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D. W. Grifffith and the Historical Imagination by Mark Royden Winchell
As we came to the end of both a century and a millennium a few years ago, professional experts and amateur buffs alike compiled lists of the most influential figures in various fields. The name of David Wark Griffith appeared at or near the top of every list of filmmakers. For that reason, Griffith was one of the great artists of the twentieth century. In the entire history of civilization, there have been relatively few radical innovations in the way that songs and stories can be passed on. The development of written language was one of them. This made it possible to preserve literature that had previously existed only in the memory of a few designated bards, who could forget part of the text or change it at will. (A friend of mine who teaches classics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee believes that all of the great intellectual achievements of the ancient Greeks resulted from their possessing an alphabet complex enough to render human experience but simple enough to be mastered by people of ordinary intelligence.) The next great leap forward came when Gutenberg invented movable type in the fifteenth century. This gave rise to the mass production of literature, thus taking it out of the court and salon and making it accessible to a general audience. Then, in the late nineteenth century, Thomas Edison developed a technology for telling stories with moving pictures. All that was needed was an artist capable of developing the creative possibilities of this new medium. When Griffith's The Birth of a Nation premiered at the Liberty Theater in New York City on March 3, 1915, it was the first feature length film ever produced. And, at 202 minutes, it is still one of the longest. In addition to being the first director to tell a complex and coherent story on film, Griffith also developed such cinematic techniques as the close-up, the long shot, the flashback, and the fade-out. (His predecessors had done little more than train a camera on what were essentially static theatrical productions.) In the nine decades since its first release, this movie has come to be regarded as the most influential film of all time. Over the past twenty years, however, public screenings of Griffith's masterpiece have become exceedingly rare. In an age when soft core pornography is readily available on cable television, The Birth of a Nation has been effectively banned because of its unfashionable view of southern history. David Wark Griffith was born on January 22, 1875, to a rural Kentucky family still suffering economically from the ravages of the War Between the States. His family had come to America from Wales before the Revolutionary War and had settled in Virginia. (His great-grandfather had fought in the first War for American Independence.) Young David's father, Jacob Griffith, had briefly studied medicine before going off to fight in the Mexican War under General Zachary Taylor. In 1850, he escorted a wagon train from Missouri to California during the final days of the Gold Rush. He later returned to Kentucky, where he owned a small farm and served for a term in the Kentucky legislature. When the War for Southern Independence broke out, he enlisted in the Confederate Army and served as a colonel under Stonewall Jackson. D. W. Griffith's earliest memories were of his father's stories of wartime adventure. The elder Griffith's southern loyalties and his flair for the theatrical left an indelible impression on his son. Because of the primitive treatment he received for his war wounds, "Thunder Jake" Griffith died in 1882, when his son David was only seven. Although he dreamed of becoming a playwright and made a precarious living as a traveling actor, D. W. Griffith was not destined for a conventional theatrical or literary career. Ever since he had seen a magic lantern show as a young schoolboy in Kentucky, Griffith had been fascinated with the artistic possibilities of moving pictures. In 1908, he began a five-year directorial apprenticeship with the Biograph Company. During that period, he developed the techniques that would mark his later career and influence the style of other great directors, including the revolutionary Russian filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein. If Griffith's work at Biograph could be said to have any social vision, it was decidedly progressive. He championed the rights of American Indians against white oppression in The Redman's View (1909) and Ramona (1910). In A Corner in Wheat (1909), he attacked wealth and power as forthrightly as any contemporary muckraker. He exposed the horrors of urban poverty in What Shall We Do With Our Old ?