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ARTICLES
BREECH BIRTH: THE RECEPTIONS TO D.W. GRIFFITH’S THE
BIRTH OF A NATION
DAVID RYLANCE
Abstract: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation was praised as
the greatest film of its day but it was also subject to a fierce controversy
over its racial politics. This essay explores the storm which surrounded this
film’s release through re-interpreting it through concepts of race, history
and nation. It identifies the racial and ideological work Birth was designed
to carry out and examines how African-Americans sought to respond to this
onslaught. Furthermore, it shows that the protests against this film were not
an all-out failure (as most scholars hold) but were rather far more effective
than has previously been given credit. In this way, this paper situates the
receptions to The Birth of a Nation at the centre of a dispute over American
identity and racial justice and re-interprets it as a crucial moment in the
history of the Progressive era.
It was ‘the greatest picture ever made and the biggest drama ever filmed’.
The New York Globe proclaimed that it was ‘beyond doubt the most
extraordinary picture that has been seen’. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film
spectacular The Birth of a Nation was hailed as a picture without peer. Even
President Woodrow Wilson himself would praise it as ‘a splendid
production’.1 Yet if Birth was received with a general sense of euphoria, it
was also met with an implacable opposition. Both African-Americans and
white liberals found the film ‘an insult’ and ‘a blight’, ‘abhorrent’,
‘loathsome’ and ‘foul’.2 Moorfield Storey, the president of the NAACP,
deplored it as ‘an effort to mislead the people of this country…and to excite
a strong feeling against the coloured people, already suffering everywhere
from race prejudice…’3 Booker T. Washington branded it ‘the most
dangerous thing (to have) ever happened to the advance and improvement
of the coloured people’.4
A movie retelling the history of Reconstruction through narratives of white
supremacy, Birth was every bit the racial epic. Based on The Clansman, a
Negrophobic novel written in 1905 by an irascible Southerner, Thomas
Dixon Junior, Griffith’s blockbuster traced the lives of two families - one
Northern, the other Southern - against the backdrop of the American Civil
War and its aftermath. However, in doing this, it argued that the newly freed
African-Americans were attempting to seize sexual and political power
from whites in the war’s wake. To crown the terrible tragedy, a young
Southern maiden, Flora Cameron, is forced to commit suicide at the film’s
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climatic moment in order to escape a rapacious black renegade. From here,
the situation escalates as the Negroes begin to riot in the streets. A mulatto
governor, Silas Lynch, attempts to force the beautiful Elsie Stoneman to
marry him. Bloodshed and slaughter seems imminent. Yet all is not lost.
The formation of the Ku Klux Klan becomes the decisive event in Birth
which saves the South from the ‘calamity’ of black rule. In billowing white
gowns, the Klan rides to the rescue and reunites the riven nation under its
‘Aryan birthright’. Thus, in a single sweep, the white nation is brought into
being through a conquest of the black hordes. Modern America is invented
through a return to racial suppression. The Birth of a Nation is therefore also
the triumph of a race. Its final message is one of racist nationalism bound up
in the spectacle of the modern cinematic extravaganza. It is the Negro at last
who stands accused, the single-handed cause for the hell of Reconstruction.5
The aim of this paper is to analyse the volatile receptions which surrounded
The Birth of a Nation. In particular, it is concerned with the ways in which
African-Americans sought to launch a forceful resistance to what was ‘the
most widely acclaimed and financially successful film of the entire silent
era’.6 It will argue that this opposition cannot be understood in isolation
from the widespread acclaim that this movie generated amongst a
mainstream white population. As a result, this paper endeavours to explore
the relationship between both white and black responses to the film in a way
that has not been satisfactorily addressed in the current historiography
where few historians have sought to contextualize and theorize the
importance of this episode in the broader course of the Progressive Era.7
Through an analysis of audience reactions to Birth and newspaper defences
of it, the paper seeks to analyse Birth through what Jane Tompkins calls the
cultural work which it was designed to carry out. Cultural work can be
thought of as the way in which a text acts at once to describe the social
order and also to make mythologies which work to transform that order.8
This paper seeks to identify the ideological and racial purposes which Birth
drew on and disseminated and to contextualize this within the events of the
Progressive era.
The paper is also concerned with the African-American response to The
Birth of a Nation. For a range of different reasons, historians diverse as
Thomas Cripps, Arthur Lennig, David Blight, Lee Baker and Bruce Tyler
(to name a handful) have all agreed that the protest efforts were a failure.9
This paper argues against such a view by re-examining the processes
through which campaigners sought to defeat Birth. We are then able to
comprehend the results that the campaign did achieve rather than lament the
ones they did not. In fact, as this paper argues, the opposition to Griffith’s
feature risked being so effective that it initiated an anxious countercampaign from white supporters determined to rescue the film and protect
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their interests. Thus we are able to gain a better appreciation of the mixed
results which these protests produced rather than to focus on the complete
defeat they supposedly suffered.
Making Myths
Premiered for general exhibition in Los Angeles on 8 February 1915, The
Birth of a Nation was declared a resounding success by its overwhelmed
audiences. Rushing from the cinema with glowing reviews, one critic
declared Griffith’s photoplay a triumph:
When a motion picture can hold you in thrall for three
hours, when in that time you feel all the emotions sway you
and your breath comes in short gasps, when you know the
tears are near the surface and in another instance your face
flushed, there comes a realization of the power of the silent
drama.10
Across the nation, responses mirrored one another with an astounding
congruity. Writing back to Alabama from a sojourn in New York, reviewer
Dolly Dalrymple announced that Birth might well be ‘called a silent drama’
but ‘when I saw it, it was far from silent…incessant murmurs of approval,
roars of laughter, gasps of anxiety and outbursts of applause greeted every
new picture that was thrown on the screen’.11 Other audiences hissed loudly
when the encroaching black hordes threatened to take the day.12 In a gallant
gesture, one audience member even opened fire on the screen in an effort to
rescue Flora Cameron from the clutches of her black pursuer.13 Broadsheets
reported in breathless tones that crowds all over were cheering ‘the mighty
riders’ of the Ku Klux Klan as they charged to save the downtrodden
South.14 Middle class decorum was being abandoned in the heat of the
moment. People were even leaving the cinemas without that quintessential
sign of class: their hats.15 The silent screen came alive in a sea of sound.
