I had to wait until the kids were in bed to start the movie.. They wouldn’t stand for me monopolizing the TV with a three-hour silent epic, whatever its historical significance. I looked at the clock. If I started the movie immediately, I could be in bed by midnight. I peeled the plastic off the videocassette that I had purchased for $4.95 plus shipping. It was one of several Klan-related purchases I had made at Amazon.com that were putting me in an increasingly weird corner of their marketing database. Now when I log in, the Web site suggests that I might enjoy The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf.
I was hoping the movie—D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation—might answer a question I had been considering for a while: How did a dormant southern vigilante group give rise to the Klan of the 1900s, which was so successful in my home state of Indiana? The movie depicts the Reconstruction-era Klan of the 1860s, but the film came out in 1915, at the dawn of the new Klan. The Birth of a Nation was a direct inspiration for those men who were trying to resurrect the KKK, and it also became their greatest early recruiting tool. At a time when the motion-picture industry was still in its infancy, twenty-five million people saw the film in its first two years. For a great many of them, it was the first movie they had ever seen. I was curious about its power: Would the same film inspire me if I were a Hoosier in 1915 seeing a movie for the first time? Would I be awed in some dark, smoky theater as I watched the story of the Invisible Empire unfold on the screen while an unseen orchestra per-formed the score? Would I want to shell out ten dollars for a white robe of my own? In my family room in Valparaiso, Indiana, almost ninety years later, I was trying to re-create that experience.
I read the box as the movie began. The cassette was produced by Madacy Entertainment of Quebec as part of their “Hollywood Classics” series, which included Three Stooges films and Our Gang comedies. The Birth of a Nation was filmed in Southern California, so the “Hollywood” part was reasonably accurate. Almost everything else on the box was wrong. It was not the first feature-length silent film; it wasn’t even Griffith’s first. It was not based on The Leopard’s Spots by Thomas Dixon—not completely, anyway. It is more accurate to say that the film was based on Dixon’s The Clansman.
Another inaccuracy grated on my nerves as the movie began—the score seemed off. One of Birth of a Nation’s many innovations was a complete orchestral accompaniment. I had read several accounts and critiques of the film that described the music for specific scenes in detail. Strains of “Dixie” were supposed to accompany one of the early scenes. Griffith’s idea of “jungle” music was supposed to accompany another. The music on my videocassette didn’t seem to bear any relationship to the action on the screen. It appeared to be the musical equivalent of clip art.
I settled in to watch, trying to ignore my frustration. If not the first feature-length silent film in the world, it was without question the first feature-length silent film I had ever seen. Overall, I was surprised by how few words appeared on the screen. I had imagined that there would be lines of dialogue on the screen after every scene. For the most part, I was left to figure out on my own exactly what was being said, based on the actions and reactions of the characters. Acting in silent films, it seemed to me, was really an advanced form of pantomime.
I had studied the history of the movie and its famous creator before watching it. David Wark Griffith left his position as a movie director at Biograph Studios in New York in 1913. The motion-picture medium was still very new—The Jazz Singer, the first film to use sound, would not be made for fourteen years—but Griffith sensed that film had a potential that went far beyond the one-reel movies and nickelodeon reels he made at Biograph. Others believed in him; when he left Biograph for Southern California, almost all of the studio’s stars left with him, including Lillian Gish, the most famous actress of her day. His stated aim: to make “the big picture.”
For his first effort, Griffith chose Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman and purchased the movie rights for twenty-five hundred dollars from the author. The novel had been a best seller when it was published in 1905, and its dramatic wartime setting fit the bill for Griffith’s “big picture.” The book depicted wartime and postwar events from a distinctly Southern point of view, but the bias didn’t bother Griffith. He himself was a southerner from Kentucky. His father had been a colonel in the Confederate army, a minor wartime legend known as “Roaring Jake.” Griffith had grown up steeped in the myths, and the prejudices, of the old South.
These prejudices are most clearly seen in Griffith’s depiction of blacks in the film. They fall into two categories in the movie: sinister predators and simpleminded buffoons. Blacks who appear in the background, such as actors playing black Union soldiers, are in many cases portrayed by African Americans. The more significant black roles are played by white actors in blackface. It is Griffith’s racist presentation of blacks that is perhaps most jarring to the modern viewer.
The story is at its heart a forbidden love story of the most basic kind. The Camerons live in the South, the Stonemans in the North. Before the war, the two families are friends. Austin Stoneman, the patriarch of the Northern family, is a Republican congressman, modeled on real-life abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. The Southern patriarch is Dr. Cameron, a slaveholding plantation owner. When the Civil War begins, the two men and their families are pitted against each other. Naturally, though, true love transcends the conflict. Elsie Stoneman, played by Lillian Gish, and Ben Cameron, played by Henry Walthall, fall for each other. Most of the movie’s plot revolves around these two star-crossed lovers trying to overcome history and unite.
(excerpted from chapter 3)