(1910) and The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and even presented the Ku Klux Klan in an unfavorable light in The Rose of Kentucky (1911). After starting his own independent company in 1913, Griffith continued to produce films with righteous liberal sentiments. There can be little question that he considered The Birth of a Nation to be in this tradition. Griffith believed that he was making a strong statement against the brutality of war as his father had experienced it, while championing the underdog South against northern oppression. The image of the South in American culture during the second half of the nineteenth century was largely shaped by the seemingly ubiquitous theatrical versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Because of the role of Stowe's novel in bringing about the War Between the States, we sometimes overlook the fact that the various plays based on that novel reached an even larger audience for nearly four decades after the war was over. Although the plantation novels of Thomas Nelson Page and the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris presented a more positive view of the antebellum South, no form of popular entertainment had been able to counter the effect of the Tom plays. Then, one night around the turn of the century, a minister and temperance lecturer from North Carolina attended one of these infamous plays. Angered by what he considered an injustice to the South, it was all that Thomas Dixon, Jr., could do to keep from leaping to his feet and denouncing the drama. When the performance was over, he rose with tears in his eyes--vowing not to rest until he had told the true story of the South. In a five-year period, he produced a trilogy of novels, The Leopard's Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907), which sold millions of copies and provided the first effective challenge to the powerful myth embodied in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Unlike more genteel apologists for the Confederate South, Dixon seemed
intent on beating Mrs. Stowe at her own game. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the
most powerful argument against slavery is not that it violates individual
human rights but that it threatens middle class family values and the
sanctity of the home. The ultimate embodiment of that threat was the nightmare
image of interracial rape. Well before Mrs. Stowe put pen to paper, abolitionist
propaganda had painted lurid pictures of southern slave-owners violating
their female chattel and then selling their mulatto babies away from their
grieving mothers. If the authentic southerners in Uncle Tom's Cabin rarely
go that far, Stowe's most loathsome slave-owner, the Vermont-born Simon
Legree, is the very incarnation of lust and sadism. By equating slavery
with miscegenatic rape, Harriet Beecher Stowe appealed to the most visceral
fears of her readers. Because social, racial, and gender equality are official dogma in our own age, it is often difficult to appreciate the governing assumptions of an earlier time. Throughout most of recorded history, men of the highest social class have considered women of a lower order to be fair game. It was only with the rise of the middle class that women began demanding marriage as payment for their sexual favors. Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which is often cited as the first novel in English, is the tale of a servant girl who finally extorts a proposal of marriage from the predatory young squire who has been pursuing her for several hundred pages. (The subtitle Virtue Rewarded tells us all we need to know about the game that Pamela is playing.) When the threat of forcible seduction comes from a social inferior, what is at stake is not just a single woman's chastity but the entire social order itself. Prior to embarking on his career as a novelist, Thomas Dixon had been a lawyer, an actor, and a popular lecturer against strong drink and other vices. Although he was an ordained Baptist minister, he left that church to form his own interdenominational congregation in New York City. (He had been born in Shelby, North Carolina in 1864, had graduated at age nineteen from Wake Forest College with a master of arts and the highest honors ever awarded by that institution, and had done a year of graduate work at Johns Hopkins--where he formed a lifelong friendship with his classmate Woodrow Wilson.) Like the early D. W. Griffith, he was on the liberal side of most political and economic issues. In fact, as late as 1896, he had publicly thanked God "that there is not to-day the clang of a single slave's chain on this continent," because "democracy is the destiny of the race, because all men are bound together in the bonds of fraternal equality with one common love." Dixon seems to have changed his views on race not because of any lingering prejudices from his southern upbringing but as a reaction to American foreign policy. Our imperialism against Spain resulted in American control of several Pacific and Caribbean populations. When these dark-skinned peoples proved incapable of self government, Dixon concluded that all non-Aryans shared a genetic tendency toward