‘The Birth of the Nation,’ the columnist Ward Greene concluded
exuberantly, ‘is the awakener of every feeling’.16
Why did The Birth of a Nation excite its audiences so? Such an astonishing
set of responses was entirely unprecedented in American cinema. Some
fifty-seven years later, the biographer Robert Henderson would express
wonder at the stir Birth created amongst its viewers. ‘It is impossible,’ he
remarks, ‘to look at The Birth of a Nation through contemporary eyes and
see what ingredients caused the tremendous impact on the audience of
1915’.17 His puzzlement is understandable but perhaps the answer is not as
lost to us as it might seem. As the reviewer Neil McIntosh wrote in The
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Atlanta Constitution, Birth had the power to move because the sheer force
of the past was at work in it:
It makes you laugh and moves you to hot tears
unashamed. It makes you love and hate. It makes you
forget decorum and forces a cry into your throat. It thrills
you with horror and moves you to marvel at vast
spectacles. It makes you actually live through the greatest
period of suffering and trial that this country has ever
known.18
Living through the ‘horror’ of the past here explained the loss of McIntosh’s
decorum. But this emotion was less a product of the film alone than the
‘past’ that streamed through it. The art of the film was empowered by its
claims to historical accuracy. Birth became a time machine transporting its
viewers back in person to experience the trauma of American history anew.
Historical truth, obviously, was a major marketing point for The Birth of a
Nation. In the eyes of D.W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon, it was the
presentation of history which was the single most important aspect of the
film. ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ Griffith insisted in one interview, had shown
that the camera was ‘the instrument with which history is beginning to be
written’.19 Dixon affirmed the same premise. ‘I am faithfully recording the
history of fifty years ago,’ he wrote and, because of this, he declared that he
was not ashamed to ‘accept the full moral responsibility for (Birth’s)
purposes and its effects on audiences’.20 Indeed, all of those who supported
Griffith’s movie (and even many of those who didn’t) would agree that the
film was historically valid.21 Nor was this opinion held merely amongst
cultural critics. Ordinary viewers also praised the film as a benchmark of
historical accuracy.22 Birth’s claims to truth were thus not only validated by
opinion columns but also an anecdotal recollection of the past. One man
wrote to the New York Globe praising the film from his perspective as ‘a
veteran of the Civil War’.23 In Atlanta, veterans interviewed after a
screening also insisted that that the photoplay was the stuff of truth.24 Thus,
across the nation, Birth’s power derived precisely from its supposed
historical vigour. As Griffith summed the matter up, the film was simply ‘a
photoplay reproduction of what actually happened and what is down in
black and white in the pages of American history’.25
The Birth of a Nation, of course, was a far cry from ‘what actually
happened’ in the era of Reconstruction. A movie made not only to present
the past but also to speak for the South, Birth was a startling attempt to sell
myths of racial regeneration and to forge white national unity. In an
interview delivered at the time of the film’s release, Griffith explained his
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reason for making his magnum opus. ‘I felt driven,’ he said, ‘to tell the story
- the truth about the South, touched by its eternal romance which I learned
so well’. A Kentuckian by birth, and the son of a man who had fought for
the Confederacy, the young Griffith was in thrall to the myths that had
reared him. In fact, according to his own account, the first memory he had
of existence was the ‘flashing vision’ of his father’s military sword.26 In this
way, history and legend were inseparable in Griffith’s impressionable eye. It
is not surprising then that Griffith’s history should be depicted in such stark
colours.
Yet neither Griffith nor Thomas Dixon was alone in this effort to remake
the American mind. Birth was actually the culminating moment in an
ongoing process of historical revisionism. As David Blight has argued, the
culture of the Progressive Era became infatuated with visions of national
reconciliation, a final healing of the open wounds of the American Civil
War which still bled some fifty years afterwards.27 As such, the War was
now no longer seen as an irreparable loss of innocence but as an act of
purification, a baptism of fire that had forged an idealized, unified America.
In 1913, the semi centennial of the end of the Civil War had been publicly
celebrated in precisely this narrative vein of a nation vindicated. Marked by
a spectacular celebration at Gettysburg, veterans from both sides of the
conflict converged on this site to commemorate the nation’s reunion. The
event was presided over by President Wilson, who in an address to the exsoldiers announced that the occasion was proof positive that the Civil War
was a ‘quarrel forgotten’. In all of this, black soldiers were noted among the
crowds but their role in the proceedings was conspicuously absent especially on the Southern side.28 In a sense, however, this was not
surprising. There was no place for the Negro in this moment of
reunification. Its purpose was to eulogize and elevate the Civil War as an
Anglo-Saxon tragedy.
Nor was this grand public affair the only sign of a burning desire among
Americans to recapture a national spirit. This was the moment when the
organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was at its peak,
funding war monuments and attempting to control the material admitted into
Southern school textbooks. It was also when Dudley Miles, a professor at
Columbia University, wrote his acclaimed essay ‘The Civil War as Unifier’.
It was also the moment that Woodrow Wilson became the first Southern
President since Andrew Jackson.29 In fact, Wilson had made his own
contribution to the national fervour some thirteen years before when, in his
epic History of the American People, he praised the Klan as the force which
rescued the Southern states from black rampage and quotes from this work
appeared as title cards in Birth itself.30 Alongside this national revival, there
grew a raft of virulent racist works such as Charles Carroll’s The Negro a
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Beast, a ‘treatise’ on the immorality of blacks and Robert W. Scufeldt’s
alarmist work, The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization.31 Of course,
there was also Dixon’s own popular contribution, The Clansman, the novel
on which Birth was based. To the audiences of 1915 then, Birth was a film
which brought together the separate strands of ideology and memory and
projected them into one sweeping epic.
