By Samuel Damren
The political storm spreading across America as a result of the increasing detention and deportation of thousands of immigrants was created from an all too familiar recipe.
A particularly loathsome image from this ongoing campaign is of federal officers on horseback and armed, masked ICE agents in MacArthur Park Los Angeles conducting a sweep for “illegal” immigrants based on “ethnicity.”
The Trump administration’s announced goal for this campaign is to deport 1 million immigrants per year.
In the American past, the ingredients to the current iteration of this political storm combined to create similar storms. The focus of this commentary is on one such instance – the film “The Birth of a Nation.” Released by D. W. Griffith in 1915, “The Birth of a Nation” was the first “blockbuster” in movie history.
The film portrays the “heroic” but false story of the restoration of white supremacy in the American South after Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan enjoys a starring role in both the movie and the book upon which it was based.
The film premiered in auditoriums and ballrooms previously reserved only for plays, symphonies and conventions, including a screening in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. Though a silent film, performances featured a live orchestra that accompanied specific sequences in the movie.
Unlike short films viewed in nickelodeons typically lasting only 6 or 7 minutes, “The Birth of a Nation” had an original running time of 2 hours and 45 minutes.
As entertainment, there had never been anything like it. As a history lesson, it was premised on racist perspectives and calculated fabrication. The story of the film’s making, its initial run, and the societal unrest it stirred is contained in Melvyn Stokes 2007 book titled, “D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” published by Oxford University Press.
“Birth of a Nation” is based on a 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. titled “The Clansman.” Dixon was born in 1864 in North Carolina which, according to Stokes, greatly affected his “outlook throughout life. He would always look back on Reconstruction as a tragic era in which the white South had been unjustly treated by the North.”
The son of a farmer and Baptist preacher, Dixon was educated at Wake Forest College and then accepted a scholarship at Johns Hopkins University for graduate work in political science. Woodrow Wilson was his classmate at Hopkins, and they became life-long friends; hence, the later White House premiere of the movie.
Dixon’s first novel, “The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden,” was a direct rebuke to the Northern perspective of Southern life portrayed in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
As Stokes notes, Dixon rejected Stowe’s belief that despite the “brutalizing effects of slavery,” former slaves could be uplifted by education and freedom. Instead, Dixon fervently believed that “with slavery gone, blacks had quickly regressed to their earlier, primitive state.”
Published in 1902, “Leopard Spots” sold more than 1 million copies. In reaching this large audience, Stokes observed that “what Dixon had essentially done was to dramatize the black problem as a national rather merely a sectional issue.”
In his later novel, “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” Dixon expanded on the racist perspectives propounded in “Leopard Spots.” The book was so successful in its own right that Dixon later adapted it as a play where it garnered the attention of filmmaker D. W. Griffith.
In transposing the novel to the screen, Griffith claimed that his intention was to reconcile the resentment of white Southerners for their treatment during Reconstruction by demonstrating shared values with white Northerners that Griffith believed both sides could embrace to heal their divisions.
Griffith’s attempted reconciliation was misguided. In many regions of the country, the racist content of the film produced an immediate and sustained backlash. To African Americans, the film was offensive in the extreme. For many Northern whites, it fueled long standing resentment of Southerners’ persistent desire to minimize the evils of slavery and excuse a racist culture which enabled it to exist under the cover of state sovereignty.
There are many instances in the film emblematic of this disconnect, but two events portrayed at the conclusion stand out.
In the film’s action styled climax, two former Union soldiers who are white – but had never appeared in the film to that point – offer their cabin as refuge to a former Confederate plantation family being pursued by Reconstruction soldiers who are black.
The Union soldiers quick decision to protect their former adversaries upon just having met them is explained in a screen caption – “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright.”
After armed and masked KKK riders on horseback rescue the family and the town from black soldiers, “The Birth of a Nation” concludes with “The Aftermath.” It features the “double honeymoon” of two young white couples, one of each couple from the North and one from the South.
Though their families were separated from previous friendship by the events of the Civil War and Reconstruction, they are now re-united.
The finale is a fantasized “golden day” of this reunion of races with an assembly of white people dressed in togas, sharing food and common purpose at a bucolic seaside setting under a superimposed figure of Christ.
No persons of color are included in the joyous setting.
In earlier versions of “The Aftermath,” Griffith made reference to the mass deportation of former slaves from America to Liberia. He cut the reference from later versions to avoid bans on the film in several states and cities.
The next commentary in this series compares the ingredients giving rise to the resurgence of the KKK in the 1920s and the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
————————
Samuel Damren is a retired Detroit lawyer and author of “What Justice Looks Like.”