barbarism. Although such views have been largely discredited in our own age, they were held by many reputable anthropologists in Dixon's own time. The Clansman is the story of two families--the Camerons of South Carolina and the Stonemans of Pennsylvania.5 Although Ben Cameron and Phil Stoneman have fought on opposite sides in the War Between the States, they are willing to forget regional differences in a spirit of healing under the benevolent leadership of Abraham Lincoln, who is considered by North and South alike to be the "Great Heart." Unfortunately, Lincoln is assassinated, and radical forces within his own party (led by Phil's father Austin Stoneman) are intent on bringing the conquered South under the heel of black despotism. As the story opens, Stoneman's saintly daughter Elsie is playing the banjo for wounded soldiers from both sides in a makeshift hospital set up in the U. S. Patent Office. Ben Cameron, who is recovering from war wounds and facing trumped up charges for guerilla activity, immediately falls in love with the northern girl. With Elsie's help, Ben's mother secures a presidential pardon for her son and escapes with him to South Carolina before Lincoln's murder incites a reign of recrimination in the nation's capital. Except for a dramatic account of the impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson, the rest of the action takes place in the Piedmont region of South Carolina. In the public realm, we see radical white Reconstructionists using the newly freed black population to terrorize their former masters. At a personal level, romantic passion is bringing the Cameron and Stoneman children closer together. Not only is Ben Cameron smitten with Elsie Stoneman, but Elsie's brother Phil has also fallen in love with Ben's sister Margaret. In the meantime, Austin Stoneman (who has moved to the warmer climate of South Carolina for his health) is growing increasingly fond of individual southerners, even as he doggedly pursues his vengeful political agenda. In what Dixon implies is the inevitable consequence of emancipation, Ben Cameron's former sweetheart, Marion Lenoir, is raped by a bestial former slave named Gus. (Having been irreparably polluted, both Marion and her mother throw themselves off a nearby cliff.) At this point, the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan materializes to avenge the violated damsel. Shortly thereafter, several thousand federal troops are summoned to quell the insurrection threatened by this show of vigilante justice. In the incendiary atmosphere, Phil Stoneman kills a black who has behaved in an uppity manner toward Margaret Cameron. Once again, Margaret's hard-luck brother Ben is suspected of a crime he has not committed and sentenced to death. After Phil replaces his look-alike friend in the death cell, the Klan rides to the rescue. Phil is saved, Old Austin Stoneman is chastened, and the Klan wins the victory over federal intervention that had previously eluded the more conventional forces of the Confederacy. With its combination of sex, violence, and unabashed sentimentality,
The Clansman was an even bigger success than its immediate predecessor,
The Leopard's Spots. (Griffith's biographer Richard Schickel tells us
that, when Dixon submitted the manuscript of that earlier novel to his
old friend Walter Hines Page, the redoubtable New South liberal stayed
up all night reading it. Setting forth in search of breakfast the next
morning and continuing to read while he walked, Page was promptly struck
by a streetcar, with the blood from his cuts staining Dixon's text.) But
no mere novel or pair of novels, no matter how popular, could undo the
damage that Uncle Tom's Cabin had wrought, both in print and on stage,
for over half a century. Fired by both ambition and greed, Dixon combined
the most sensational elements of both his anti-Tom books in a play he
called The Clansman, which began touring the nation in 1905. Although the New York critics and ideologues were even more antagonistic toward Dixon's play than their counterparts in the provinces had been, the theater continued to be packed night after night. This remained true when the show went on the road in other northern cities. No doubt, the popularity of The Clansman was due in part to the spectacle of the production. Seeing white-robed Klansmen riding across the stage was even more thrilling than watching a runaway slave be pursued by bloodhounds in Uncle Tom's Cabin. But the racial politics of the play must have also been congenial to Yankee audiences. Anti-black sentiment was particularly strong among recent immigrants, who competed with African Americans for low paying jobs. (Remember, at the Atlanta Exposition of 1900, Booker T. Washington had taken an anti-immigrant stance on the grounds that blacks had been in this country first and had proved themselves to be reliable workers.) If northern playgoers were not exactly forgetting Uncle Tom's Cabin, racial solidarity was beginning