There is no doubt that the racial implications were apparent to audiences
who viewed Birth. Arthur Lennig has argued that it is unproductive to see
the film as a racist enterprise precisely because it ‘did not appear offensive
or even unfair’ to ‘the general public’ who ‘couldn’t understand what all the
fuss was about’.32 But this effort to rescue Birth deliberately overlooks the
fact that its claims to truthfulness were part and parcel of its racial
discourse. Roland Barthes has argued that for a myth to work, it must not
hide its purpose (whether racist or otherwise) but rather must seek to
naturalize this purpose. It must achieve its real agenda not by concealing its
intentions but by making them seem universal and unarguable. In this way,
as Barthes argues, a myth is not read as ‘a motive but as a reason’.33
Audiences to Birth were able to absorb the myths it promoted not as the
white invention they were but as an incontrovertible fact about the past. In
projecting itself as truth, Birth legitimized racist desire and absolved those
who spouted it. It was not Americans, after all, that were racist but History
itself that was racial.
Fighting Back
Upon The Birth of a Nation’s release, African-Americans found themselves
facing a racial affront of a breathtaking scale. From the moment that the
film was released, both black organizations and white liberal newspapers
went on the offensive. W.E.B. DuBois wrote furiously that the film was
nothing more than an attempt to ‘capitalize burning race antagonisms’.34
The New York Age, a popular Negro newspaper, fiercely labelled the film
‘an appeal to the baser emotions’ and damned it as seeking ‘to degrade a
people and incite race hatred’.35 As such, from its first showing Birth was
met by a strong resistance from across the range of black associations. Its
trek across the nation was accordingly always a troubled one. The most
popular film of its time was also the most controversial.
Scholars have tended towards a negative view of the African-American led
protest efforts against Birth. The general consensus has been that the
campaigns against Griffith’s film were a clear failure. This of course has
been an essential part of a larger understanding that the Progressive Era
represented ‘the continuation of a decline’ in the position of AfricanAmericans right across America.36 In this context, the appearance of a film
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like Birth and the black failure to defeat it would seem self-explanatory. The
inability to have the film removed from circulation was no doubt to be
expected in such a hostile environment. Despite heavy protests in Los
Angeles, New York and Boston, Birth ultimately ran in all three cities.37
More than that, its racial message clearly made it through to the population
at large. In Lafayette, Indiana, one patron would emerge from seeing Birth
only to shoot a teenage Negro boy to death before the day was through.
Reflecting back in 1940, DuBois would recall that the ‘number of mob
murders so increased that nearly one hundred Negroes were lynched during
1915 and a score of whites, a larger number than had occurred for more than
a decade’.38 In Atlanta, of course, the film’s inspiration triggered the
formation of a new Ku Klux Klan and another reign of terror in the South.39
In this light, it seems understandable that scholars would see the labours to
have Birth stopped as being all in vain.
Nevertheless to simply dismiss the African-American response to Birth as a
defeat is to do that response a deep disservice. Historians have been much
too inclined to see black protests as a failed form of resistance without first
asking just what ‘resistance’ might mean. Steven Diner reminds us that - in
a period of deepening disenfranchisement - we must look closely for the
‘cultural strategies’ that blacks developed in the Progressive Era in order to
‘cope’ with their oppression as well as simultaneously ‘resist’ it.40 Looking
at the protests against The Birth of a Nation in this perspective permits us to
see some of the real successes that blacks did manage to achieve in their
campaign against the film. It also allows us to appreciate the fact that their
demonstrations were deeply troubling to the boosters and supporters of the
film. This is not to suggest that we should suddenly elevate the campaigns
against Birth into a triumph. But it is to insist that we must look more
closely at what these protests did achieve as well as why they might have
failed.
When The Birth of a Nation appeared on the national scene, both black
people and their white supporters were in no doubt that the film had to be
opposed. As Thomas Cripps has asserted, ‘Blacks never debated whether to
stand and fight Birth but rather how’.41 A number of cultural strategies
presented themselves. Some (such as the more conservative Booker T.
Washington) chose to publicly ignore the film in a bid to refuse it the
widespread exposure associated with protest. Others (like the more militant
NAACP) sought to advocate censorship and campaign against it. Still others
(such as the Hampton Institute, a technical college for Negroes in Virginia)
elected to answer Birth by adding a filmed epilogue to be played with
Griffith’s film so as to offer positive black counter-images in the cinema
itself.42 Historians have been prone towards a tacit acceptance that publicly
ignoring Birth would have been the most sensible response. This statement
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must immediately be qualified because no historian has openly declared
such a belief. Yet their criticisms of other strategies open to blacks imply
that public silence would have been the best solution to the trouble which
Birth caused.
Yet, we must be careful with this kind of assumption.. Even those who held
themselves aloof from the public debate at no point actually thought that
such a debate was misconceived. Booker T. Washington was one who
elected to steer clear of the debate over Birth.43 Throughout the whole
campaign, he was to contribute only one letter of protest to the Atlanta
Independent and supposedly gave ‘no overt support’ to the protest efforts.44
Yet, if Washington kept out of the public furore, he nevertheless continually
insisted on the need for public demonstrations against the film. Perhaps
surprisingly for a man that had made his mark as a conciliator and
incrementalist, Washington actually argued for direct and immediate action.
In a telegram which was reprinted in the metropolitan newspapers in April
(right in the thick of a censorship row over Birth in Boston), Washington
aligned the weight of his considerable reputation firmly on the side of the
more aggressive attempts to have Birth removed from circulation. As the
year progressed, he would continue to follow the progress of campaigns to
censor the film with continued support and approval.45 In this sense, even
the Negro understood as the most famous proponent of non-intervention did
intervene in the movement against Birth. Silent resistance was never really
silent. It was at the very extreme simply a resistance of a quieter and less
confrontational manner. In this respect, the need for protest action against
the film was apparent to all positions.
One of the first and most important moves against Griffith’s film was to
launch a forceful attack, led by the NAACP, on its claims to historical
authority and validity. Exposing the historical claims of the movie was a
crucial move in the anti-Birth campaign precisely because it sought to
demystify the racial dimensions of the film. Letters of protests, pamphlets
and demonstrations all proclaimed (and verified through historical fact) that
the film was false in order to illuminate its gross political purposes.
Accusations against the historical credibility of a film which staked so much
on its veracity had a highly persuasive power. When Birth’s producers
attempted to present the film in New York and Boston, delegations of both
black and white citizens were dispatched to the Mayor and Governor’s
office in each city respectively to oppose the film’s historical distortion.46 In
both cases, the appeals over historical misrepresentation impressed each
Mayor enough for them both to insist on the removal of certain scenes in the
film which they believed appealed to ‘race prejudice’.47 In this sense,
attacking Birth on its own ideological grounds through claims of historical
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inaccuracy turned into proof that Birth was designed to provoke racist
sentiments.
