The picture of Reconstruction presented in the second half of The Birth Of A Nation is entirely bogus, but since it represents the views
of respected historians of the time we need to see it as expressing the
environmental racism of 1915.  That it did express racism, however, is
beyond doubt.  Radical Reconstruction sought to fully enfranchise
Southern blacks and bring them into full political and social equality
with whites.  Its ideals were decent, and ones that almost everyone
today would heartily endorse, but it was undoubtedly unrealistic in the
context of Southern society just after the end of the Civil War.  And
it wasn't only Southerners who were horrified at the notion of treating
blacks as free and equal citizens.  To many, the idea was both
ludicrous and repugnant.




Unwilling to oppose the idea of liberty and equality for all people,
opponents of Radical Reconstruction created a myth about it — that it
was a cynical ploy by unscrupulous Northern whites to maneuver
ignorant blacks into political power and then use that power themselves
to control and plunder the South.  Historians, out of a similar
prejudice against blacks, confirmed the myth as fact.




The myth, and the bogus historiography that seemed to confirm it, tried
to disguise an opposition to equality for blacks, but the disguise
comes apart in The Birth Of A Nation, where attempts by blacks to
interact on terms of social equality with whites are presented as
outrages almost on a level with political and judicial corruption. 
Henry Walthall's Little Colonel grows steely-eyed when black soldiers
assert their right to walk on the sidewalk in front of his house, when
Silas Lynch offers to shake his hand — his look in those moments is
not so different from the chilling one he gives in reaction to the
death of his sister at the hands of a crazed black would-be rapist. 
Earlier, that same sister had reacted with a look of repugnance when
Stoneman's daughter publicly conversed, on perfectly innocent and civil
terms, with the mulatto Lynch.




In such attitudes we see the ugliest side of casual environmental
racism — the nastiness it could provoke when its assumptions were
challenged by “uppity” blacks . . . that is, blacks who presumed to be
entitled to the common respect and dignity accorded to whites.




Indeed, the pathological racism of The Birth Of A Nation can be seen
as a kind of justification for this nastiness, by showing where such
presumption by blacks will inevitably lead — to sexual assaults by
black males on white females, to miscegenation.




This connection is established in the very first scenes of the second
half of the film.  In the wake of Lincoln's death and Stoneman's rise
to greater power, Stoneman's maid has now become his social equal,
dressing like a lady and insisting on being treated as one by
Stoneman's associates, though she remains an infantile schemer. 
Stoneman states his intention of elevating his protege, the mulatto
Lynch, to full equality with whites — but we are shown what the
consequences of this will be, which Stoneman can't see yet.  Lynch
stares lustfully at Stoneman's daughter, foreshadowing his future
pursuit and attempted rape of her.  That's what “equality” means to him.

The association of political and social equality for blacks with sexual
designs by black males on white women is carried through the scenes in
South Carolina which follow.  We see blacks displaying signs which read
“Equal Rights/Equal Politics/Equal Marriage.”  The
drumbeats are clear — the progression apparently inevitable.  In the
black-dominated state legislature, the
ignorant, buffoonish black members react with indifference to the
government business being conducted, until a bill allowing
miscegenation is passed, whereupon they direct sexual leers at the
white women in the galleries and then break out in riotous celebration.




A title informs us that this picture of a black legislature was based
on historical photographs, but David Shepard, in his excellent short
documentary on the making of the film, included in the Kino DVD
edition, reveals that it was not — it was based on political cartoons
of the time.  Once again, when Griffith wants to inject an element of
psycho-sexual paranoia into his film he adopts a different standard of
historical accuracy than he applies elsewhere.




Black political power is shown as having no legitimate ambitions.  It
exists only to enrich or enable the white and/or mulatto manipulators
of the black vote, and to sanction sexual relations between the races. 
Even “marriage” is a euphemism here, since blacks are shown as having
no conception of the institution — it just represents a license to
copulate, with or without the woman's consent.

