The Birth of a Nation

• 1. Introduction

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  The Birth of a Nation arrived in American theaters in 1915 and immediately changed what cinema could do. D. W. Griffith directed this silent epic, and within weeks it had been screened at the White House, cheered by the entire Supreme Court, and protested in streets from Boston to Los Angeles. It was the first non-serial American twelve-reel film ever made. It ran for three hours. It came with a thirteen-page Souvenir Program and its own orchestral score. Adjusted for inflation, it remains one of the highest-grossing films in history.

  But the same film that taught Hollywood how to tell a story also helped revive the Ku Klux Klan and was linked by a Harvard University research paper to a fivefold rise in lynchings in the counties where it screened. Those two facts sit side by side, and neither cancels the other. How does a work of such technical power also become, in the words of one critic, "a great film that argues for evil"? That is the question this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. Origins and Ambitions

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  Thomas Dixon Jr. published his novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan in 1905, and the stage version toured American cities before D. W. Griffith ever picked up a camera. In late 1913, Dixon met film producer Harry Aitken, who was interested in turning The Clansman into a motion picture. Through Aitken, Dixon encountered Griffith, and a crucial personal connection was made immediately plain: both men were Southerners. Griffith's father had served as a colonel in the Confederate States Army. Like Dixon, Griffith viewed Reconstruction negatively.

  Griffith was drawn to a specific passage in the novel in which Klansmen ride "to the rescue of persecuted white Southerners." He believed that scene alone could be adapted into a great cinematic sequence. He agreed to pay Dixon ten thousand dollars for the rights, though when he ran short of funds he could only produce two thousand five hundred dollars in cash. Dixon accepted twenty-five percent interest in the picture instead. The unprecedented commercial success of the film eventually made Dixon wealthy; as of 2007 his proceeds amounted to several million dollars, the largest sum any author had received for a motion picture story at that time.

  Griffith began filming on the 4th of July, 1914, and finished by October of that year. Much of the shooting took place on the Griffith Ranch in San Fernando Valley, with the Petersburg scenes filmed at what is today Forest Lawn Memorial Park, and other scenes in Whittier and Ojai Valley. West Point engineers provided technical advice and the artillery used in the Civil War battle sequences. Griffith shot about thirty-six hours of footage in total, which he then edited down to just over three hours. His budget started at forty thousand dollars and rose above one hundred thousand.

• 3. Technical Invention

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  Joseph Carl Breil composed a three-hour musical score that combined classical adaptations, new arrangements of familiar melodies, and wholly original music. Breil drew on works by Carl Maria von Weber, Franz von Suppe, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Richard Wagner, using Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as a leitmotif during the Klan sequences. The score was not ready for the 8th of February 1915 Los Angeles premiere at Clune's Auditorium, where a score compiled by Carli Elinor was performed instead. Breil's score debuted when the film opened in New York at the Liberty Theatre and was used in all showings outside the West Coast.

  Breil's principal love theme for the romance between Elsie Stoneman and Ben Cameron was published as "The Perfect Song" and is regarded as the first marketed theme song from a film. It was later used as the theme song for the radio and television program Amos 'n' Andy. DJ Spooky called the score, with its mixture of Dixieland songs, classical music, and what he called "vernacular heartland music," an early and pivotal accomplishment in remix culture.

  Griffith pioneered dramatic close-ups, fade-outs, parallel action sequences, crosscutting, and tracking shots. The film's war sequences used hundreds of extras made to appear like thousands. It was also the first American-made film to carry a musical score written specifically for an orchestra, and it used color tinting for dramatic effect. Film historian Jonathan Kline later wrote that virtually every film is beholden to The Birth of a Nation in some way, and that Griffith essentially created the visual language of contemporary cinema.

• 4. The White House and the Court

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  On the 18th of February, 1915, The Birth of a Nation was screened in the East Room of the White House before President Woodrow Wilson, members of his family, and members of his Cabinet. Dixon had been a fellow graduate student in history with Wilson at Johns Hopkins University and had dedicated a 1913 novel to "our first Southern-born president since Lincoln, my friend and collegemate Woodrow Wilson." Dixon had also suggested Wilson for an honorary degree from Dixon's alma mater, Wake Forest College.

  There is dispute about how much Wilson knew beforehand. His private secretary Joseph Patrick Tumulty later showed visitors a letter stating that Wilson had been "entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it." The evidence to the contrary is circumstantial but, in the view of historians, strong: Wilson is quoted by name in the film's title cards, and his book History of the American People is cited on screen. Three title cards carry quotations from that book, describing Reconstruction-era black officeholders and what the cards call "a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South."

  The following evening, on the 19th of February, Griffith and Dixon held a second screening in the Raleigh Hotel ballroom. Dixon had reached Edward Douglass White, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, through Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy. Initially reluctant, White agreed to attend once Dixon described it as the "true story" of Reconstruction and the Klan's role in "saving the South." White said, recalling his youth in Louisiana: "I was a member of the Klan, sir." With White committed, the rest of the Supreme Court followed. The audience of six hundred that evening included thirty-eight senators and about fifty members of the House of Representatives, and they "cheered and applauded throughout." Griffith and Dixon then transported the film to New York and presented it to the National Board of Censorship as already endorsed by the President and the highest court in the country.