The assault on Birth’s veracity was a strategy with the power to do very real
damage to the historical memory Birth was attempting to create. Attacking
it on the ground of its historical strength reversed the film’s logic. It
exposed this history of Reconstruction as a reconstruction of history. This in
turn became both injurious to the film and a grievous public embarrassment
for Birth’s creators. When Griffith declared to Moorfield Storey, he would
donate $10,000 to charity if Storey could find a single historical inaccuracy
in Birth, the filmmaker thought he had scored a brilliant publicity move. But
this turned into a fiasco when Storey took Griffith up on the offer,
demanding to know exactly which real mulatto governor had bound and
gagged a white woman to force her into marriage.48 In a letter addressed to
the Boston Herald (although reprinted in several papers), Storey also took
the film apart point by point, offering a chronological account of
Reconstruction to show that the Ku Klux Klan had been formed at a
moment when blacks were already disenfranchised and was thus simply ‘a
feature of a determined struggle to withhold from emancipated slaves the
right of voting’.49 Letter campaigns in the press sought to extricate the
history of black oppression from beneath Birth’s gloss of the age of
Reconstruction. Facts were thrown at The Birth of a Nation to turn its claims
of truthful representation upside down and to twist its racial dynamics inside
out. Yet perhaps a more powerful sign of the effect of these skirmishes over
the historical accuracy of Birth was to be found in the sheer number of
letters pouring in to newspapers from ordinary citizens seeking to correct
the film’s misrepresentations. The campaign to expose the historical
inaccuracies in Birth had thus denaturalized the film, exposing its
assumptions to criticism and stirring up the population to interrogate it. As
such, although the film could still be watched freely across the nation, its
validity was under question and under siege.
Alongside this crusade to discredit the claims to truth upon which the film
so heavily depended, protesters also proceeded to agitate for the film’s
censorship and elimination. Scholars have tended to study the censorship
campaign by concentrating upon how protesters appealed to ‘racial
prejudice’ to have the film removed from circulation. However, black and
white campaigners also sought to achieve their ends not only through a
discourse of race but also through a far more effective language of moral
hygiene. It was argued that the film was not merely an offence against
blacks alone but against the ethical fabric of American society - its
democracy, law and religion. The ideas of morality and decency which the
protesters were drawing on here were not a spontaneous invention. Rather,
they built on a platform of long held preconceptions amongst the middle
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class that the cinema could cast a dangerous influence over its audiences.
For this reason, censorship boards had been instituted at the behest of
middle class reformers as a means of policing the unsavoury elements in
films (and assumedly the unsavoury crowds that came with them).50 It was
this language of moral hygienics intertwined with the history of the movies
that the protest movements would draw on in their attack on Birth.
However, they adapted this discourse to advance their own ambitions for
racial justice. As Robert Sklar has argued, ‘the prime target’ of reformers
was to obliterate ‘obscenity’ from the cinema ‘but they never defined the
word, assuming that a respectable person knew obscenity when he or she
saw it’.51 It was precisely this imprecision over just what ‘obscenity’ meant
that the protesters could (and did) use to their advantage. By drawing on this
discourse of morals, they could overcome racial prejudices among censors
and supporters of the film alike and achieve some real gains in seeking to
have Birth censored.
It was on these moral grounds that the first real efforts against The Birth of a
Nation took place in New York in February and March of 1915 before the
National Board of Review. The Board itself was a private, nongovernmental agency that had been created as a compromise measure due to
the problems that individual state censorship boards had created for film
distribution. Nonetheless, it had become a venerable institution and, by
1915, some eighty percent of film exhibitors nationwide abided by the
Board’s rulings on all films.52 On first receiving Birth, a subcommittee of
the Board passed the film without alteration, but protesters forced the Board
to a revision of this decision.53 Critics have tended to dismiss the subsequent
deletions made by the Board as minor.54 Certainly the NAACP was hoping
for the elimination of the entire second half of the film which included all
the offensive material on Reconstruction.55 However, the cuts they did
secure were a real triumph in themselves. One major alteration was the
deletion of its conclusion. Entitled ‘Lincoln’s Remedy’, the scene which
originally ended Birth was an exultant vision of black Americans being
loaded onto boats to be despatched back to Africa. Physical expulsion of
course was the obvious finish for a film which sought to cast out the Negro
with such fervent animosity. Another cut was made to a crucial scene where
the Negro who attempts to rape Flora Cameron is castrated by the Ku Klux
Klan.56 As Michael Rogin has suggested, this was a fundamental moment in
Birth’s narrative arc. In punishing the black man who had tried to rape
Flora, the Ku Klux were seizing back as their own the sexual power that had
been conferred on this wild brutish rapist. In this sense, as Rogin writes, the
regeneration of both masculinity and race could take place through
castration - through a ‘wound that signified the white man’s power to stop
the black seed’.57 The removal of each of these scenes was thus a crucial
disruption of Birth’s racial dynamic. Other cuts were also made before the
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screening in Boston: the attempted rape of Flora Cameron, the forced
marriage between Silas Lynch and Elsie Stoneman, a shot of the elder
Stoneman’s mulatto mistress, a whole sequence showing a corrupt South
Carolinian legislature dominated by black members and several scenes of
Negroes leering.58 All of these scenes were crucial to convey the mix of
sexual lawlessness and political anarchy which Birth sought to fasten upon
the Negro. The Birth of a Nation would play on then but not as it was fully
intended or conceived. This was a victory within limits but a victory
nonetheless.
The Ride to the Rescue
At the end of all of this, however, we are left again with the insistent
question of failure. Why was it that black and white protests to The Birth of
a Nation never could manage to overcome the film? We have seen that it
was surely not for a lack of effort. Scholars have maintained that the
censorship campaign had no real lasting impact against Birth or its
producers. Indeed, even in 1915 in the very thick of the fight, Thomas
Dixon would flippantly dismiss the labours to have Birth banned as nothing
more than a ‘silly legal opposition’.59 Unfortunately, his opinion has echoed
down through much of the historiography.60 Yet Bruce Tyler has shown that
there was actually a furious attempt across the nation to control and contain
the black opposition.61 The successes of the censorship campaign were not
going unnoticed at the time among the white defenders of Birth and were a
source of anxiety to them. For this reason, Birth’s backers developed a
series of forceful counter-arguments with which to strike back and save the
film from the genuine threat of an outright ban.