In the finale, as former Union and Confederate soldiers and
their women huddle in a remote cabin assaulted by crazed blacks, we
are told that they have united, not in defense of shared American
values, shared ideals of justice and freedom, but “in defense of their
common Aryan birthright”, granted by the “purity” of their Aryan blood,
which is really what is threatened here.  The women face the
possibility of rape by the animalistic blacks and the men prepare to
kill them rather than allow that possibility to come to pass.  The
“nation” whose birth this film celebrates has almost nothing to do with
the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution — everything to do
with Aryan purity and superiority.  It's racist to the core.




The white sheets of the Klansmen in The Birth Of A Nation do not
cover idealists riding to right political and judicial wrongs, despite
a blizzard of intertitles which tell us otherwise.  They cover the
beleaguered psyches of 20th-Century males riding to restore their own
insecure manhood.

The environmental, or broad cultural racism in the first half of The
Birth Of A Nation finds expression in two ways.  The first is the
general depiction of blacks under slavery as well-treated and happy. 
It can be argued that some blacks under slavery were well-treated,
insofar as anyone held in involuntary servitude can be said to be
well-treated, and that some blacks under slavery were happy, insofar
as anyone held in involuntary servitude can be said to be happy.  But
presenting such blacks as the only representatives of slavery in a film
with the epic scope of The
Birth Of A Nation cannot be seen as merely
an act of dramatic selection.  All the characters in the film are
emblematic of broader social realities, and the view of slavery
presented here, as part of the “gracious” Southern social order that
will be swept away by the Civil War, has an ideological dimension —
and
the ideology is based on a lie.  Whether or not slavery was a
“necessary evil” or a crime against humanity or on balance a benign
institution, it did not even remotely resemble the portrait of it
offered up in The
Birth Of A Nation.




The second expression of environmental racism is more complex.  It lies
in Griffith's decision to have all blacks who are presented as
individuals in the film played by whites in blackface.  In this he was
following
conventional theatrical practice.  We know, from his testimony in a
censorship hearing for the film, that he considered the issue before
deciding on the blackface solution, but he probably wouldn't have been
terribly self-conscious about it, so common was the practice.  But its
very commonness raises interesting issues.




On one level, the blackface caricature of an African-American by a
white actor carries its own critique within it.  There is no theatrical
deception involved — the glaringly obvious make-up reveals that the
convention is a convention, and one of the things expressed in the
convention is that whites have appropriated the image of the black,
that whites will control the image of the black.  The image must be,
therefore, on the blackened face of it, constructed.  The convention
announces that whites feel empowered to construct, to control, the
image of the black, but also admits that the image is inauthentic.  It
leaves open the possibility that blacks might construct other images of
themselves, if they had the power to do so — and that they might not
participate willingly in these particular constructions of their
images.  There are more questioned raised than answered by the
convention of blackface, at least on an unconscious level.




The pathological, psycho-sexual racism of The
Birth Of A Nation
doesn't emerge until about 16 minutes into the film, with the first
appearance of Austin Stoneman's sluttish maid.  Previously, Stoneman
has been
established as a grotesque figure, with a club foot and an ill-fitting
wig.  Suspicions about him have been aroused by revealing that he
spends a lot of time in his library, where his family never visits. 
He's never shown in his own home — his sons even march off to war from
that home when he is not present.  This is Victorian code for the fact
that Stoneman is a creep — at the very least a deeply problematic
figure.  Devotion to the
home was an essential element of male rectitude in Victorian fiction.




With the appearance of Stoneman's maid we learn the dark secret he is
hiding — an illicit sexual relationship with his maid, a mulatto
woman.  Stoneman is a thinly-veiled stand-in for the great anti-slavery
statesman Thaddeus Stevens.  Stevens' radical views on Reconstruction
can be, and have been, criticized as over-zealous and impractical, but
Griffith is suggesting that his polity was the direct result of sexual
perversion, the impulse towards unbridled sexual lust in general and
miscegenation in particular.  The mere fact that his slovenly maid is a
mulatto, the product of miscegenation, sets up the association of black
enfranchisement, even black aspirations towards dignity, with an
undiscriminating, animalistic sexuality.  The maid is offended when a
visitor to Stevens'
library treats her dismissively, as a mere servant — after he leaves
she flings herself to the floor and writhes in anguish, her shoulders
immodestly bared, her hands playing over her breasts.  Her behavior is
not just indecorous — it's positively bestial.