to trump sectional animosity. Just as Dixon had become frustrated with the limitations of print when he transferred his story to the stage, he eventually came to realize that stage drama itself was a dying genre. His new dream was to produce a version of his story in the emerging medium of motion pictures. In 1911, he tried unsuccessfully to form his own company for that purpose. After two years of having the door slammed in his face by established producers, Dixon approached the small-time entrepreneur Harry E. Aitken in 1913. Aitken had just hired D. W. Griffith away from Biograph, and the two were looking for a more ambitious project than the one-reel films Griffith had been used to turning out. Because of his own southern background, Griffith felt an immediate affinity with Dixon's story. Moreover, as a director, he was impressed with the visual possibilities for the film. He recalls that, when he first looked into The Clansman, he "skipped quickly through the book until I got to the part about the Klansmen, who, according to no less than Woodrow Wilson, ran to the rescue of the downtrodden South after the Civil War. I could see these Klansmen in a movie with their robes flying." What he envisioned was a ride to the rescue that would outdo anything previously attempted on stage or screen. "Instead of saving one poor Little Nell of the Plains," he said, "this ride would be to save a nation." Although Griffith's version of The Clansman was more faithful to Dixon's novel than many movies are to their sources, he made several crucial changes that made the narrative more effective. To begin with, he starts the film well before Reconstruction with a scene of a Puritan clergyman praying over a slave-market. (The subtitle reads: "The bringing of the African to America sows the first seeds of disunion.") The very next scene is of a nineteenth-century Abolitionist meeting. The same Puritan types who had blessed the original slave trade are now agitating for an end to the peculiar institution. Through this visual juxtaposition, Griffith exploits the stereotype of Puritans as cold-blooded hypocrites. Shortly thereafter, we see the two Stoneman boys visiting their boarding school chums the Camerons in South Carolina. (Griffith has supplied Phil Stoneman with a younger brother, while giving Ben two younger brothers and an additional sister.) In contrast to Puritan New England, life in the South is filled with grace, laughter, and a sense of joy large enough to include both races-- as the black slaves sing and dance during their two-hour lunch break. That such a life depends on social and racial hierarchy is emphasized visually by another pair of consecutive scenes. As a wagon full of jovial disorderly blacks passes in the street, a couple of "pickaninnies" fall out and are retrieved with a playful pat on the rear. Immediately thereafter, a carriage of well dressed aristocratic whites passes in the opposite direction. Because Griffith begins prior to the war, he is able to broaden his epic by showing us scenes of battle. The scope and realism of these scenes was unprecedented in the American cinema. Also, because World War I had already begun in Europe, Griffith's condemnation of armed conflict was particularly timely. He quickly kills off the two younger brothers he has provided for Ben Cameron and shows the gallant Ben succoring a fallen foe. (This scene is described in a conversation after the fact in the novel.) Only then, do we see the angelic Elsie Stoneman ministering to Ben and the other wounded soldiers in the patent office. With a kind of dramatic economy, Griffith has the black predator Gus pursue the additional younger sister he has given Ben, thus dispensing altogether with the character of Marion Lenoir. Rather than depicting an actual rape, which occurs off the page in Dixon's novel, anyway, he has the little sister leap off the cliff in order to avoid what would otherwise be a fate worse than death. Also, in the film the Klan rescues Elsie Stoneman rather than her brother Phil. Her calamity is the prospect of a forced marriage with the mulatto lieutenant governor of South Carolina, Silas Lynch. In the end, however, the happy outcome is the same as in the novel--with the Klan triumpant, the blacks suppressed, and the Reconstructionists on the run. When the film was first shown, in a private screening at Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles in early February 1915, Thomas Dixon was so moved by the spectacle that he told Griffith The Clansman was "too tame a title for so powerful a story." Instead, it must be called The Birth of a Nation. If Thomas Dixon, Jr., hoped that his novel and play would replace Uncle Tom's Cabin in the American consciousness, he was to be sadly disappointed. Nearly every American has at least heard of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and tens of millions of people who have never read the novel or seen a Tom play can identify characters and scenes