These counter-arguments involved a two-pronged strategy. One was an
argument based on ideas of racial uplift. The other involved more a direct
appeal to the freedom of speech. In the first instance, Birth’s advocates
utilized notions of racial improvement to legitimize Griffith’s blockbuster.
Boldly and brashly, they insisted that The Birth of a Nation was actually not
a slur against the Negroes of 1915 at all but rather quite the reverse. In
showing how far the African-American had progressed, it was instead a
compliment to them. Indeed, in an article that appeared in newspapers right
across the continent, the New York priest and political reformer, Charles
Pankhurst, defended Birth on the grounds that it did not depict the black
person of today:
The criticism that…(Birth) is calculated to engender
racial animosity is fully met by the consideration that it
represents the negro, not as he is now at all, but as he
was in the days when he had just had the chains broken
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from him and when he was rioting in the deliciousness of
liberty…It is in this respect exactly true to history and if
it reflects upon the negro as he was then it is a
compliment to the black man of today.62
Pankhurst’s cunning justification of Birth proposed that the movie was
immune from racism because it did not even represent a race which still
existed at all. Its was merely illuminating to African-Americans the truth of
their origin not attacking their present condition. Writing in an article in The
American, the Reverend Thomas Gregory also argued that Birth did not
simply show negative images of Negroes but positive ones as well:
So far from teaching hatred for the negro, some of the most
beautiful and touching scenes in The Birth of a Nation are
those in which the audience are shown the unsophisticated
goodwill, the deep and cordial affection and devotion
between whites and the faithful bondsman who loved one
another with an everlasting love.63
It was these loyal Negro slaves, Gregory concluded, that had progressed
into the upstanding Negro of the present day. Of course, in arguing this, the
Reverend was only perpetuating a racial discourse that ensured the
subordination of blacks all the more. In Gregory’s logic, black progress was
entirely dependent on their relation to whites who were in turn the recipient
of ‘their unsophisticated goodwill’, the object of their ‘deep and cordial
affection’.
Despite attacks by Storey and DuBois on these types of arguments, the
views that both Pankhurst and Gregory were using to defend Birth were
ones with extraordinary power in 1915.64 This shrewd rhetorical defence
appealed to a widespread discourse of racial uplift held at the time by blacks
and whites alike. In a popular vocabulary, the notion of ‘racial uplift’ was
understood as referring to how blacks had risen from a degraded condition
once slavery had been abolished towards ever greater economic, social and
cultural achievement. As Kevin Gaines has argued, the purpose of this
concept among blacks was to highlight their personal, collective and
spiritual ‘transcendence of worldly oppression and misery’.65 Yet this
concept of racial uplift implied a notion that blacks had gradually worked to
civilize themselves across the last half-century. This concept of racial
evolution and civilization fed into a wider understanding in the Progressive
era that race was an engrained characteristic, a natural condition, rather than
a social and cultural construction. For this reason, even white allies who
denounced Birth found themselves adopting a language that reinforced its
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
13
message. Jane Addams reprimanded Birth as a film designed to evoke race
feeling but, as she went on to explain, the reason for this was that:
the producer seems to have followed the principles of
gathering the most villainous and grotesque individuals he
could among coloured people and showing them as
representative of the truth about the entire race…It is
undoubtedly true that some elements of the plot are based
on actual events but they are only a part of the picture.66
Addams’ objections to Birth identified the defamation of Negroes which the
film carried out but it also accepted the premise that the ‘villainous and
grotesque’ blacks in the film were based on reality.
Some black people also fell into this trap. In mid-1915, facing the prospect
of widespread outrage at his film, Griffith decided to make a ‘conciliatory’
gesture towards the black community. Representatives of his film company
approached Hollis Frissell, Principal of the Hampton Institute, and broached
the topic of adding an epilogue to the film. This epilogue, they argued,
would be designed ‘to show the progress of the coloured people' in order to
‘correct unfortunate impressions given by The Birth of a Nation’.67 Much
like Booker T. Washington, Hollis Frissell was a conservative who did not
care for the more confrontational style in opposing Birth. For this reason, he
saw adding an epilogue to the end of the movie (showing black students
working industriously at Hampton) as a chance to disseminate positive
images of African Americans to counteract the bad ones generated by the
film. To give Frissell his due, this epilogue might well have had an effect in
mollifying the slanderous side of Birth. Audiences who would applaud the
Klan initially were now also reported as applauding the black students seen
in the epilogue too.68 Yet because this epilogue presented an ideal of racial
uplift, it played perfectly into the hands of Birth’s producers. It had become
a platform from which Griffith’s devotees could defend his film as having
the endorsement of a black perspective. Indeed, in an interview held in late
May, Griffith himself pointed to the filmed epilogue as evidence of Birth’s
fundamental integrity.69
The second counter-strategy against the protesters was to attack their
censorship campaign as an assault on the integrity of free speech. The
papers of the times were filled with ferocious invectives damning the
censorship attempts. Most of these articles would argue that censorship was
little more than a ‘dead end’. Indeed, in quite stirring rhetoric, they would
reproach the censorship movement above and beyond the single case of
Birth and accuse it of foolishly enacting a precedent for the infringement of
free speech in general. In the Chicago Tribune, for instance, Kitty Kelly
14
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
leapt to Birth’s defence only to move on to a passionate avowal that
expression of any kind should never be regulated. As she cried:
That this picture stirs some chord of controversy is no
unprecedented experience…It is a general American
sentiment to prefer taking an experience first hand - risking
that it be unpleasant - rather than suffer the protection of
shielding by paternally minded censors.70
For Kelly, then, The Birth of a Nation itself is reduced as an issue. The film
is not a special case on its own merits but must be defended on the basis of a
more universal sentiment: that ‘general American sentiment’ - the freedom
and autonomy to be able to watch what one wants to watch. Censorship here
is violence against ‘Americaness’. It denies the true citizen’s right to
experience authentically - ‘first hand’ as it were - rather than suffer the
mediation (or tyranny) of another. In light of such views, the historian
Arthur Lennig has argued that the debate over censorship which surrounded
Birth ‘expanded far beyond the (bounds of) the specific film that initiated
the problem’ to test ‘the consciences of those who…believed in free
expression’.71 In other words, for Lennig and for these cultural critics, the
defence of Birth was not a defence of racial politics. Instead, it moved
beyond issues of race to become a noble gesture, a vindication of the right
to free speech.
