Henry B. Walthall in an iconic battle scene.

The year 1914 marked the true beginning of Hollywood as a household name. That year saw the release of the first feature length movie shot in the burgeoning movie colony, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man. It also marked the movie debut of Charlie Chaplin and his Little Tramp persona. During the summer and fall of that year D.W. Griffith filmed the first Hollywood epic, The Birth of a Nation.

Birth of a Nation was originally titled The Clansman after a famous novel and play of the times written by a self-proclaimed white supremacist named Thomas F. Dixon Jr. Griffith later changed the title to be less offensive and more representative of the scope of his movie. It tells the story of two families, one from the north, one from the south, and how their lives intertwine before, during and after the American Civil War. The first half of the movie is by far the best. There are some truly spectacular battle scenes staged on a scale never before seen in American film. The first act culminates with the assassination of President Lincoln. The recreation of this historic event is perhaps the finest sequence in the entire 3 hour movie.

The second act deals with Reconstruction in the most repugnant and deplorably racist manner. The Ku Klux Klan are shown as the heroes riding to the rescue against insolent, unruly blacks and mulattoes who are clearly the villains; some of them actually (Gasp!) want to marry white women. The scene at the South Carolina House of Representatives is disgusting in its stereotyping. It shows the black elected officials drinking alcohol, eating fried chicken, sitting with their shoes off and just basically acting ignorant. The entire point of the scene is to demonstrate just how incapable of governing the blacks were, in Griffith’s opinion.

D.W. Griffith was from the south and had grown up listening to his father (an officer in the Confederate Army) tell tales about the war. He would later claim not to be a racist and made movies such as Intolerance and Broken Blossoms in an attempt to change his reputation as such. I first watched this movie about 10 years ago. To be honest I have put off reviewing it because I find it so distasteful. I’m glad I will never have to sit through it again. Perhaps the worst insult to blacks, in a nearly constant stream of them, is the fact that most of their large roles are played by white actors in horrible black face.

This is the movie that made Lillian Gish a star. She was the finest dramatic actress of the silent era. She could convey great depths of emotion with her face. As her friend Lily Tomlin once remarked, “It was like her aura was being filmed.” She is a ray of sunshine in a sea of demeaning images.

The Birth of a Nation became instantly notorious upon its release in 1915. The NAACP and other civil rights groups mounted protests, several riots broke out at screenings and it reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan, which had been dormant during the beginning of the century and would later peak in membership in 1925. One of the subtitles has one white character say to another something about “Reclaiming our Aryan birthright.” If they had financed the movie themselves it is difficult to imagine a more perfect recruiting tool for the KKK.

There’s no denying, however, that it was hugely popular with the majority of Americans. It cost half a million dollars to make and went on to gross 10 million. It remains the highest grossing silent movie of all time and was the box office champ until another civil war picture called Gone With the Wind was released nearly a quarter of a century later. For all its technical accomplishments, historical importance (President Woodrow Wilson famously said, “It was like history written with lightning.”) and huge box office receipts, The Birth of a Nation is the most relentlessly racist movie ever to come out of Hollywood.

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