The political storm spreading across America as a result of the increasing detention and deportation of thousands of immigrants was created from an all too familiar recipe.
A particularly loathsome image from this ongoing campaign is of federal officers on horseback and armed, masked ICE agents in MacArthur Park Los Angeles conducting a sweep for “illegal” immigrants based on “ethnicity.”
The Trump administration’s announced goal for this campaign is to deport 1 million immigrants per year.
In the American past, the ingredients to the current iteration of this political storm combined to create similar storms. The focus of this commentary is on one such instance – the film “The Birth of a Nation.” Released by D. W. Griffith in 1915, “The Birth of a Nation” was the first “blockbuster” in movie history.
The film portrays the “heroic” but false story of the restoration of white supremacy in the American South after Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan enjoys a starring role in both the movie and the book upon which it was based.
The film premiered in auditoriums and ballrooms previously reserved only for plays, symphonies and conventions, including a screening in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. Though a silent film, performances featured a live orchestra that accompanied specific sequences in the movie.
Unlike short films viewed in nickelodeons typically lasting only 6 or 7 minutes, “The Birth of a Nation” had an original running time of 2 hours and 45 minutes.
As entertainment, there had never been anything like it. As a history lesson, it was premised on racist perspectives and calculated fabrication. The story of the film’s making, its initial run, and the societal unrest it stirred is contained in Melvyn Stokes 2007 book titled, “D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” published by Oxford University Press.
“Birth of a Nation” is based on a 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. titled “The Clansman.” Dixon was born in 1864 in North Carolina which, according to Stokes, greatly affected his “outlook throughout life. He would always look back on Reconstruction as a tragic era in which the white South had been unjustly treated by the North.”
The son of a farmer and Baptist preacher, Dixon was educated at Wake Forest College and then accepted a scholarship at Johns Hopkins University for graduate work in political science. Woodrow Wilson was his classmate at Hopkins, and they became life-long friends; hence, the later White House premiere of the movie.
Dixon’s first novel, “The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden,” was a direct rebuke to the Northern perspective of Southern life portrayed in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
As Stokes notes, Dixon rejected Stowe’s belief that despite the “brutalizing effects of slavery,” former slaves could be uplifted by education and freedom. Instead, Dixon fervently believed that “with slavery gone, blacks had quickly regressed to their earlier, primitive state.”
Published in 1902, “Leopard Spots” sold more than 1 million copies. In reaching this large audience, Stokes observed that “what Dixon had essentially done was to dramatize the black problem as a national rather merely a sectional issue.”
In his later novel, “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” Dixon expanded on the racist perspectives propounded in “Leopard Spots.” The book was so successful in its own right that Dixon later adapted it as a play where it garnered the attention of filmmaker D. W. Griffith.
In transposing the novel to the screen, Griffith claimed that his intention was to reconcile the resentment of white Southerners for their treatment during Reconstruction by demonstrating shared values with white Northerners that Griffith believed both sides could embrace to heal their divisions.
Griffith’s attempted reconciliation was misguided. In many regions of the country, the racist content of the film produced an immediate and sustained backlash. To African Americans, the film was offensive in the extreme. For many Northern whites, it fueled long standing resentment of Southerners’ persistent desire to minimize the evils of slavery and excuse a racist culture which enabled it to exist under the cover of state sovereignty.
There are many instances in the film emblematic of this disconnect, but two events portrayed at the conclusion stand out.
In the film’s action styled climax, two former Union soldiers who are white – but had never appeared in the film to that point – offer their cabin as refuge to a former Confederate plantation family being pursued by Reconstruction soldiers who are black.
The Union soldiers quick decision to protect their former adversaries upon just having met them is explained in a screen caption – “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright.”
After armed and masked KKK riders on horseback rescue the family and the town from black soldiers, “The Birth of a Nation” concludes with “The Aftermath.” It features the “double honeymoon” of two young white couples, one of each couple from the North and one from the South.
Though their families were separated from previous friendship by the events of the Civil War and Reconstruction, they are now re-united.
The finale is a fantasized “golden day” of this reunion of races with an assembly of white people dressed in togas, sharing food and common purpose at a bucolic seaside setting under a superimposed figure of Christ.
No persons of color are included in the joyous setting.
In earlier versions of “The Aftermath,” Griffith made reference to the mass deportation of former slaves from America to Liberia. He cut the reference from later versions to avoid bans on the film in several states and cities.
The next commentary in this series compares the ingredients giving rise to the resurgence of the KKK in the 1920s and the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
————————
Samuel Damren is a retired Detroit lawyer and author of “What Justice Looks Like.”
