Acclaimed saga re-opened bitter Civil War wounds

THE first feature-length film, released a century ago today, reopened US Civil War wounds by defending the Ku Klux Klan.

History: A still from the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Public domain image

Australian audiences praised David Wark Griffith’s spectacular 1915 film for graphically showing “what war is really like — its grimness and cruelty, pathos and tragedy, horror and confusion”.

Griffith’s pioneering historical feature film, The Birth Of A Nation, opened in Los Angeles a century ago, on February 8, 1915. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People immediately agitated for a ban.

In Australia, Griffith’s work also inspired self-congratualtion on White Australia policies: “The danger from the negro population is the underlying theme of the production,” one critic wrote.

Another observed: “The great point of Birth Of A Nation from the Australian aspect is what this country has avoided by its insistence on a White Australia. The reign of terror by blacks over whites in the South is depicted with vivid faithfulness.”

Griffith’s achievement in producing great cinematic art to depict divisive social politics remains the conundrum for audiences of Birth Of A Nation. Originally released as The Clansman, based on South Carolina Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance Of The Ku Klux Klan, the 12-reel feature was released as The Birth Of A Nation in New York on March 3.

Running almost three hours, the epic chronicled racial, economic, political and geographic tensions leading up to the Civil War, the four-year war, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and his assassination by John Wilkes Booth. Controversy centred on Griffith’s depiction of reconstruction in Southern states after the war ended in May 1865, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan by December.

Dixon’s book was a response to a 1901 revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Dixon considered Northern propaganda that favourably depicted blacks against lies about white Southerners. The Clansman was dedicated to the memory of “A Scottish-Irish leader of the South, My Uncle, Colonel Leroy McTee, Grand Titan of the Ku Klux Klan.” Dixon saw himself as an Anglo-Saxon defender, claiming “the beginning of negro equality is the beginning of the end of this nation’s life”.

Griffith was also a southern son, born in Crestwood, Kentucky in 1875 to Mary and Jacob “Roaring Jake” Griffith, a Confederate Army colonel in the Civil War. Although injured, his father was elected as a Kentucky state legislator but died when Griffith was 10, leaving the family impoverished. Griffith was 14 when his mother left their farm to open a boarding house in Louisville. It soon failed, when Griffith left high school to work in a dry goods store, and later a bookstore.

Griffith aspired to become a playwright. After trying to sell a story to The Edison Company, he reluctantly agreed to act in its motion pictures. From his directorial debut with The Adventures of Dollie (1908), he had directed hundreds of shorts by 1915. Actress Lillian Gish, who starred in Birth Of A Nation, called him “the father of film”.

Screen writer Frank Woods introduced Griffith to Dixon’s The Clansman, suggesting it would work as a film. Griffith agreed, especially as the book dealt with events familiar to him. Being 50 years since the Civil War felled more than 600,000 Americans, the conflict was again in the public conscience.

Griffith, raised on accounts of the bitterness of Southern post-war reconstruction, apparently considered The Clansman accurately recounted the Southern experience of Northern carpetbaggers sweeping in on the razed South. They destroyed the social order by giving blacks the franchise and equality, leaving whites suffering and subjugated. Griffith’s film chronicled the relationship of two families, the pro-Union Northern Stonemans and pro-Confederacy Southern Camerons, with white actors in blackface controversially portraying black men as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women. The dramatised founding of the Ku Klux Klan is presented as a heroic force to protect southern wives and sisters.

After its opening, The New York Times noted, “In ... pictorial value the best work is in those stretches that follow the night riding of the Ku Klux Klan, who look like a company of avenging spectral crusaders sweeping along the moonlight roads.”

When whites joined African American legal battles and street protests to close the film, Griffith expressed his love for negroes, explaining white Southerners had a special rapport with blacks and an understanding of their natures.

Originally published as Acclaimed saga re-opened bitter Civil War wounds