This plea for free speech was lethal to black attempts to have Birth stopped
as it split black from white in the protest movements.72 Faced with this
rhetoric of suppression, white liberals found themselves in a moral dilemma
over the censorship campaign. Many saw Birth as a racial assault but they
also considered themselves dedicated to the freedom of expression and
information. Many more were alienated from joining the protest movement
on precisely the grounds that the campaigns were creating a dangerous
precedent.73 As such, the problem of free speech was a mortal blow to the
efforts against Birth. Yet these defences of free speech were not simply
devoid of racial meaning. Indeed, the move to protect a universal principle
of free expression was yet another way to preserve racial hierarchies and
reaffirm a white national identity. In Kitty Kelly’s article, the appeal to an
‘American’ sentiment as the basis for free speech directly implied that those
who endorsed censorship were lacking in something crucially American.
Her suggestion that censors were ‘paternal-minded’ also insinuated that
only someone with a childish disposition (a common trope employed
against the Negro) would allow another to decide for them. A full citizen, an
authentic American, would forever fight against such an indignity. The
black attempts to stop Birth were thus conceived as nothing less than an
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
15
effort to confiscate white free speech. Expression itself had been racialised
by the debate over Griffith’s film.
By the end of this counter-campaign then, free speech had become another
dimension in the debate over race, nation and history. It had grown into one
more space in which to enact myths of white regeneration. In this way, the
dispute over free speech would repeat the terms of the film itself. Perhaps
nothing was to make this clearer than D.W. Griffith’s own contribution to
the dispute. Entering into the fray in early April, Griffith wrote angrily to
the New York Globe about its support of the censorship movement. As he
declaimed, the activities of the protesters were duplicitous and made from
no noble cause. In truth:
the attack of the organised opponents to this picture is
centred upon that feature of it which they deem might
become an influence against the intermarriage of blacks
and whites…May I enquire if you desire to espouse the
cause of a society which openly boasts in its official organ,
The Crisis, that it has been able to throttle antiintermarriage legislation in over ten states?74
Griffith’s argument here is framed as an appeal to reason even as it is an
attack on race. It implores The Globe to realize the danger of espousing the
protester’s cause by pointing to that most taboo of subjects: miscegenation.
In Griffith’s view, the elements who oppose Birth do so only because the
film itself is ‘an influence against the intermarriage of blacks and whites’.
Here Griffith’s position matched Thomas Dixon’s perfectly. In a letter of his
own in the same month, Dixon would publicly dub the NAACP ‘the Negro
Intermarriage society’ and claim that it hated The Birth of a Nation ‘for one
reason only’ - because ‘it opposes the marriage of blacks to whites’.75 As
such, in the eyes of both Griffith and Dixon, it was rapacious sexual desire
which was the real motive behind the black protesters.
In an illustrated pamphlet published in 1916 entitled The Rise and Fall of
Free Speech in America, Griffith would take this irrational logic to its
resolution. Cursing the censor as a ‘malignant pygmy’ that had matured into
a ‘Caliban’, Griffith announced that this force for ‘evil’ was now ‘so strong
that it threatens that priceless heritage of our nation - freedom of
expression’.76 Here censorship itself had become racialised. In Griffith’s
booklet, it was a savage beast encoded explicitly black, a stunted, exotic
curiosity (a ‘pygmy’) which had developed into the overblown, uncivilized
irrationality of a figure like Shakespeare’s Caliban. It was also this hideous
black menace that was now such a threat to free expression. In an
illustration on the closing pages of Griffith’s pamphlet, this free expression -
16
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
this ‘priceless heritage of our nation’ - is visualized in the image of a white
lady enfolded in pure white gowns.77 So just as the censor had become a
black man, now free speech had become a white woman. A vision of virtue,
we see this lady of liberty in a heroic tableau, as she casts out the invidious
censor. Tall and towering, with her arm proudly extended, she issues a
thundering, reverberating command: ‘All history, all reason condemn you.
GO!’78 Here then, at long last, the past had been restored to its white
masters. In the figure of this white woman, history and reason (and, by
implication, civilization itself) stood unified against the black protesters.
Thus, the racial debate surrounding Birth had come full circle to mimic the
film itself. The same black menace which had threatened to carry off the
pure young white women of the South was now returned to spoil the
sanctity of the lady of liberty. In a masterpiece of rhetorical conflation, the
campaign against Birth and the campaign for intermarriage had become one.
Race, sexuality, history and nation had converged in a reactionary whole.
The lusting black hordes had climbed out of Griffith’s movie screen to
confiscate the white lady of his free speech.
Conclusion
The receptions to The Birth of a Nation demonstrate a vital moment in the
Progressive era, a moment where racial ideologies coalesced and where
African-Americans confronted them. As a cinematic spectacular, the film
had dazzled its white audiences. As a bearer of ‘history’, it had awed them.
Invigorating its spectators with the drama and pageantry of the past, Birth
also sought to characterize Reconstruction as an era where white Americans
had seized back their Aryan inheritance from rampaging blacks.
Scapegoating had thus become the means to resuscitate an ideal of white
nationhood. Racism and identity were one. In spreading this message, of
course, the film was a resounding success. Its sheer popularity attests to
that. However, it would be a mistake to assume as a consequence that
protesters were rendered powerless before this great onslaught. The black
opposition to Griffith’s movie was neither an unmitigated failure nor a total
victory. The efforts to oppose Birth had a lasting impact on the
dissemination of this monumental film. In stirring the population into a
furore over the film and in securing permanent cuts to significant sections of
it, black and white protesters had interfered decisively with Birth’s cultural
work. If Birth had remade the American historical memory, its racial
politics had not gone uncontested. In fact, the message of the film was never
quite the same after its stormy release. No matter how it tried, the film could
never quite escape the tarnish of controversy that protests had cast upon it.
