1915 - Birth of a Nation
History is usually written by the winners. But that wasn’t the case when The Birth of a Nation was released on February 8, 1915. In just over three hours, D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic film about the Civil War and Reconstructiondepicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors of a post-war South ravaged by Northern carpetbaggers and immoral freed blacks. The film was an instant blockbuster. And with innovative cinematography and a Confederate-skewed point of view, TheBirth of a Nation also helped rekindle the KKK.
Until the movie’s debut, the Ku Klux Klan founded in 1865 by Confederateveterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, was a regional organization in the South that was all but obliterated due to government suppression. But The Birth of a Nation’s racially charged Jim Crow narrative, coupled with America’s heightened anti-immigrant climate, led the Klan to align itself with the movie’s success and use it as a recruiting tool.
“People were primed for the message,” says Paul McEwan, film studies professor at Muhlenberg College and author of The Birth of Nation (BFI Film Classics). “Hard to argue this was a distortion of history when the history books at that time said the same.”
Adapted from the book The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr., who was a classmate and friend of President Woodrow Wilson, The Birth of a Nationportrayed Reconstruction as catastrophic. It showed Radical Republicans encouraging equality for blacks, who in the film are represented as uncouth, intellectually inferior and predators of white women. And this racist narrative was widely accepted as historical fact.
“Academic histories mostly centered around the Dunning School,” McEwan says of the historiographical school of thought conceived by scholar William Archibald Dunning. It concluded that Reconstruction was a terrible mistake, which helped validate the film’s message, McEwan added.
Shortly after the Los Angeles launch, Thomas Dixon Jr. convinced President Wilson to screen the movie inside the White House, arguably the first time that was ever done. President Wilson reportedly said of the film, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
Although the quote’s authenticity has been disputed, there is no debate where Wilson stood on the issue of race. “He re-segregated the civil service,” says McEwan. “It’s not unreasonable to conclude that he thought the film was amazing.” And of course, a movie screened at the White House was going to be perceived as an endorsement of the film; one white supremacist in Georgia understood this implicitly.
William Joseph Simmons is considered to be the founder of the 1915 modern Ku Klux Klan. While recovering from a car accident, the local preacher in Georgia followed the Birth of a Nation’s nationwide success. There were KKK-inspired aprons, costumes and regalia that glorified the defunct organization. Simmons seized on the film’s popularity to bolster the Klan’s appeal again.
It wasn’t just the fraught racial tensions that made the timing of a rebirth feasible. The way the film was made, with innovating editing techniques and close-up action shots, was captivating.
“People were taken to another planet,” says Dick Lehr, author of The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War. “The galloping Klan riding to the rescue. The pure spectacle of it all,” says Lehr, romanticized the KKK. The film bolstered the idea that the Klan was there to save the South from savage black men raping white women, a racist myth that would be propagated for years, Lehr adds.
It wasn’t just the fraught racial tensions that made the timing of a rebirth feasible. The way the film was made, with innovating editing techniques and close-up action shots, was captivating.
“People were taken to another planet,” says Dick Lehr, author of The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War. “The galloping Klan riding to the rescue. The pure spectacle of it all,” says Lehr, romanticized the KKK. The film bolstered the idea that the Klan was there to save the South from savage black men raping white women, a racist myth that would be propagated for years, Lehr adds.
Source: https://www.history.com/news/kkk-birth-of-a-nation-film