Birth of a Nation (1915) is no more racist than you are.

110 years after its debut onto the American screen, it seems that everyone apparently knows everything about this film from the title alone, whether they have seen it or not.  Dare to mention the name of it, or the name D.W. Griffith, and you will be immediately met with rolled eyes and a smug reaction by people who just know that Birth is an irredeemably racist movie made by an irredeemably racist filmmaker with an irredeemably racist message for an irredeemably racist audience.

You are required to think this way for the same reason you are required to think that America is an irredeemably racist nation with an irredeemably racist history.  And to think this without even having seen Birth?  Even better; now you can be convinced of anything.

With the decay of cinema that followed and paralleled the death of film, the culture has predictably dampened too.  The 21st century is the age of TikTok videos, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, and animated emojis, where length and depth are relegated to podcasts.  Your content is coming fast, loose, and all at once; inevitably either over-edited or not edited at all.  A natural consequence of digitalization and streaming; when Tony Zhou from Every Frame a Painting observed that the modern audience is visually sophisticated yet visually illiterate, he was also predicting the future.

What could a young person today possibly think there is to learn from a silent film?  If the profile of someone reading this piece here is considerably younger than that of the audience for Godfrey Cheshire’s landmark The Death of Film & The Decay of Cinema essay, in which he specifically described his reader as a 20th century “film person,” I may be asking the impossible of even the most open minded of you.  After all, Birth of a Nation is not just a movie made with actual film, but one that has to break the flow of its sequential pictures with text cards or sudden changes to the tint of the picture.  Who could fault someone for simply thinking that a silent film is, at this point, merely an artifact or the artistic equivalent of a steam locomotive.

The answer, or first answer, as it turns out, can be found in the film’s profile of Abraham Lincoln.

In the very first scene featuring Lincoln, Griffith presents him under the most peculiar framing.  He sits at a desk to his left with a host of nondescript suits behind him, all standing and looking over him with expectation while a large document is read to him by the man closest to the door.  He briefly stands, demonstrating that he is a near full head taller than all of the men in the room, receives the paper, appears to study it, then sits back down as the ink is prepared for him, only for him to then put on his reading glasses before signing it as the other men watch.

We never see Lincoln again until after the end of the Civil War, 45 minutes later, where the wounded “Little Colonel” Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) is under the care of the woman of his dreams Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish), and the narration tells of a “secret influence” that has condemned him to death, which compels the family to “ask mercy from the Great Heart.”  Cut from the hospital to Lincoln, who after bowing in kind before military leaders in a crowded room – with similar people busy in the background – sits back down at his table alone with his thoughts for a briefest moment before the family arrives.  He appears reluctant to accept the mother’s pleas, but he gently puts his hand on her shoulder before she slinks in despair, and agrees.  In doing this, he puts on his glasses and takes care of the paperwork himself.  As the family celebrates and prepares to depart, Lincoln returns to being tired and alone with his thoughts again.

Lincoln, according to Griffith, is both central yet almost trivial to the American divide.  He may be in the center of the frame, but he is more of a follower than a leader.  Though his introduction in the text card, “Abraham Lincoln uses the Presidential office for the first time in history to call for volunteers to enforce the rule of the coming nation over the individual states,” portrays Lincoln as an escalating tyrant forcing “a coming nation” upon unwilling “individual states,” he appears as an obedient puppet of other busy and more important looking men.  The first signs of energy and autonomy from the big man come only when he acts to give Ben Cameron his “life back,” as though Lincoln finds life and purpose in the opportunity to help a family marred by his war.  Griffith speeds up the action just to emphasize the point.

So when Birth returns to Lincoln again, this time to address the Radical Republicans’ protest against Lincoln’s policy of clemency for the South, Lincoln’s stature and importance begins to grow as the room is cleared of everyone else.  Thaddeus Stevens comes in huffing and puffing his desire to hang every southern leader and treat the states as conquered provinces, and in response, Lincoln listens to him like a thoughtful leader, then towers over Stevens in rebuke.  “I shall deal with them as though they were never away.”  The great heart triumphs!  Ah, but here is also where this portrait of Lincoln becomes a problem.  With Lincoln in charge, hope springs eternal.  The South is being rebuilt and there is harmony; then, of course, the assassination that ruins everything and condemns the good people down there to the wrath of the “Radicals” with no great heart to stop them.  Birth perpetuates the old southern myth that all good things died with their “best friend” Lincoln, and that his assassination was a curse upon the South.

This problem is, of course, a representative microcosm of the greater problem that is the political and mythological picture Birth presents to its audience.  Birth marks “the bringing of the African to America” as the first seed of disunion planted on promising soil, and opens with a plea for pacifism and to hold war “in abhorrence.”  But real history is far more complex.  It is one thing to present the Civil War as regrettable (it was), but quite another to omit the all-important caveat, eloquently summed up by General George Henry Thomas:

[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed.  This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property — justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people — was not exacted from them.

