A Hundred Years Later, “The Birth of a Nation” Hasn’t Gone Away

A hundred years ago, on February 8, 1915, D. W. Griffith released “The Birth of a Nation.” The movie became the fledgling film industry’s first blockbuster. It ran for over three hours at a time when most films were not longer than ten minutes. It had employed eighteen thousand people and used three thousand horses during filming, and the finished product had five thousand discrete scenes. It was the first film to allocate money for an advertising campaign. Griffith wanted his film to resemble the high art of theater, so he hired a full orchestra to play the film’s soundtrack in certain movie houses. Griffith succeeded. “The Birth of a Nation” was a landmark in motion picture history—full of technological innovations and new storytelling techniques, including flashbacks, crosscutting, dissolves, closeups, panoramic filming, and color tinting, all of which heightened the dramatic and emotional effects. The film grossed somewhere between thirteen and eighteen million dollars (roughly three hundred to four hundred and fifty million dollars today). In March, 1915, under President Woodrow Wilson, “The Birth of a Nation” became the first film to be screened at the White House.

Set mostly in South Carolina, “The Birth of a Nation” offered a wildly distorted view of Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War, by picturing African-Americans as faithful slaves who defended their masters and did not wish to be free. African-American men were lazy and benighted wretches who had been thrust into positions of power for which they were woefully unprepared.

Set during this period of what ex-Confederates and others called “Negro misrule”—from roughly 1865 to the removal of federal troops from the South, in 1877—the film’s second half shows African-American political officials sipping whiskey, eating chicken, and walking barefoot in the halls of the South Carolina House of Representatives. The world of white Southerners had been turned upside down and the South was in desperate need of rescue. Enter the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan. In the final and most dramatic scenes, the Klan assembles, rides into town, and saves the day by brutally subjugating blacks. The last title card reads, “Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!” The Klan’s membership surged after the film’s release, and the organization continued to use the film as a recruiting tool for decades. Through the nineteen-seventies, former Grand Wizard David Duke screened the film at Klan meetings.

When the film was released, many members of the audience believed Griffith when he claimed that these scenes were “historical facsimiles” that represented the actual truth. To these viewers, who had been worked up into “a perfect frenzy,” as gossip columnist Dorothy Dix wrote, the film provided a way of understanding what happened when enslaved people were freed and foisted into positions far above their station. Griffith’s birth of a nation does not occur as the war-weary North and South struggle to rebuild the country after the war. Instead, the birth itself occurs once the bright promises of racial reconciliation and Reconstruction were scuttled. “The Birth of a Nation” became part of the edifice of the Jim Crow regime of legalized segregation that would last for the next forty years. (Jelani Cobb has written about the reaction to the film.)

On its hundredth anniversary, the film should be remembered in part as an artifact. D. W. Griffith was once known as “the father of film technique,” “the Shakespeare of the screen,” and “the man who invented Hollywood.” The American Film Institute named “The Birth of a Nation” one of the “100 Best Films of the Century,” in 1998, and it was included in the National Film Registry, in 1993. As Richard Brody has noted, much of the damage caused by the film came about because it was so well made. But, more important, the film needs to be remembered because the scenes in “The Birth of a Nation” from 1915 eerily reflect the deeply troubling realities of race in America in 2015.

Much has changed in the past hundred years: legalized segregation ended, civil rights came, an African-American was elected President. But many of the stereotypes that fill the film persist; and, as we’ve learned over and over and over and over again, this is still a country where people, and police, need to be reminded that black lives really do matter. In one of the final moments of the film, black men come out of small cabins to vote. Members of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback swiftly turn them away. It is hard to watch this scene today without being reminded of the unrelenting efforts to suppress the right to vote and to roll back the protections of the Voting Rights Act.

It isn’t hard to see the themes of the film echoed in the current Presidential race, particularly in the words of Donald Trump, who has sounded a call for the birth of a new nation, one that he will “make great again.” Trump began his campaign by declaring that the country must be rescued from Mexican “rapists,” “criminals,” and “drug dealers” who are crossing the border illegally. Since then, we’ve had talk of mass deportations, black protesters who deserve “to get roughed up,” mosques closing, and databases where Muslims would have to register. Trump’s history, too, is crafted to serve his political ends, as when, without evidence, he declared that he saw “thousands and thousands” of residents in an “Arab” community in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheering on September 11th. Demagogues are common in American history, but they’ve rarely or never had quite the same skill as Trump at whipping people into what might be called a perfect frenzy.

Trump’s most offensive and nativistic proposal came on Monday, when he called for the U.S. to bar all Muslims from entering the country until leaders could “figure out what is going on.” We have not seen this type of plan since the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by President Chester Arthur in 1882, which banned all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. Meanwhile, his persistent calls for neighbors to report neighbors to the F.B.I. recalls the effort to arrest foreign anarchists, Communists, and radical leftists by the Department of Justice under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who had Presidential aspirations of his own, during 1919 and 1920.

For some Americans, President Barack Obama’s two terms in office appear to resemble the period of misrule portrayed in “The Birth of a Nation.” According to a poll released in January, nearly one in five Americans do not believe that Obama was born in the United States. After the San Bernardino massacre, Trump made the ominous remark that “there is something going on with [President Obama] that we don’t know about.” Calls to “take ‘our’ country back” have become increasingly shrill and strident. “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. . . . And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago,” Trump said recently, appealing to the most paranoid and polarizing instincts of American political culture.

That’s what D. W. Griffith did, too, by venerating and glorifying the Klan as the only way to restore the country to its original greatness—which had been lost when the country started giving opportunity to people of color, and even electing some of them to public office. A title card quoted President Wilson’s book, “The History of American People”: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation. . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South to protect the Southern country.”

And so perhaps it’s fitting and frightening that, on the hundredth anniversary of “The Birth of a Nation,” membership and support for white-supremacy groups is apparently surging once again.