There is no evidence that Thaddeus Stevens ever had an affair with a
mulatto maid, or that he engaged in sexual misconduct of any kind. 
What we
have here is pure, and very bizarre, fantasy, which can only be
explained by the pathological association of black enfranchisement and
equality with the destructive unleashing of the libido.  A title card
announces that we have witnessed in the scenes described above “the
weakness” — Stoneman's lust for
a black woman — “that blighted a nation”.  The entire Civil War and
the complex moral and economic forces that led to it, the entire
abolitionist cause, is reduced to sexual “perversion” in the form of
miscegenation.




Meanwhile, down South, the Civil War has broken out and almost
immediately the Cameron home is threatened by Negroes gone wild. 
“Renegade” black soldiers, in Union uniforms, attack the town where the
Camerons live, and the Cameron home itself.  Griffith concentrates
dramatically on the threat to the two Cameron sisters, hiding out in
their basement.  Any viewer of the time would have recognized the
sexual component of the threat.  The girls are clearly in danger of
being raped by the maniacs assaulting their home.

There were, in fact, no bands of renegade black soldiers running wild
in
the South.  A title tells us, misleadingly, that the first black troops
were enlisted in South Carolina, which is true — but none of them
ever behaved the way these blacks troops do, which is what the title
implies.  A title also tells us that the blacks have been incited to
their behavior by an irresponsible white commander.  Griffith often
uses this device in the film to show he's not blaming blacks for their
behavior — only the white trash who spur them on.  But this muddles
what's really being said between the lines.  The bad whites in these
cases have failed to
exercise proper patrician supervision of and control over their black
charges, they have misdirected and unleashed the animalistic tendencies
of the blacks.  The important point being driven home — and it's
driven home throughout the film — is that this potential for
animalistic behavior by blacks is always there and always needs to be
controlled.  This is the white man's burden — his first duty in
protecting the home and its women.




A detachment of white Confederate soldiers rescues the Cameron girls
and their home — white actors in blackface help put out the fire in
the house and embrace these soldiers in gratitude.  But in the course
of the film, the white deliverers
won't always get there on time . . . indeed, their failure to do so
on one crucial occasion will lead directly to the dramatic climax of
the film.

The first half of The
Birth Of A Nation ends with the assassination
of Lincoln, dramatically and quite accurately recreated onscreen.  This
assassination has become a tragic, iconic component of America's
national myth, and in the film it is greeted by sorrow on both sides of
the Mason-Dixon line — with one exception.  Stoneman's mistress exults
as she strokes Stoneman's arm lasciviously and tells him he's now the
most powerful man in the country.  Her villainy and inhumanity could
not be
asserted more forcefully — a more direct connection could not be drawn
between the “history” we're about to watch unfold and the sexual
“perversion” of miscegenation.  To this woman, and perhaps to Stoneman,
Lincoln's death only removes the greatest obstacle to the sexual union
of the black and white races.




It's really impossible to fully appreciate Griffith's artistry in this
film without recognizing how skillfully he inflects his national epic
with psycho-sexual themes, appealing to patriotism, nostalgia for a
more gracious age, reverence for the home, in order to set all these
things against the perceived horror of the pollution of the Aryan race
by admixture with inferior blood.




The environmental racism of The
Birth Of A Nation is not egregious by
the standards of its day.  It wouldn't even have been egregious by the
standards of 1939, the year of Gone With the Wind, which simply used
cleverer and more sophisticated means to distract us from thinking too
seriously about the horrors and the enduring moral stain of slavery. 
And in the first half of The
Birth Of A Nation, the more disturbing
and
pathological racist element is almost overwhelmed by the lyric beauty
of the film in its celebration of family and home and gallantry and
innocent courtly love.

But we will see that the pathological element has been carefully
interwoven into the fabric of the film's first half precisely in order
to set up its emotional ascendancy in the second half — and there is
no question that this strategy was deliberate.  The
Birth Of A Nation
prides itself on historical accuracy — with some justification.  The
film is historically responsible and convincing in visual terms, and in
many of its recreations of actual events.  The only times it departs
conspicuously from historical accuracy, the only times it unashamedly
distorts and
falsifies the historical record, are in those passages where it seeks
to promote its psycho-sexual racist agenda.  That agenda will come to
dominate the second half of the film, but it was painstakingly and
strikingly foreshadowed in the first half.

