Booker T & Them: A Blues

24. Wherein Is Related the Rush of Defenders to Griffith’s Defense . . . Along with Other Events to Do with Mr. Mayer

( 220 ) Wherein Is Related the Rush of Defenders to Griffith’s Defense . . . Along with Other Events to Do with Mr. Mayer 24 Griffith says & shows, “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, calculated to raise the goose-flesh on the back of an audience more than that of a white girl in relation to Negroes.” But, Griffith’s Legions, his generation’s best minds: journalists, logicians, clerics, savant pedagogues, promoters, financiers, & theorists, squat like Phoenicians, or fallen angels, on Hell’s precipice, & deaf to the cries of the sacrificed, dispassionately toss reason & judgment on the ever-burning flames of the furnace of craving that is his audience’s need for the nourishment of the affirmation of their Supremacy before it. They declare Birth an Aesthetic Triumph! an Instant Classic! Masterpiece! Mr. Griffith, 01 Harris text.indd 220 12/13/11 11:26 AM ( 221 ) they argue, is “the Shakespeare of the screen,” & surely if there are “inflammatory excesses” or “racial overtones,” he is simply a victim of his isolation, being far removed from urbane enlightenment as he is in this Gehennaian Hollywood. It’s his innocence, his naïveté, his genius, they justify, fuels his inflamed images. It’s his God-given right, they exhort, to give the audience “what they want” & how they want it as the old minstrel song says, &, to show “the dark side of wrong,” “illuminate the bright side of virtue . . .” ’Tis Shakespeare, first put an English-speaking black on the British boards: Aaron, a Moor & villain, figure of vice, & the beloved of Tamora, Goth Queen in Titus A. The unleashed sack of stormwind endorsements, & waves & wake of their verbiage inundates, sweeps away before it, without abatement, all vessels of objection; not like loner Elijah to the heaven of equality, but like Ulysses into a seemingly boundless, boiling sea of segregation & exclusion. Yea, see the tossed-about “sea washed” hands, including Du Bois, at the tiller of the good ship N DOUBLE A C P. Birth of a Nation is “the meanest vilification of the Negro race,” they say, riding out the wrath in their storm-pelted rafts of righteousness. Birth of a Nation indeed signals the blazing rebirth of the reconstructed Ku Klux Klan. 01 Harris text.indd 221 12/13/11 11:26 AM ( 222 ) To restore “100% Americanism ” the Klan’s Lost Cause culturist agenda is swathed in Ol’ Glory, & the mantle of Christianity. Is sold as American born Protestantism. Is a recruitment tool for frustrated whites (South & North). No others need apply. Blacks, back-sliding whites, Jews, Roman Catholics, foreigners, anti-traditionalists, & immoralists, continue as baby seals to the bludgeons of Klan “family values” invective. Its appeal appeals. Its fear fits fearsome whites to a T; parties & socials spread like wildfire. Flocks flock. Klan rolls soar: 100thousand recruits in a year. A congressional investigation uproots nothing. Sheets are unruffled. No one is unmasked. The K.K.K. song is triumphantly sung to the tune of “A Hot Time in the Old Town To-night.” Iris out. Fade in. 1915 still: long shot: a Boston motion picture theater. close up: Louis Burt Mayer, a.k.a. Eliezer, or Lazar (Louis B.) Mayer, its owner, b., according to his official bio, 4 July, 1885. T’aint that just Yankee Doodle Dandy, but a lie by about a year & some . . . & by a Lazar, or Eliezer Meir, or some such, out of Minsk, Belarus—Russia, escaping his Cossackridden home in the late ’80s through England & Canada to Massachusetts. At 19 Louis B., or L.B., recently 01 Harris text.indd 222 12/13/11 11:26 AM ( 223 ) a junk man’s son, begins, in hustler minstrelsy tradition, to re-form himself, & there being no business like show business he boards the entertainment ethnic-immigrant express to cross that divide to Full White Personhood. Diversifies. Buys theaters, until he owns the largest chain in New England. Exhibits only “high quality films.” Distributes Birth of a Nation in his chain. Under-reports the box office take. Makes a huge profit. Makes this his move-to-Hollywood-&-make-movies money. Becomes Hollywood’s most powerful magnate. His company houses “more stars than there are in the heavens.” “Isn’t God good to me?” he says, reshuffling the deck; making the game his own. Gives the public what it wants by picturing the American Dream as wholesome escapism wrapped in the Stars & Stripes. Louis B.’s last words before his credits roll are reportedly, “Nothing matters.” Fade out. Cross-cut to flashback: 1915...