from Stowe's story. After their obligatory fifteen minutes of fame, Dixon and The Clansman were soon forgotten. (Dixon's work is included in no anthology of American or southern literature, and most of the standard reference books in the field fail even to mention his name.) Nevertheless, Dixon's vision continues to live in the first great film of the American cinema. For many years, The Birth of a Nation was the most widely distributed and the highest grossing movie ever. Even if those distinctions have now been eclipsed by more recent films (particularly Gone With the Wind, which it influenced), Griffith's masterpiece has enjoyed remarkable longevity. Despite persistent efforts at suppression by political foes from the Communist Party to the NAACP, The Birth of a Nation continued for decades to be shown in revival houses specializing in classic films. Unfortunately, this practice came to a virtual end in 1980, when a lily-white group of Berkeley radicals stormed a San Francisco theater showing the movie. After they vandalized the building, destroyed projection equipment, and burned the print of the film, most other theaters owners were scared away from braving such attacks. But no amount of intimidation or censorship can completely banish myths and dreams. If Griffith's consummate artistry is responsible for the technical excellence of The Birth of a Nation, the much maligned hack writer Thomas Dixon gave him two of the film's most memorable and disturbing images--the black rapist attacking his white victim and the Klan riding to the rescue. It is perhaps for this reason, Leslie Fiedler argues, that Griffith "for all his talent never again was able to project archetypes that have refused to fade from the mind of the world." These two images, much more than the Jim Crow stereotypes earlier in the film, is really what the fuss is all about. What are we to make of these images? How should we as southern patriots respond to the controversy they have spawned? In considering the spectre of interracial rape, we can always cite the fact that it was the abolitionists --particularly Harriet Beecher Stowe--who introduced this nightmare into the debate over race relations. But what is perhaps more telling is not the convoluted genealogy of this image but the way in which it has been used in the nine decades since the filming of The Birth of a Nation. If Uncle Tom is the prototypical "Good Nigger," then Gus is the equally prototypical bad one. In our own day and age, the worst thing you can possibly call a black male is an "Uncle Tom." The Gus prototype, however, has fared much better. The protagonist of Richard Wright's Native Son, which is the first great
American novel by a black writer, achieves a sense of manhood and spiritual
fulfillment when he convinces himself that he has raped and murdered a
white girl--although he, like Gus in the movie, is technically innocent
of both crimes. When the white southern liberal William Styron wrote an
historical novel about Nat Turner, he had the leader of this famous slave
rebellion murder a white girl for whom he had secretly lusted. In Soul
on Ice, the black radical Eldridge Cleaver speaks of rape as a revolutionary
act. He would begin by practicing on black women in his own neighborhood
and then move to the white side of town when he got good enough at his
craft. If miscegenatic rape has become an image of black power in the
minds of many who are sympathetic to the cause of civil rights and black
aspirations, it seems a bit disingenuous to blame Thomas Dixon and D.
W. Griffith for being the first artists to plant this image in the American
imagination. But an even more basic point needs to be made. When people are in distress, the last thing they are likely to do is demand a background check of those willing to help them. In countless B Westerns, seemingly acceptable to those who decry The Birth of a Nation, the cavalry rides to the rescue of helpless whites under siege by dark-skinned Native Americans. In the Tarzan movies, the potential victims are invariably white and the attackers black savages. (Even if the savior does swing from a vine, he is still a British lord.) Finally, in Hitler's favorite movie, King Kong, the entire technology of civilized mankind is directed against the African beast who is climbing the Empire State Building with blonde-haired Fay Wray in hand. Back when ethnic profiling was still allowed, the orders were to shoot Kong on sight. When white leftists, such as the ones who vandalized the revival house in Berkeley, seek to suppress The Birth of a Nation, I am reminded of the scene in Hamlet in which the prince says, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." In an essay on Dixon and Griffith, Leslie Fiedler writes: "I myself once saw . . . the members of a left-wing cine club in Athens, believers all in the equality of the races and the unmitigated evil of the Klan, rise to their feet at ten o'clock in the morning (the year was 1960, two