There are two kinds, or degrees, of racism in The Birth Of A Nation.  The first might be described as environmental racism, reflecting the conventional racism of the dominant culture of early 20th-Century America.  This centered on the idea that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, unfitted for social or political equality, and best treated with a kind of benign paternalism.

In 1915 one might hold such views almost unconsciously, so imbedded were they in the thinking of the time, and one might find “scientific” explanations for the inferiority of blacks even in the pages of authoritative reference works like the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Other viewpoints were available, however — other public voices which insisted that blacks were fully the equals of whites and deserved to participate fully in American democracy and American society.  The attitude of the dominant culture did not go unchallenged, and so involved a measure of choice, of moral responsibility.  Moreover, the dominant culture benefited psychologically and financially from maintaining blacks as a permanent underclass and source of cheap labor, so its view of their inherent inferiority incorporated an element of self-serving denial.

In short, there was very little about environmental racism which could be considered morally neutral or benign, even though it could be entertained by people who were in other respects decent and good-hearted.

The second kind of racism in The Birth Of A Nation has a darker undertone.  While it derives from the assumptions of environmental racism it moves into a frankly pathological realm.  It held that blacks were not just intellectually inferior but animalistic, distinctly subhuman, and would, if ungoverned by strict regimentation on the part of whites,
revert to bestial behavior, especially with regard to sexuality, and particularly with regard to sexual aggression by black males against white females.

The social history of race relations in America provided almost no evidence to support this view — quite the contrary.  Historically speaking, sexual aggression and sexual abuse between the races resided almost exclusively in the sexual predation of white males directed against black females within the Southern plantation system.  This was the unspoken scandal of ante-bellum society in the South, as Mary Chestnut confessed ruefully in the original unexpurgated version of her famous diary.

The fictive threat to white womanhood from black males had origins within the psyches of white males — under threat in 1915 from social causes inherent in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing America.  Males increasingly worked for and at the pleasure of other men far more powerful than themselves, and women had access to incomes from office and factory work independent of male domestic partners.

The male insecurity that resulted was augmented by cultural insecurity as waves of immigrants began to change the face of America, importing “foreign” mores, customs, values and even languages that competed with those of the dominant culture.

In this atmosphere, the casual environmental racism of the dominant white culture took a more intense and programmatic form — it mutated into a defiant celebration of the “Aryan race”, an aggressive insistence on its superiority, and an essentially pathological fear of its dilution, or even overthrow, by lesser races, especially the animalistic “Negro” race.

The great success of Thomas Dixon’s potboiler fiction, which openly promoted this new, more self-conscious and aggressive racism, testifies to its wide cultural appeal at the beginning of the 20th Century.  In his skewed and irresponsibly manipulated version of the historical facts of Reconstruction, Dixon was presenting a prophecy of what might happen to white culture if “lesser” races ever again got the upper hand.  He was quite clear about this.  His introduction to The Clansman, the novel on which The Birth Of A Nation was partly based and under which title it was originally released, described Reconstruction as one of the most important episodes, not in the history of America, but in the history of the Aryan race.

Thinking of the history of America as the history of the triumph of the Aryan race was appealing to many in early 20th-Century America — it bolstered the manhood of white males threatened by new female power and new cultural influences.  It was psychologically seductive.

One of the men it seduced was D. W. Griffith.  It was an ironic tragedy, since Griffith was himself, by all accounts, a benign sort of racist in his dealings with individual blacks, and also a man deeply sympathetic, in his way and within his limitations, to the emerging
position of the “modern woman”.  One can only conclude that the seduction took place on some level beneath the conscious — as it must have, surely, to some degree, for American society as a whole.

I’m not sure the process can ever be wholly understood, but from a distance it can at least be described, and I think there’s some value in that.  In future posts I’ll offer some examples of how the two kinds of racism described above play out in The Birth Of A Nation.