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121 CHAPTER SEVEN The Birth of a Nation Promoters of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ film petitioned the city council again on last Wednesday morning for a rehearing to show the film in Portland. The editor of The Advocate was summoned and spoke against the film, pointing out that it was not only historically untrue but that it incited hatred between the races. — “‘Birth of Nation’ Film Again Unanimously Denied by City,” the Advocate, April 11, 1931, 1 The nation’s first full-length motion picture featured a cast of eighteen thousand people, including the rising star Lillian Gish, took eight months to complete, and by some accounts cost a reported $500,000 to make—a staggering sum for 1915.1 Although some reviewers were critical of the film’s conflation of “the negro with cruelty, superstition, insolence and lust,” most were spellbound by the story as well as the cinematography, and applauded the silent picture that “at once became the most controversial and successful film in the history of cinema.”2 The story was based on novels and a play by Thomas Dixon, Jr., though director David Wark Griffith added many of his own touches to the script before shooting began in Southern California on July 4, 1914.3 Griffith described the massive project as a “picturisation of history,” but, as scholars have pointed out, the melodrama about the Civil War and its aftermath was told from the perspective of two Southerners still trying to come to terms with defeat and the abolition of slavery.4 The film follows two white families who have known each other for some time—the Stonemans in the North, and the Camerons, plantation owners in South Carolina—through the idyllic antebellum period and the ravages of the Civil War.5 But according to the film, the war was nothing compared with Reconstruction; Griffith portrays the twelve-year period as a humiliating time for Southerners who were “forced to acknowledge blacks as equals.” Ben Cameron, a wounded veteran, is particularly “tormented by the ruin he sees all around him.” But he has an epiphany when he sees a group of children wearing white sheets and pretending to be ghosts. The costumes frighten some black children, and their terrified reactions give him “the inspiration” he needs to form the Ku Klux Klan.6 The remainder of the film shows the Klan restoring law and order to the A Force for Change 122 land. In the process, according to both Dixon and Griffith, a new nation is born, one in which white supremacy becomes the order of the day. Negroes in Southern California were alarmed by the film’s message as well as its celebration of the KKK.7 Charlotta Bass, editor of the California Eagle, wrote in her memoir that she “knew … the production of such a motion picture would be a major social, intellectual and artistic block in the path toward … civil liberties for all.” In addition, she feared the story “would have a devastating effect on better race relations in Los Angeles” as well as “in the state and nation,” and urged that filming be halted at once.8 But work continued, and by the time production concluded at the end of October, Griffith had amassed nearly one hundred and forty thousand feet of film and was forced to “condense, condense, condense.” He finally managed to pare down the film to about thirteen thousand feet, or a running time of just under three hours.9 Patrons in Riverside, California, had an opportunity to preview The Clansman on January 1, 1915.10 A “capacity audience” at the Loring Opera House enjoyed the film, as did a reporter for the Daily Press who believed it was “certain to win public favor in the east as well as in other parts of the country where it is shown.”11 Two months later, the renamed film opened to acclaim in New York City.12 But the NAACP, headquartered there, had been marshaling members and materials to protest the film in New York and in other Eastern cities. The Crisis, edited by NAACP cofounder W. E. B. Du Bois, kept Cannady and other readers apprised of the organization’s strategies and last-ditch efforts to convince the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures that The Birth of a Nation was harmful to race relations.13 B Even as the NAACP fought to have The Birth of a Nation banned from New York, Boston, and other cities on...

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