THE FILM's PORTRAYALS AND PLOTLINES

In 1915, eight years after the Atlanta riot, Griffith made and released perhaps the most controversial film of the twentieth century, The Birth of a Nation . Griffith used innovative cinematic techniques including fade-outs, close-ups, parallel action shots, elaborate costuming, high-angle panoramic shots, and realistic battlefield scenes to tell an emotional and compelling story in an epic and spectacular manner. In deference to Southern sensibilities, he used white actors in blackface to portray black characters that came into close contact with or touched white actors and actresses. Real blacks had only small roles in the film. Birth was a message film designed to stigmatize blacks in the most offensive way. It was clear that images in motion pictures could be used for more than just entertainment and that their potential use as propaganda was unlimited.

Thematically, Birth was a relentless attack against Radical Reconstruction and a glorification of the pre–Civil War South. In Griffith’s South, Northern carpetbaggers and Southern blacks were the villains, and those whites who upheld traditional Southern values, including keeping black people in their place, were the heroes. The film glorified racial vigilantism, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan. It helped to revive the Klan; it rationalized lynching in the interest of protecting the virtue of white women; it incited rioting and prompted protests; it helped to launch the race movie industry; it gave credence to a school of historiography that claimed that Radical Reconstruction was a failure; and it received an official stamp of approval from the president of the United States. Dixon, who knew President Woodrow Wilson from their college days at Columbia University, persuaded the president to have a special showing of Birth at the White House. After the screening in the company of his daughters, Wilson described the film as akin to seeing history “written with lightning” and claimed it was a true account of Reconstruction.

Griffith’s epic film traces the impact of the Civil War, Radical Reconstruction, and Redemption on the citizens of Piedmont, South Carolina, through the eyes of two families, the Camerons, who live in Piedmont, and the Stone-mans of Pennsylvania. Austin Stoneman is the powerful leader of the Radical Republicans, but his sons have known the Camerons since the romantic days of the idyllic ante-bellum South. Prior to the Civil War, Dr. Cameron and his family are depicted as being kind and caring toward their slaves. The slaves in turn, are portrayed as happy-go-lucky Negroes who just love picking cotton for the master. In fact, everyone on the Cameron plantation is happy because all understand and are satisfied with the social order. Griffith creates an environment where benevolent paternalism assures that conflicts are minimized. As the Civil War begins, the Stonemans and the Camerons find themselves on the opposite sides of abolitionism.

To show that many Northerners supported the Southern view of blacks, Griffith has the Stonemans arriving in Piedmont as carpetbaggers. However, they soon come to sympathize with the plight of the Camerons and Southerners whose lives had been disrupted and whose society had been thrown into turmoil under the leadership of Radical Republicans and incompetent, ignorant, and bestial blacks and Mulattoes who came to control state legislatures in the South. Griffith shows the idyllic Piedmont under siege by carpetbaggers and newly freed, sex-crazed, and uppity blacks. Disorder and chaos reign in Piedmont as disobedient ex-slaves roam the streets mistreating, disenfranchising, and disrespecting whites while the fields lay fallow because the ex-slaves refuse to work. They are more interested in dancing, singing, and mocking the good white citizens of Piedmont. The blacks who are elected to the state legislature are shown as incompetent and arrogant. In addition, they show no respect for the legislative process and are more interested in eating fried chicken, drinking, and resting their tired feet on their statehouse desks.

Birth addresses the theme of interracial sexual contact in a manner consistent with the view that miscegenation would destroy white civilization. The film’s characters Gus, an uppity black, and Silas Lynch, a Mulatto, are depicted as aggressive, oversexed, and savage in their lust for white women. Lynch’s status as a Mulatto suggests that any amount of black blood, no matter how small, would be enough to pollute the bloodline of whites. Lynch’s greatest desire is to force Elsie Stoneman, the daughter of Republican Austin Stoneman, to marry him. Lynch and Gus symbolize and conjure up a once deeply held and persistent fear in white America—that every black man wants a sexual relationship with a white woman. Thus, Gus, in a lustful rage, chases the young Flora Cameron through a wood trying to convince her to marry him, but rather than submitting to his sexual advances, she hurls herself over a cliff. This unites the Camerons and the Stonemans, and even the great abolitionist Austin Stoneman comes into the Southern fold when he learns that his appointee, the Mulatto Lynch, wants to marry his daughter Elsie, who is in love with Colonel Ben Cameron, the last of the Cameron sons.

The film ends with members of the Cameron and Stoneman families having survived a siege in a local cabin where they were hiding from black renegades. Ben forms the local Klan into a fighting force, and they confront and defeat blacks in what is, essentially, a race war. They rescue Piedmont and its white citizens from the control of blacks and carpetbaggers and reestablish social order under white leadership. The triumphant Klan and the Camerons and Stonemans ride into Piedmont as heroes and prepare for the marriage of Phil Stoneman to Margaret Cameron, and the marriage of Elsie Stoneman to Ben Cameron. Griffith uses the last scene to show that Southern and Northern whites must unite to keep blacks in their place. It is only when the Stonemans see firsthand the depraved nature of black males that they come to understand that they have been misguided in their belief that blacks could ever be the equal of whites.