Hath not the morning dawned with added light?

Rating: 5/10 (6 December 2014)

Hath not the morning dawned with added light? And shall not evening call another star.....
When in 1861 the Confederate States seceded from the Union, Henry Timrod, "The Poet Laureate of the Confederacy", celebrated the occasion with a poem entitled "Ethnogenesis". We now know, of course, that the "birth of a nation" hymned by Timrod was to prove a stillbirth, that the South was to be defeated in the ensuing Civil War and that the Union was to survive. More than fifty years later, however, D. W. Griffith revived Timrod's title, in English translation, for his epic film. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", however, was not the Southern independence Timrod had hoped for but the reunion of North and South to form a single whole, greater than before.
The film tells the story of two families, the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons, during the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It has been described as telling that story from a pro-Southern viewpoint, but actually its politics, at least during Part I dealing with the war itself, are fairly confused. Its initial stance seems to be that the Civil War was a war of aggression, launched by President Lincoln in order to increase the powers of the Federal Government at the expense of the States. Griffith and his scriptwriters, however, clearly realised that this stance would be an unpopular one in the North because during the scenes dealing with the war itself it is softened in favour of a general pacifism. (The film was made just after World War I had broken out, but before America joined the conflict). Towards the end of Part I the film even seems to be arguing that the Northern victory was a good thing, because a united America was stronger than an America bisected along the Mason-Dixon Line into two independent states. Lincoln is now portrayed as the "Great Heart", the advocate of a reconciliation between North and South which was sadly jeopardised by his assassination.
It is in Part II that the film gets really nasty. Austin Stoneman, the patriarch of the Stoneman family and a prominent congressman (loosely based on Thaddeus Stevens), emerges as one of the film's villains. Stoneman's main villainy, in the eyes of Griffith and Dixon, is that he believes in racial equality and advocates policies such as the enfranchisement of black voters and an end to the ban on racially mixed marriages. The other villains are Stoneman's protégé, the mixed-race politician Silas Lynch, and just about every black character in the film, portrayed (by white actors in blackface) as stupid, ignorant, aggressive and sexually voracious, especially where white women are concerned. (Even Stoneman loses his enthusiasm for racial equality when he learns that Lynch wants to marry his daughter Elsie). The only good blacks are what are described as "faithful souls", former slaves nostalgic for their slavery. The heroes of the film are the Ku Klux Klan, portrayed as the defenders of white Southerners against black villainy.
To condemn the film for its racism is not to judge it by the standards of modern political correctness. It was hateful even by the standards of 1915. African-Americans loathed it, the NAACP called for a ban, and it actually was banned in several Northern cities because the authorities feared (with good reason) that it might inflame racial tensions. White Southerners long bewailed the perceived injustices of Reconstruction, but it should have seemed obvious that, after the destructive Civil War, America needed to be reconstructed. That process would need to involve the integration into American society not only of white Southerners but also of black Southerners, who could not be so integrated unless they were afforded the same civil rights as their white neighbours. These points should have seemed obvious but were so obscured by prejudice that black Americans were to face decades of injustice, discrimination and poverty. Griffith called upon "the former enemies of North and South to unite in defence of their Aryan birthright," and for many years North and South did indeed seem united by a shared racism. After around 1876 Northern politicians took the view that, provided Southerners did not try to secede again or to reintroduce slavery, they could treat black people how they wished.
(Incidentally, I was intrigued to note that, in American English at least, "Aryan" was used in a political sense long before Hitler's rise to power, although Britons, who generally only used the word to refer to the Indo-European peoples of northern India, might have been surprised to learn that white Americans considered themselves "Aryan").
Trying to evaluate this film is a difficult task. Yes, "The Birth of a Nation" was highly innovative by the standards of 1915, pioneering new techniques such as panoramic long shots, night photography, panning shots and the use of colour tinting. Yes, it has a highly dramatic musical score, incorporating quotations from Classical composers as well as music from the Civil War periods. Yes, it mounts to a highly effective dramatic climax as the mounted knights of the Klan ride to the rescue of the beleaguered whites. Yes, these innovations won it a place in movie history. But none of that alters the fact that it makes propaganda on behalf of a viciously racist organisation and fans the flames of an ugly prejudice. It was credited- if that is the right word- with contributing to a revival of the Klan, virtually moribund in 1915, in the 1920s. It is one of the great ironies of cinema history that Griffith, having directed one of the most bigoted and intolerant films ever made, should have followed it up with a film entitled "Intolerance". He meant that title as an attack on those who criticised "The Birth of a Nation". He should have paid more attention to the beam in his own eye. 5/10