A Historical Retrospective of the Propaganda in "The Birth of a Nation" (1915)
Media influences the cultures of centuries-spanning generations, with a primary example through film beng the tainting of how some Americans view the history of a postwar South.
There are few better examples of a film that has impacted a larger cultural perspective than D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation. A blatantly racist film depicting events during the Civil War and into the era of reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation has contributed to a tainted lens of the war and its effects, which continues to exist among Americans today and even in some aspects of states’ educational curriculums. It is essential to understand what has caused many Southerners to adopt such a defensive point of view of the war as it can help paint a picture of why the prejudices that persisted both half a century after the war ended — as in the case of the film’s release — and in the 21st century were so strongly associated with the South’s loss of the war.
Losing the Civil War was much more than a military failure in the eyes of Southerners. To plantation owners and common southerners, male and female, being mandated to rejoin the union was an act of forcible erasure of culture and century-old institutions that made the country run — and not only in the South, as the North reaped many benefits from the wider, nationwide economy, too. Once the 14th Amendment granted equal protection and other rights to anyone born or naturalized in the United States, ensuring no person is deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, this ushered in a social, economic, and political whirlwind that created chaos in the South. Such paranoia among Southern whites escalated due to individuals’ own beliefs, but the latter half of the 19th century and the legacy of the South that was to follow in coming decades developed to an even more extreme extent as a result of propaganda such as The Birth of a Nation. In the film’s rose-colored history of an antebellum South, well-to-do whites romantically admire cotton while smiling blacks slave in the background and Blacks happily dance in the streets. Once the war begins, this sort of camaraderie (despite obvious prejudices) persists, with Confederate soldiers on horseback being cheered for by those of both races — with one over-the-top black man falling to his knees and bowing, as if the soldiers are saviors — overall displaying the Southern population, Black and white, as being united in the cause of preserving their way of life.
The filmmakers behind the technically groundbreaking film felt as though it was not only their right but their responsibility to “show the dark side of wrong,” which they do by painting the South as a collective victim of the postwar carpetbaggers and liberated blacks who, by their point of view, infested the South and “swe[pt] the state.” Labeling this takeover as “Negro rule,” Southerners viewed this national shift as a threat to their long-established institutions, both those with elected officials and the ones that existed within a household. Northerners fit into the South’s narrative as aggressors. The Birth of a Nation includes language meant to reflect this ideology, with terms such as “demanding” being used, and a title card reading: “Abraham Lincoln uses the Presidential office for the first time in history to call for volunteers to enforce the rule of the coming nation over the individual states.” This portrayal of a Northerner — let alone one of the most outspoken men responsible for the expansion of civil rights — as a radical was common not only back then but continues to exist in the minds of some modern Southerners as well. The war as a whole is portrayed negatively, referencing the four years as “the terrible days,” with “a healing time of peace” hopefully being at hand following the South’s surrender. The film doesn’t only use words to express these supposedly Northern-inflicted wounds. As Lincoln is shown signing documents towards the end of the war, other politicians are standing around him while he sits at his desk, with one man even taking the quill pen out of his hand as if he were a servant of the president. This critical representation of Lincoln as a power-hungry dictator is reflective of the scapegoating tactics Southerners quickly resorted to, even before the war began.
The United States Constitution has remained the law of the land since the nation’s inception and both pro-slavery and anti-slavery individuals (politicians or otherwise) and groups used the document to support their platforms. This leads to an even deeper conversation about the nation’s values and how even after the Civil War, there was “still a North and a South,” as Griffith’s film says. In January 1874, almost a decade into Reconstruction, South Carolina Representative Robert B. Elliot, an advocate of federal civil rights, said, “[This bill] proposes to enforce the constitutional guarantee against inequality and discrimination by appropriate legislation... The Constitution warrants it; the Supreme Court sanctions it; justice demands it.” (“Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” 400) Elliot goes even further, saying that the framers made an error in their language in the Constitution, which “strengthened the cancer of slavery.” (“Major Problems,” 401) However, the average pro-slavery Southerner tended to use the Constitution’s outlining of federalism as justification for their right to operate their states under their own means. The suppression of state’s rights contends as the primary defense of Southerners, with Griffith noting the final surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 as “the end of state sovereignty.”