Its reception among the public was always marked by schism and division.
Its racial message had been delivered but with uproar, with trauma. In this
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
17
sense, The Birth of a Nation did not have the uncomplicated delivery
intended for it by its makers. Instead, it had been a breech birth.
ENDNOTES
* I would like to express my thanks to Mike McDonnell, Stephen Robertson, Peter Bastian,
and, finally, Frances Clarke without whom this article would not have been written.
1
Los Angles Times, 9 February 1915 quoted in Arthur Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact: The
Reception of The Birth of a Nation’, Film History, 16.2, 2004, p.120; ‘A Real Work of Art’,
Evansville Journal News, c. 26 November 1915 in ‘Publicity Scrapbooks’, D.W. Griffith
Papers 1894-1957 reels 24-27, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (hereafter referred to
as DWG); For the national success of Birth at its openings, see John Hope Franklin, ‘The
Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History’ in John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected
Essays 1938-1988, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1989, pp.15-17, 21;
Woodrow Wilson to D.W. Griffith, 5 March 1915 in Arthur Link (ed.), The Papers of
Woodrow Wilson, vol. 32, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1980, p. 325.
2
‘An insult’ from ‘Capitalizing Race Hatred’ New York Globe, 6 April 1915 in DWG; ‘a
blight’ from ‘The Birth of a Nation: Movies to Music’, 9 April 1915 untitled newspaper
clipping in DWG; ‘abhorrent’ quoted from the Rabbi Stephen Wise in ‘Film Play a Crime
Against Two Races’ undated newspaper clipping in DWG; and ‘foul’ and ‘loathsome’ from
‘Ask Mayor to Stop “Birth of a Nation”’ Greenville News, South Carolina, c. 3 April 1915,
in DWG.
3
Ibid.
4
Booker T. Washington quoted by Dr. C.C. Barnett in ‘Colored Leaders File Protest on Birth
of a Nation’, untitled newspaper clipping, 10 December 1915, in DWG.
5
The discussion of plot here draws on D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, (1915) Eureka
Video, 2000; Fred Silva (ed.), Focus on The Birth of a Nation, Prentice-Hall, Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey, 1971, 169-173. For a superb discussion of the sexual and racial dynamics
in this film, see Michael Rogin, ‘“The Sword Became a Flashing Vision”: D.W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation’, Representations, 9, Winter 1985, pp. 50-195 & Grace Elizabeth Hale,
Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, Pantheon Books, New York,
1998, pp. 73, 79.
6
Lary May, ‘Apocalyptic Cinema: D.W. Griffith and the Aesthetics of Reform’, in John
Belton (ed.), Movies and Mass Culture, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New
Jersey, 1996, p. 31.
7
Some notable exceptions would be Rogin, ‘“The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’”; Hale,
Making Whiteness; & Bruce M. Tyler, ‘Racist Art and Politics at the Turn of the Century’,
The Journal of Ethnic Studies, 15.4, Winter 1988, pp. 85-103.
8
For this essay’s theoretical understandings of ‘cultural work’, see Jane Tompkins,
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1986.
9
See Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film 1900-1942, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1977, pp. 41-69; also Thomas R. Cripps, ‘The Reaction of the
Negro to The Birth of a Nation’, The Historian, 26, 1963, pp. 344-62; Lennig, ‘Myth and
Fact’, pp. 117-141; Blight, Race and Reunion, pp. 394-7; Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro:
Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954, University of California Press,
Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1998, pp. 132-4; & Bruce M. Tyler, ‘Racist Art and Politics
at the Turn of the Century’, The Journal of Ethnic Studies, 15.4, Winter 1988, pp. 85-103.
10
‘Clansman is Passed by Board’, undated newspaper clipping, in DWG.
11
Dolly Dalrymple, ‘Dolly Dalrymple in Series of Stories Tells Some Things She Saw and
Heard on Recent Visit to New York’, Herald, Birmingham, Alabama, Wednesday June 16
1915 in DWG.
18
12
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W. Stephen Bush, The Moving Picture World, 13 March 1915 in Silva (ed.), Focus on
Birth, p. 27.
13
An incident reported in Hope Franklin, ‘Propaganda as History’, p. 21.
14
For cheering of the Klan, see ‘Cheer Ku Klux Klan’, Baltimore Sun, 14 March 1915;
‘Birth of a Nation wins Big Applause at the Olympic’, undated newspaper clipping (probably
c. September 1915); ‘Birth of a Nation Given Much Applause’, c. 6 February 1916, Battle
Creek Enquirer; ‘Birth of Nation was Stupendous’, Charlotte News, 15 November 1915 all
located in DWG.
15
Rennold Wolf, ‘They Forget Their Hats’, undated newspaper lipping, c. 10 March 1915, in
DWG.
16
Ward Greene, The Atlanta Journal, 7 December 1915, in Silva (ed.), Focus on Birth, p. 30.
17
Henderson, D.W. Griffith, p. 158.
18
Ned McIntosh, The Atlanta Constitution, 7 December 1915, in Silva (ed.), Focus on Birth,
p. 34.
19
D.W. Griffith interview in undated newspaper clipping (c.20 March 1915) in DWG.
20
Thomas Dixon, ‘Letters to the Editor: Thomas Dixon’s reply’, New York Globe, 9 April
1915, in DWG.
21
For example see Louella Parsons, ‘D.W. Griffith in Plea for His Greatest Film’, ChicagoHerald, 30 May 1915 in DWG.
22
‘Many “Repeaters” at Birth of a Nation’, Evening Sun, 2 April 1915, in DWG.
23
A Veteran of the Civil War, ‘Letter to the Editor’, New York Globe, c.10 April 1915, in
DWG.
24
Veteran interviewed in Atlanta Constitution, 14 December 1915, quoted in Goodson,
‘“That Mighty Force’”, 43.
25
D.W. Griffith in Variety, 25 March, 1915 quoted in Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact’, p. 125.
26
David Wark Griffith ‘My early Life’, in Henry Stephen Gordon, ‘The Story of Griffith’,
Photoplay in Geduld (ed.), Focus on Griffith, pp. 13-4.