• 5. Protest and Suppression

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  Before the film reached New York, the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP had already asked the city's film board to ban it. Because film boards were composed almost entirely of white members, few initially acted. The NAACP launched a public education campaign, publishing articles documenting the film's fabrications, organizing petitions, and pressing for censorship in city after city. By the 17th of April, 1915, NAACP secretary Mary Childs Nerney wrote to an executive committee member: "I am utterly disgusted with the situation in regard to The Birth of a Nation... kindly remember that we have put six weeks of constant effort on this thing and have gotten nowhere."

  In Boston, Booker T. Washington wrote a newspaper column asking for a boycott, and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter organized demonstrations. On the 10th of April and again on the 17th of April, Trotter and a group of other black citizens attempted to buy tickets for the premiere at the Tremont Theater and were refused. They stormed the box office, two hundred and sixty police rushed in, and a melee followed. Trotter and ten others were arrested. The following day a mass demonstration was staged at Faneuil Hall.

  Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, said in an interview published by the New York Post on the 13th of March, 1915 that the film "appeals to race prejudice upon the basis of conditions of half a century ago, which have nothing to do with the facts we have to consider to-day. Even then it does not tell the whole truth." Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise in New York called the film "an indescribable foul and loathsome libel on a race of human beings." The Reverend Francis James Grimke published a pamphlet entitled "Fighting a Vicious Film" that challenged the film's historical accuracy scene by scene.

  The film was denied release in the state of Ohio and was banned in the cities of Chicago, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. The mayor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was the first of twelve mayors to ban it in 1915, acting after meeting with a delegation of black citizens. Griffith's indignation at these efforts motivated him to produce Intolerance in 1916.

• 6. Commerce and Violence

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  At the Liberty Theater at Times Square in New York City, the film ran for forty-four weeks with tickets priced at two dollars and twenty cents. An estimated three million people watched it across six thousand two hundred and sixty-six showings in New York alone by January 1916. Its roadshow release strategy allowed Griffith to charge premium ticket prices and sell souvenirs before granting the film a wide release. The film remained the highest-grossing motion picture in history until Gone with the Wind overtook it in 1939.

  While the box office figures are disputed, Griffith's own records put worldwide earnings at about five point two million dollars as of 1919. Film historian Richard Schickel estimated the film generated more than sixty million dollars in box office receipts during its first run. A 2015 estimate calculated the equivalent of approximately one point eight billion dollars adjusted for inflation.

  The violence that followed is documented with equal precision. When the film opened, riots broke out in Philadelphia and other major cities. On the 24th of April, 1916, the Chicago American reported that a white man murdered a black teenager in Lafayette, Indiana, after seeing the film. In November 1915, William Joseph Simmons revived the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta, Georgia, holding a cross burning at Stone Mountain. The historian John Hope Franklin observed that, had it not been for The Birth of a Nation, the Klan might not have been reborn at all. A 2023 study published in the American Economic Review found that roadshow screenings of the film were associated with a sharp spike in lynchings and race riots between 1915 and 1920.

• 7. Legacy and Responses

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  In 1992, the Library of Congress deemed The Birth of a Nation "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. The American Film Institute ranked it forty-fourth on its 100 Years...100 Movies list in 1998. Roger Ebert compared it to Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, writing that it "is not a bad film because it argues for evil" but rather "a great film that argues for evil," and that understanding how it does so reveals something about both cinema and the nature of propaganda.

  Filmmakers pushed back almost immediately. John W. Noble's The Birth of a Race was released in 1918 as a direct challenge. In 1920, African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux released Within Our Gates, depicting the hardships faced by black Americans under Jim Crow laws. A sequel called The Fall of a Nation was released in 1916, directed by Thomas Dixon Jr. himself and based on his novel of the same name. It was the first feature-length sequel in film history, though it was not a success with American audiences and is now a lost film.

  In 2004, DJ Spooky remixed Griffith's film as Rebirth of a Nation. In 2016, Nate Parker produced and directed a film of the same title, reclaiming it as, in his words, "a tool to challenge racism and white supremacy in America." Spike Lee incorporated clips from Griffith's original into BlacKkKlansman in 2018, where Harry Belafonte's character speaks about its role in the lynching of Jesse Washington. Quentin Tarantino said he made Django Unchained in 2012 specifically to counter the falsehoods of The Birth of a Nation.

  In 2019, Bowling Green State University renamed its Gish Film Theater, which had been named for actress Lillian Gish, after protests over her role in the film. The debate over what the film is, what it did, and how to hold those facts together has not ended. Richard Brody wrote in 2013 that "the worst thing about The Birth of a Nation is how good it is," and that the conflict between its aesthetic power and its injustice renders the film "all the more despicable" and the experience of watching it "more of a torment."