You do not have to accept the narrative of the winners, and if Birth has a racial problem (which it does), it is not because it chooses not to.  Much can be and still is debated about Reconstruction, what could have been, or how it should have gone, and it is perfectly valid to take the position that the North exacted a gratuitous form of collective punishment against the South that was unhealthy for all sides.  The point is only that the first half of Birth and its portrayal of Lincoln cannot be understood without Thomas’s insight.  Just as it must be understood that this problem comes not from malice.  Griffith cannot help having the southern perspective that shapes the film.  He cannot help having been born and raised in Kentucky, with a father who was a high-ranking Confederate officer and Kentucky state legislator.  But even still, he has a reverence for Lincoln that was likely not shared by his family, and his depiction (both here and in his talkie Abraham Lincoln (1930)) of him are outdone only by John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).  What these scenes in the first half of Birth tell us, therefore, is that Griffith’s understanding of the history shortly before his life is informed by his southern roots.  What Thomas aptly describes as a rhetorical trick are, in fact, some of the foundational myths on which Griffith grew up.

Certain moments in Birth suggest that Griffith is aware of what may be within his periphery, and also that he was particularly aware of his own era in time.  After all, a world where everything goes to hell because of a single assassin’s bullet was quite recognizable to audiences in 1915 – in the middle of a massive war in Europe that was sparked by the death of Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia.  And the isolationist mood of the nation, which Birth indirectly speaks to, was undoubtedly fueled by the horrors of the Civil War still within living memory.  It was also fueled by contemporary audiences’ observation (to the extent that such a thing could be observed) of millions of young, eager boys all around the world signing up to join a war.  The long sequences of town parades of fond farewell to smiling soldiers as they march off with pride speak to this as well.  Griffith, ever the humanist, can depict those horrors vividly and make them real to a war-anxious public, but the effect is that his tremendous artistry served an unintentionally insidious purpose.

Even within the Civil War itself, Griffith attempts to find beautiful moments of humanity that can temporarily reunite the warring sides.  As the Confederacy attempts to make its final stand at Petersburg, cut off from supplies and separated from the enemy by a wide-open, smoke-filled battlefield in which they sit in and cover behind previously dug-in trenches (another commentary about the ongoing “Great War” at the time) desperately taking cover from nonstop artillery and mortar fire, they engage the North in a brutal hand-hand brawl.  “The Little Colonel,” having just lost his brother, exhibits a level of bravery by rushing into the open field to give water to a wounded Union man.  His old friend and future brother-in-law, a Union officer on the other side, orders a ceasefire and the men cheer the heroic deed.  Then Colonel Cameron leads the charge, as per his orders.  But then, when a bullet catches him mid-charge, he collapses on the field, gets up, and instead of picking up the gun, he picks up the flag, reaches the enemy, and jams the flag into the cannon.  Again Captain Stoneman spares him and even celebrates him.  Though the South will continue to lose that battle, Cameron has done his part and the war is effectively over for him.  This by itself is a thrilling sequence and no one watching it can deny being taken by it.  A perfect way to heroize a character without diminishing the unpleasantness of war; and while, as noted earlier, the morality of Griffith’s pacifism leaves much to be desired, his humanism is impossible not to appreciate.

All of these complex elements – from the depiction of President Lincoln as a puppet whose heart is so great that he breaks his strings to Griffith’s childhood-ingrained very conveniently Southern framing of a “nation over states,” to the pacifistic parallels Griffith draws between wars past and present – both convert and curse the second half of Birth of a Nation (“Reconstruction”).  “The blight of war does not end when hostilities cease” quote that opens the second half both exemplifies Griffith’s ethos while also continuing the “it was everyone’s tragedy” southern cop out.  In the final hour and a half, the Radical Republicans of the North launch effectively a second invasion that brings the tyranny of war home to the innocent on purpose, trashes the houses of Congress, disrupts and disturbs the racial “harmony” of whites and blacks (who consider themselves Southern more than racially separate), and terrorizes the innocent.  In response, the South must necessarily “rally” to its own defense, and “the Little Colonel” (in real life, his name was Nathan Bedford Forrest) must channel the bravery and gallantry of his leadership in war to “restore” the peace that Lincoln had promised, and bring about the real reunion of North and South into one “Nation” that the Northern Radicals had prevented.  This story, of course, is appalling and justifiably condemned as false.  Even if Reconstruction was an act of unnecessary tyranny (and I will never agree that it was), it goes without saying that donning the white robes and hoods of ghosts and riding to commit anonymous terror on blacks, political opponents, and everyone in between is obviously not how to answer that.

It did not help that President Woodrow Wilson endorsed this narrative about America.  It was not simply because he chose to screen the film at the White House.  If someone else had been President, it might have been defensible given the mass popularity of the film.  But two years earlier, as one of his first actions after taking office, Wilson, the first southerner elected since Zachary Taylor, resegregated the Civil Service and effectively put the culture of Jim Crow into the Federal Government.  And before becoming President, he had devoted much of his academic career to advancing the aims of segregation and legitimizing the Klan.

