What people must have thought in 1915.

Rating: Null/10 (24 April 2006)

I thought it might interest others to know that my grandmother, who was the same age as Lillian Gish, saw Birth of a Nation in 1915. She said it was a wonderful film and she wished she could see it again sometime. I believe I may have even heard the comment more than once. The comment was made 50 some odd years after the movie came out.
The interesting thing is that she made no mention of racism, the Ku Klux Klan, or anything else like it. (At that time one could also find TBOAN listed in print as the first truly modern film and a breakthrough. Again, no mention was made of the film's offensive contents.) Now, my grandmother was no racist, at least by the standards of her time, was in full sympathy of the Civil Rights Movement and often said so. So why the silence on the racism of TBOAN?
I think that people like her that remembered such things as a movie they saw a half century earlier must have entirely forgotten what the film was about. And what did she think when she saw it in 1915? Well, my grandmother still lived in Canada at the time, was very worried about Irish independence, the First World War, etc. I would suppose that to her and people like her outside the South, they simply must have taken the material verbatim as fact without any question. Remember, at that time, regions and distances were much more isolated than today and the South would have been an exotic far-away land to most non-Southerners.
In addition, the book And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmeyer about post Civil- War society in Ohio, made the comment that while Northerners were passionate about liberating the slaves, that was the extent of it. What happened to them after was not a concern in general in the North. They'd done their job as far as they were concerned. So I conclude that the racism issue of the film was simply a non-issue to contemporary audiences, at least outside of the South. I am glad that we as a society have progressed beyond that.