average movie admission was fifteen cents), it was the first American film to arrive at theaters with a printed score the orchestra was expected to play, and it was the highest grossing American film of all time until Gone with The Wind was released in 1939. The film’s release also revived the Ku Klux Klan in the South. They used the film as a recruiting tool.

Why has the film simply not been buried somewhere and forgotten? That’s a legitimate question. In “The Worst Thing About Birth of a Nation Is How Good It Is,” published in The New Yorker in 2013, Richard Brody argues, “The merits of its grand and enduring aesthetic make it impossible to ignore and, despite its disgusting content, also make it hard not to love. And it’s that very conflict that renders the film all the more despicable, the experience of the film more of a torment [....]

“Throughout the film, Griffith’s pro-Confederacy feelings are grossly apparent; yet his depiction of events—his representation of reality as he understands it—involves the inclusion of much that departs from his intentions. The very essence of his realism is open frames, complex staging, and multiple planes of action, all of which suggest far more than Griffith’s [reprehensible title cards] and his stunted politics would themselves allow. For instance, a scene of slave-owners and their Northern guests amiably passing by cotton fields while slaves toil in the background presents, as if in a documentary, the obvious connection between the white Southerners’ gracious ways and the hard, enforced work of slaves that makes it possible.”

Roger Ebert weighed in on the film in his book The Great Movies II, writing, “Certainly, The Birth of a Nation (1915) presents a challenge for modern audiences. Unaccustomed to silent films and uninterested in film history, they find it quaint and not to their taste. Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel show or a vile comic pamphlet [....] The Birth of a Nation is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Triumph of the Will, it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil."

For many years, I attended a delightful little movie convention called WonderFest over Memorial Day Weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. I started out driving there, but eventually discovered that flying was cheaper—the hotel even ran a free shuttle to and from the airport, so I never had to rent a car.

Then, in 2014, two things happened. I discovered that D.W. Griffith was buried in a public cemetery in Louisville, then friend of the site Heath Holland decided to join me and drive up to WonderFest from Alabama. I now had access to an automobile! Heath was nice enough to drive me to the cemetery. (I remember him saying he would “love to take me to the cemetery” again in a few years. Oh, Heath!) We visited Griffith’s grave. It is impressive. Kentucky has placed a historical marker between it and the street, explaining who Griffith was to the uninitiated.

I have visited D.W. Griffith’s grave. I felt like I was making a pilgrimage of sorts. I hope that does not make me racist. Can we ever truly separate the art from the artist? Is it conditional and, if so, what are those conditions? I recognize that as a motion picture pioneer, Griffith had no peer. But as a man, Griffith was a confused, bigoted, boorish dolt. The Birth of a Nation teaches us that two things can be true at the same time.