The plot of the movie The Birth of a Nation centers on two brothers, Phil and Ted Stoneman as they visit their friends, the Cameron family, in their Piedmont, South Carolina home. The onset of the Civil War divides the friends as each serves on opposite sides. The movie chronicles the lives of these families as they go through the Civil War, Lincoln’s assassination and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. Based on the Reverend Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s racist melodrama entitled The Clansman, the movie, considered the first epic drama, creates controversies that polarized the United State and further divided a nation.
Most of the controversies surrounding The Birth of a Nation are the historical inaccuracies presented in the movie, particularly when it pertained to the way blacks acted after the Civil War. In the movie, blacks are portrayed as ignorant, violent and sexually deviant, with mulattos committing the most offences. In one scene of the movie, former slave, Gus played by Walter Long in blackface, forcefully proposes to Flora Cameron portrayed by Mae Marsh. She refuses and runs for her life; Gus pursues her, and she eventually jumps to her death. To avenge her death, the good white men find Gus and execute him. Scenes like this ignite the extreme consternation of the NAACP and they picket the movie across the nation. Instead of people boycotting the movie, this actually increases curiosity.
The portrayal of the Klan in the movie also created a firestorm of controversy. In the movie, they are the heroes, saving their community from the violent, bloodthirsty Negroes. In another scene in the movie, the mulatto Silas Lynch, played by George Siegmann, asks Lillian Gish’s character Elsie to marry him. When she refuses, he forms a black militia and traps her and her family in a house. Just as all seems lost, the Ku Klux Klan rides in to save the day. The movie ends with a triumphant Klan parade. Blacks in the general public were not happy with these scenes, just as the aforementioned paragraph, because it perpetuated a fear that black men were violent, sexually miscreants who needed to be kept in there place.
On the other hand, The Birth of a Nation reignites interest in the Klan. Before the release of this movie, they had all but died out. After the release of the movie, the Klan we know them was born. They take their cues from the movie, including the white sheets and the pageantry of a parade in the streets. In the movie, they are never seen terrorizing innocent Negroes, as they actually did during reconstruction. Throughout the 1920s, Klan membership increases, and this movie becomes a symbol of what they stand for, the heroic saviors of the white race against the savagery of the Negro male and the rape of their women. Even today, this movie is still watched by Klansman on a regular basis.
When Woodrow Wilson saw a screening of this movie, he exclaimed, "It's like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true." However, the movie is not historically accurate. Instead, it further divides a nation and does not further the cause for racial unity in the country at that time.
Sources:
Plot summary of the Birth of a Nation
http://www.imdb.com
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
http://www.filmsite.org.birt.html
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