The Birth of a Nation was the first film shown in the White House, during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Throughout the film, quotes of Wilson’s are incorporated into the narrative, with the second half of the film starting with an excerpt from his book “A History of the American People,” which reads: “…In the villages, the negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.” According to Wilson, Reconstruction’s “overthrow of civilization in the South” was determined “to put the white South under the heel of the black South.” Southerners’ feeling of chaos emerging after the liberation of former enslaved people, as displayed by Griffith’s sensationalism, called for a savior of sorts in the South. Taking on this role was the Ku Klux Klan, described by the film as a self-preserving, “great” protector of “the Southern country” and a “veritable empire of the South.” The newly instated Black politicians are shown disrupting a once-civilized space, not taking their jobs seriously: actors in blackface are eating snacks, drinking alcohol, putting their bare feet up on their desks, and being all-around foolish and disoriented on the congressional floor. Steven Hahn’s “A Society Turned Bottomside Up” reads: “Nothing seemed more menacing or illegitimate, nothing more vindictive or humiliating, than the installation in positions of official political power of former slaves, of abject and ‘ignorant’ dependents belonging to an ‘inferior race.’ … The ruled had become the rulers and the rulers the ruled.” (“Major Problems,” 405)
“The helpless white minority” went beyond the numerous white politicians who would be voted out of office in the early years of Reconstruction. The film not only portrays the South as being plagued by incompetence but also by the simple integration of races: a confident Northern Black makes a white couple uncomfortable when offering to shake their hands and freed blacks prey on white women, leading to one woman’s death after being chased and subsequently falling off a cliff. Depicted as rescuing the South from the anarchy that resulted from Reconstruction, the ideology of the violent KKK was a product of the anger harbored by countless Southerners after the war. (Women even took part in the effort, making thousands of outfits for Klan members). The rise of such an organization came about because of the complex changes that Reconstruction presented. The whiplash faced by Southerners was not simply a matter of race, in the conventional sense at least, in terms of skin color alone; it was the fact that the concept of Blacks being intellectually inferior by nature was perpetuated for centuries, in turn creating a cultural shock that, to refer to the title of Hahn’s essay, turned the South on its head.
The film’s portrayals of Blacks being devious — a freed Black is seen double-dipping at a ballot box and the film asserts that white Northerners intimidated Blacks to vote for their preferred candidates — and unqualified for government positions — ignoring the education they were stripped of due to their enslavement — are not comprehensive of the Black experience during Reconstruction. In reality, it took an incredible amount of perseverance on the part of Blacks to take as much advantage of their newly granted rights. Additionally, Black politicians were largely effective in their policies:
“[Black Republicans] established and aided charitable institutions, and provided for the educational opportunities envisioned at the Radical constitutional convention by constructing ‘colored’ schools… Most of all, they curtailed the arbitrary and coercive power of white landowners, bringing perpetrators to heel and lending substance to the notion of civil equality.” (“Major Problems,” 410)
Hahn continues: “Even a white critic of ‘Negro rule’ had to concede that many of these efforts were ‘extraordinarily successful.’” (Ibid) The Birth of a Nation’s degrading representation of Blacks after the Civil War not only refuses to acknowledge these accomplishments but goes a step further in their insulting of former slaves’ intelligence, such as in a scene where white men are seen holding picket signs explaining to mostly confused-looking Blacks about how to vote. Blacks are also portrayed as assertive and rude, with Black Union soldiers walking through the South exhibiting such behavior, contributing to the film’s fearmongering.
A notable aspect of Griffith’s film that stands out is the inclusion of both Black actors and actors in blackface not only being in the same film but even sharing scenes. A recurring background character is a woman in blackface, portraying a stereotypical mammy, who is seen defending the ways of the antebellum South throughout the film, even calling a well-dressed northern black “black trash” at one point. The inclusion of such a character preserves the vision of an “ideal” Southern society. Another tainted angle that the film promotes relates to the Blacks who participated in politics after the war. Stating that their securing of roles in government was often not organic and simply ploys by white Northerners to influence voting and infect the South with uncivilized politicians, this does not acknowledge that generations of Blacks made up a population that far outnumbered whites, accounting for genuine elections (on the part of Black voters, at least).
The fallacy of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy continues to find footing today as a result of cultural pieces that heighten parts of history to form a fixed ideology full of deceit, flat-out falsehoods, and, in the case of Griffith’s film, inclinations towards intimidation and violence to preserve a way of life.
Linked below: Actor and singer Walter Huston discusses the film with Griffith in a prologue to its 1930 re-release.
Citations from: “Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction, Third Edition,” Documents and Essays Edited by Michael Perman, Amy Murrell Taylor, and Thomas Paterson.
5/22/24
Amazingly even very great filmmakers were seduced by Griffith's skill into believing the narrative he presented.
Take William Friedkin, who you think would really know better:
"It shows that in the... Restoration Period there was a lot of black crime... the rise of the Ku Klux Klan came about because there was a lot of rapes and pillaging done by the newly-freed slaves."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-APzEjrklc
His discussion of Birth of a Nation starts at 6:45 on this video.