But if Wilson’s embrace of the Klan and the southern bedtime story in the second half of Birth was ideological, it is clear that Griffith’s own telling of it, even as it took from Wilson’s academic writings, is not.  Even as the second half disclaims any suggestion that the story to be told makes for commentary on any race of people today, Birth cannot escape the inherent falsehood of the overall story even when, through the act of telling it on screen, Griffith seeks universal response.  In an act described as “Sowing the wind,” the ill old Radical Austin Stoneman invites the shifty-looking “mulatto” Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) home to elevate him to a position of power to oversee reconstruction of the South, over the objection of Senator Charles Sumner.  Now, if you know anything about Sumner, this is hilarious considering that he was considered one of the most radical Senators of his time (the only time he broke with his party was in his opposition to hanging Confederate leaders).  The tyrannical political framing that begins the second half of Birth sees a northern aristocrat more radical than Charles Sumner sending a greedy, power-hungry “mulatto” to the South, while also apparently unaware of the lustful eyes Lynch has for Stoneman’s daughter Elsie.  Lynch proceeds to become “the uncrowned king,” marching men in wide columns that rudely take up the full sidewalk, intruding the towns and fields, telling black people to stop working and being productive and instead lavish lazily in the spoils of northern victory provided by the Freedman’s Bureau, which “misuses” the “generous charity” of the north to “delude the ignorant.”

Importantly, Griffith portrays southern blacks as largely uninterested in politics and unimpressed by northerners.  They go along with them only when force-fed and deluded by the “generosity.”  Politics itself is its own intrusion, as evident by a sudden cut and change in music to “Election Day” following a lengthy sequence of courtship and love that slowly blossoms in the unfavorable climate of pride that north and south still have.  The first postwar act of violence occurs against a black man who northern blacks tie to a tree and whip for failing to vote for the “carpetbaggers.”  A white man tries to stop the whipping, and the Union officer shoots him dead.  And then, of course, is the big sequence in Congress.  This actually might be the most racist moment in the film, even as it is also impossibly funny – full of stereotypes of black people putting their dirty bare feet on desks, eat chicken legs standing, and trashing the place as they jump to hoot and holler for interracial marriage, while the quiet and helpless white minority idly sits and white visitors to the gallery are horrified to see the predatory eyes of northern blacks upon them.  The man drinking at his desk and only half pretending to hide it rings relevant 110 years later after Senator Markwayne Mullin’s remarks in Committee about his colleagues showing up drunk to vote at night.  The moment is absolutely ridiculous.  And yet, that’s Congress for you, isn’t it?

After the Klan rides to the rescue and restores all things good, beautiful, and pure to the South, Griffith doubles down on his earlier themes. Once again suggesting that war both was and is a horseman of the apocalypse, and that the peaceful teachings of Jesus Christ may yet restore peace, redemption, and brotherhood to mankind, all of which are evoked by sudden stark and almost holographic images that have nothing to do with anything else in the film appearing to disturb and then immediately relieve the senses at the same time the two happy couples begin their honeymoon; Griffith does not just reveal a perspective nurtured by a southern upbringing, but also how his faith made sense of it.

There is no need to justify or explain away any of this, and the point of this piece was never to do that.  The criticism Birth of a Nation met at the time of its release was powerful enough that Griffith himself addressed it with his next several films, all of which are masterpieces far better than most today.  In Intolerance, Griffith intercut four separate stories of “Love’s Struggle Through the Ages” where the vice of intolerance collapses the Babylonian civilization, nails Christ to the cross, massacres the innocent, and persecutes the imperfect.  Griffith did not try to apologize for or walk back any racial or political commentary in Birth of a Nation, but rather re-applied his humanist principles into a visual story he specifically designed to elevate them for audiences and critics.  In Broken Blossoms, Griffith critiqued a growing trend of postwar racism in America against the Chinese by converting a racist book about Chinese people into an uplifting story about an innocent girl terrorized by her rambunctious father who stumbles into a Chinese man’s shop and finds that the only foreign thing about him is the kindness he shows her.  And in Orphans of the Storm, Griffith revisits the chaos of political assemblies and his skepticism of equality with a precise and moving cautionary tale about the French Revolution.  If Birth of a Nation was the racist curse of American cinema, it was also the first ingredient to lift that curse because of the films Griffith made after it, which he would never have made were it not for it as well as the reaction and criticism it received.

Birth is also not more racist today than it already was for the fact that present-day racists sometimes manage to find ever more redundant ways to caricature the film as the medium of cinema’s “Original Sin” that merits endless reparations in the form of “minority representation” in Hollywood.  If the past decade (2016 – present) isn’t its own kind of evidence that the medium of cinema is far more advanced by the imperfect humanism of D.W. Griffith in silent form than it is by the stale and mindless platitudes of Disney studios and pretentious A24 art projects today, no matter how colorful the posters are, then all may be lost and there might be no point writing about cinema ever again.  Yet ironically, modern racists have more to identify with the racism in Birth than almost anyone they might otherwise worry about, like the fact that, as noted earlier, the film opens with its own recognition of 1619, where “the first seed of disunion” was planted. Just ask Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times.

So how racist is Birth of a Nation?  Racist enough that many of the people most determined to hate it without recognition of its complexities have more in common with it than they otherwise realize.  Or, to put that another way – no more racist than any of you are.

– Vivek