wars and innumerable revolutions after the making of the film) to scream with bloodlust and approval equal to that of the racist first-nighters of 1915 as white womanhood was once more delivered from the threat of black rape." The scenario that Dixon and Griffith depicted so memorably seems to have been discovered rather than created by them. Consider, for example, a poem called "The Pipes of Lucknow: An Incident of the Sepoy Mutiny," written in 1858. The scene is India, where a group of Scottish women and children are besieged by an uprising of fearsome brown-skinned natives. Early in the poem, the dire scene is set: Day by day the Indian Tiger Louder, nearer, fierce as vengeance, Round the silver domes of Lucknow, This poem was not written by a southern defender of slavery or even by a northern copperhead. It couldn't have been written by Rudyard Kipling, who wasn't born until 1865. The author of "The Pipes of Lucknow" was none other than the righteous Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. Even if The Birth of a Nation is a powerful work of art capable of exposing liberal hypocrisy, its vision of the South is incomplete. For that reason, we should hesitate to make it the basis of a social movement. For one thing, Dixon and Griffith were both staunch unionists. The Birth of a Nation is an accurate title for a film that so insistently depicts the reconciliation of North and South. In terms of the fictional storyline, that reconciliation is symbolized by the double wedding that joins the Stoneman and Cameron families at the end of the movie. (Austin Stoneman, who is loosely based on the radical Reconstructionist Thaddeus Stevens, apparently realizes the error of his ways when his mulatto protege seeks to marry Stoneman's own daughter.) Should we miss the larger historical point he is making, Griffith ends his film with Daniel Webster's statement, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." This is not just a plea for national healing but an implicit admission that the South had been wrong to secede from the inseparable union, which is now being reconstituted on the principle of white supremacy. In order to maintain a unionist perspective and still denounce the horrors of Reconstruction, it is necessary for Dixon and Griffith to buy into the Greatheart fraud. If only the saintly and compassionate Lincoln had not been murdered, Reconstruction would have been a joy rather than an agony. No literary or historical gushmeister from Walt Whitman to James Agee has given us a more saccharine view of Lincoln than the one we get in The Birth of a Nation. When the news of the assassination reaches Piedmont, South Carolina, old Colonel Cameron laments: "Our best friend is gone. What will become of us now?" Before the war, the same Colonel Cameron had read a newspaper headline saying: "If the North Carries the Election, the South Will Secede." This is of course historical nonsense. It was the election of Lincoln that prompted secession. Had the northerner Stephen A. Douglas won the election, the South would have stayed in the union. But Griffith would rather rewrite history than suggest that there was anything more than a temporary disagreement separating Lincoln from the South. As Thomas DiLorenzo has recently reminded us, the record of the real Lincoln is not one that any of us would want to endorse. Finally, the question of race cannot be ignored. If The Birth of a Nation tells a hard and bitter truth, it is finally only a partial truth. In places, Griffith gives us what he no doubt considered to be a positive view of African Americans. The house servants of the Cameron family (who seem not to have heard about the Emancipation Proclamation) remain loyal and submissive. When the little sister plummets to her death, we see a shot of the servants' quarters and the subtitle "None grieved more than these." But no positive portrayal of a black character attains the mythic resonance we find in the image of Gus. Not only is there no counterpart to Uncle Tom in The Birth of a Nation, but neither is there an equivalent to William Faulkner's Dilsey or Margaret Mitchell's Mammy. The absence of such characters is far more troubling than the presence of Gus. Despite these limitations, the power of The Birth of a Nation has never been more evident than it is today. In recent years, we have been repeatedly told that America is a different country since the events of September 11, 2001. That particular day of infamy reminded us of our individual and collective vulnerability. It also taught us that tolerance and good will do not constitute an effective defense against real enemies. Tribal loyalty is no vice when the tribe is under attack. These are truths that D. W. Griffith instinctively knew nearly a century ago. For that reason, his great film will never die. Mark Royden Winchell is Director of the League of the South Institute for Southern History and Culture.
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