Abominable masterpiece

by David Benjamin

“The Negro race has had enough trouble, more than enough of its share of injustice, oppression, tragedy, suffering and sorrow. And because of the social progress which Negroes achieved in the face of these handicaps, it is best that The Birth of a Nation in its present form be withheld from public exhibition.”

—D.W. Griffith, 1941

MADISON, Wis. — D.P. Dagnes introduced me to D.W. Griffith. It was a moment of mixed enlightenment. 

This happened in the spring of 1968 at a corn-country college in northern Illinois. Dagnes had arrived a semester late and three years older than his freshman peers, after surviving Vietnam and mustering out of the U.S. Army at age 21. After ascertaining that Dagnes was not a narc planted amongst us by the college’s right-wing president, we initiated him into a small brotherhood of hairy oddballs organized loosely as the Chapultepec Social Club (CSC). Dagnes, who had led a troop or two in Southeast Asia, was a den father, a gadabout and a bit of a showman. These qualities coalesced when he discovered that the nearby Rockford Public Library had movies. To check out. For free.

“Far out,” quoth J.T. O’Connor, a CSC founder.

Within a week, Dagnes had launched on campus a new amusement unit, Dynamite Shows, Inc. We started showing Saturday-night movies—admission, ten cents—in dorm rooms and, as crowds grew, the Women’s Living Center. Among our attractions were The Black Pirate (Douglas Fairbanks, 1926), Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) and the wildly popular Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. One of our last bills before summer break was D.W. Griffith’s six-reel, three-hour epic, The Birth of a Nation. 

For some reason, likely because President Howard suspected Dynamite Shows, Inc. to be a hotbed of hippie sedition, we never screened Birth of a Nation for an audience. The CSC watched it, in awe and dismay, in a study room at the Men’s Living Center. 

I recalled that evening of silent-movie revelation as I was reading Dick Lehr’s 2014 history,  The Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights. D.W. Griffith’s spectacle about the Civil War and Reconstruction has been labeled the “most racist movie ever made.” It is also known among cineastes as a startling masterpiece that rewrote the vocabulary of film.

Now 107 years past its release, Birth of a Nation lingers in the American experience as a cultural quandary hard to forget and impossible to dismiss. There are two moments in Griffith’s spectacle that riveted its viewers. In one scene, an ex-slave named Gus, crazed by Negro lust, pursues Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), the virgin daughter of a genteel plantation family that has been brought to its knees by the invasion of Northern aggressors. Played in blackface by white actor Walter Long, Gus—literally foaming at the mouth—is bent on ravishing Flora. Rather than submit to Gus’ bestial defilement, she throws herself from a cliff.

Griffith’s final scene brought filmgoers to their feet. Lehr writes: “The Ku Klux Klan then enters the story in time for a climactic rescue. The hooded heroes restore order to the chaos of Reconstruction, cleansing South Carolina of the corrupt alliance between northern carpetbaggers and free Negroes.”

D.W. Griffith was inspired to film Birth of a Nation by a novel, The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, a fierce and malignant bigot. As Griffith said at the time of the filming, “The Klan at the time was needed. It served a purpose.”

The purpose it served, of course, was to glorify the revival of a white supremacist America, whose lynch-law racism was headquartered in the Jim Crow South. In 1915, when Birth of a Nation was released, a wave of historical revisionism about the post-Civil War era was led by a Columbia University historian, William A. Dunning. Dunningism, as Lehr notes, “portrayed Negroes as inferior, ignorant, incapable of the honest exercise of political rights and power.”

Dunning’s version of history became unspoken gospel in American jurisprudence politics, culture, and art. Birth of a Nation came out nineteen years after the Supreme Court voted 8-1, in Plessy v. Ferguson, to enshrine the Jim Crow principle of “separate but equal” as the law of the land—forcing Black Americans to languish for the next seven decades in a backwater of second-class citizenship.

Politically, the white establishment in those days had the support of America’s foremost Black spokesman, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a school then devoted to manual training, good Negro manners and subservience to white bosses. “It is at the bottom of life that we must begin,” said Washington to unanimous white approval, “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social activity is the most extreme folly. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in the opera house.”

In other words, “Don’t get uppity and don’t you darkies put on no airs.”

The subhuman nature of the Negro—notwithstanding the example of articulate, educated Black men like Washington, ex-slave Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter (more on him below)—was widely affirmed by (white) scientists, philosophers and even poets. In 1915, the Los Angeles Times published a snatch of bouncy doggerel called “The Black Peril,” by Stephen Phillips. It includes the lines, “Beware the black blood with the white!/ The skull of brass, the hands that tear!/ The lecherous ape, not human quite,/ The tiger not outgrown his lair.”

Then, no civil rights “movement” existed. Lehr’s history traces the emergence of organized Black protest, led by Monroe Trotter, a prickly Boston journalist who found his calling, ironically, in censorship. He fought to halt the showing of Birth of a Nation at the Tremont Theatre, just across the street from the Boston Common.

Trotter, a zealot who rubbed even his friends the wrong way, battled a nation that was united against him, even the president. Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal workforce, installing “white only” toilets all over the District of Columbia, made Birth of a Nation the first movie screened at the White House.

However, despite resistance from Boston’s power elite, including legendary Mayor James Michael Curley, Trotter summoned throngs—composed of Black protesters and white curiosity-seekers—to the Tremont, and to other movie venues in Boston. Trotter succeeded in scaring the daylights out of the Boston Police and triggering the first mass civil-rights arrests in U.S. history—all this fuss over a Saturday-night movie. For what reporters called a “near-riot” over the movie’s screening on 17 April 1915, Lehr writes, “the number of Boston police detailed for special duty at the Tremont Theatre totaled 897. By contrast, the number of officers on special duty for the Ringling Bros. Circus parade in late May would be 94.”

For all its sins against humanity, the silver lining of Griffith’s epic paean to the KKK was its awakening of a struggle for equality that followed Dr. Martin Luther King’s long “arc of the the moral universe,” which bent—slightly, thanks to Monroe Trotter—toward justice. 

D.W. Griffith was a Southern-born impresario steeped in the racism of his birthplace and era. He made the most hateful popular movie of all time. But he lingers in film-history curricula because he took unprecedented artistic risks and advanced movie techniques beyond the imagination of his peers in an infant industry. In his one great film, he was both a brilliant innovator who thrilled moviegoers, and a fell propagandist who aroused a righteous rage—among enlightened Americans—that has proven to be as epic as his celluloid brainchild.