27
Blight, Race and Reunion, p. 383.
28
Ibid., 384.
29
Blight, Race and Reunion, pp. 392-3; for information on the activities of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy and Wilson as symbol of national reunification, see Hale,
Making Whiteness, pp. 216, 241-2, 251-4.
30
Woodrow Wilson, History of the American People, vol.5, Harper, New York, 1901; see
discussion in Rogin, ‘“The Sword Became a Flashing Vision”’, pp. 152-3 & Baker, From
Savage to Negro, p. 132.
31
See Hope Franklin, ‘Propaganda as History’, pp. 21-2.
32
Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact’, p. 141.
33
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Annette Lavers (trans.), Vintage, London, 2000, pp. 132-33.
34
W.E.B. DuBois, The Crisis 10 May-June 1915, p. 22 in Silva (ed.), Focus on Birth, p. 66.
35
Lester A. Walton, Telegram to Mayor Mitchell, 4 March 1915 reprinted in The New York
Age, 11 March 1915, & Lester A. Walton, ‘The Invasion of Boston’, New York Age, 22 April
1915 quoted in Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact’, p. 124;
36
Cripps, ‘Reaction of the Negro’, p. 344.
37
The best researched and most recent discussion of this is Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact’, pp. 117141. However, his interpretation is sorely lacking. For a more sympathetic reading, see
Cripps, ‘Reaction of the Negro’, pp. 344-363.
38
Both the shooting and DuBois’s quote are in Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois, p. 507.
39
For the formation of the Klan in wake of Birth, see Hope Franklin, ‘Propaganda as
History’, p. 21: ‘Thus, Birth of a Nation was the midwife in the rebirth of the most victorious
terrorist organization in the history of the United States’.
40
Diner, A Very Different Age, p. 126.
41
Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, p. 70.
42
This notion of a three strategy division draws on Cripps, ‘Reaction to the Negro’, p. 345.
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
43
19
For the assumption Washington remained silent, see Cripps, ‘Reaction of Negro’, p. 356;
Lennig. ‘Myth and Fact’, p. 135; David Blight, Race and Reunion, p. 396.
44
Cripps, ‘Reaction of Negro’, pp. 356-7 n. 31.
45
See Booker T. Washington to William Hale Thompson 3rd June 1915; Booker T.
Washington to William Colfax Graves, 16 June 1915; Booker T. Washington to Florence E.
Sewell Bond June 30 1915 all in Louis Harlan (ed.), The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol.
13, 1914-1915, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1989, pp. 317-8, 320, 335 respectively.
46
The delegations took place on 30 March 1915 in New York and 19 April 1915 in Boston
respectively. For detailed discussions of both of these, see Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, pp.
56-8 , 61-2 and Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact’, pp. 125, 129-31.
47
‘Mayor Orders More Cuts in the ‘Nation’: Tells Producers of Film It Creates Race
Prejudice’, New York Sun, 2 April 1915 in DWG; Christian Science Monitor, 19 April 1915
cited in Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact’, p. 129.
48
For this exchange, see ‘Fighting Race Calumny’, The Crisis, 10, May-June 1915, p. 87 and
Rogin, ‘“The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’”, p. 184.
49
Moorfield Storey, ‘Condemn Ku Klux Klan’, Boston Herald c. 15 April 1915, in DWG
50
This information is drawn from Rogin, ‘“The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’”, pp. 1556; Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture
Industry, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, pp.19-67.
51
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of the American Movies, Random
House, New York, 1975, p. 32.
52
Ibid., pp. 31-2; Cripps, ‘Reaction of the Negro’, p. 348.
53
‘Fighting Race Calumny’, The Crisis, 10.1, May 1915, p. 40.
54
Cripps, ‘Reaction of Negro’, p. 350; Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact’, p. 125.
55
‘Fighting Race Calumny’, The Crisis 10.1, May 1915, p. 40.
56
On the removal of the castration scene, see Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing
Vision’”, p. 175. This scene was only approved for removal in the North. In the South it
made it past the censors and played for decades. But it has now been removed permanently
from the final print.
57
Ibid., p.176.
58
Cripps, ‘Reaction of Negro’, p. 355.
59
Boston Branch of the NAACP, ‘Fighting a Vicious Film’, quoted in Lennig, ‘Myth and
Fact’, p. 136.
60
Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, p. 64.
61
Tyler, ‘Racist Art and Politics’, pp. 97-8.
62
Reverend Dr. Charles Pankhurst, ‘Dr. Pankhurst on “The Birth of a Nation”’, Montgomery
Daily Times, 16 January 1916, in DWG.
63
Reverend Thomas B. Gregory, ‘Rev. Dr. Wise Sees ‘The Birth of a Nation’, The
American, 18 April 1915, in DWG.
64
Moorfield Storey, ‘Condemn Ku Klux Klan’, Boston Herald c. 15 April 1915, in DWG;
W.E.B. DuBois quoted in David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race
1868-1919, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1993, 507.
65
Gaines, Uplifting the Race, p.1.
66
Jane Addams, untitled article, New York Post, 10 March 1915 in DWG.
67
Nickie Fleener, ‘Answering Film with Film: The Hampton Epilogue, A Positive
Alternative to the Negative Stereotypes Presented in The Birth of a Nation’, Journal of
Popular Film and Television, 7.4, 1980, pp. 402-3.
68
‘Birth of a Nation Given Much applause’, Battle Creek Enquirer, 29 January 1916 in
DWG.
69
Louella Parsons, ‘D.W. Griffith in Plea for His Greatest Film’, Chicago-Herald, 30 May
1915, in DWG.
70
Kitty Kelly, ‘Another Plea for Birth of a Nation’, Chicago Tribune, 27 May 1915, in DWG.
71
Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact’, p. 133.
20
72
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, p. 57.
Ibid.
74
D.W. Griffith, ‘The Birth of a Nation Controversy: A Statement by the Producer, D.W.
Griffith’, in New York Globe, 10 April 1915, in DWG.
75
Thomas Dixon, ‘Fair Play for The Birth of a Nation’, Boston Journal, 26 April 1915, in
Silva (ed.), Focus on Birth, p. 95.
76
Griffith, Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America, p. 6.
77
Ibid., 55-6.
78
Ibid.
73