There might not be a more (terrifyingly) apt moment to talk about Dixon’s 1905 play, which provided the basis for D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. 1 There’s a
There might not be a more (terrifyingly) apt moment to talk about Dixon’s 1905 play, which provided the basis for D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. 1 There’s a legend surrounding a presidential endorsement of the film: after the viewing of the movie, President Wilson supposedly declared that it was “like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” 2 And, of course, the Ku Klux Klan endorsed the person being sworn into the office of the presidency today. There has been a lot of talk about how we cannot – must not – normalize white supremacy: but the KKK has been normalized – even romanticized – in popular culture since its founding in the Reconstruction period – and Dixon’s play is certainly an instance of this.
The Clansman as play-text found its origin in Dixon’s “Reconstruction Romance” trilogy: The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). Dixon had the theatre bug, and decided to adapt the first two novels into a stage play: he was both co-creator and co-financier of The Clansman. Dixon’s play was not the first time Klan characters appeared on the American stage, but it was certainly their most popular appearance. 3 Dixon took the stage at the premiere in Norfolk, Virginia during the third act curtain call, to tell the mixed race audience in attendance that his play was a “sequel” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, claiming that his object was to “teach the north, the young north, what it has never known—the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful reconstruction period.” 4 Of course – in all The Clansman’s manifestations – all the African American characters were played by white performers in blackface.
It is worth noting, too, how Dixon’s play would have undermined audience expectations, starting with the very first scene. The Southern plantation – especially in the decades following the Civil War – had been romanticized ad nauseam in popular culture, and melodramas had long drawn on picturesque Southern settings. 5 So the charming Southern house called for in the stage directions, with honeysuckle, roses, and a “rustic arbor” with “mountains seen in the distance beyond the river valley” were all familiar settings to an audience at the time. Dixon, however, chose to disrupt the “idyllic” (read: white-dominated) Southern atmosphere with “characteristic crowds of negroes” including “negro troopers” milling about and stuffing the ballot box, while a handful of whites make their way to the Cameron family house. 6 The first words of the play are spoken by a black preacher, who asks his followers: “Ain’t I done tole ye dat de Lawd call de cullud men ter come up on high…de judgemen’ day done come fur de white Man!” 7 Right from the get-go, Dixon is setting up antagonistic race relations: he is creating the conditions of a race war, an invasion of white-dominated utopias, and lamenting the “suffering” due to disrupted racial hierarchies.
More importantly, this was not a “typical” depiction of a stage dominated by black characters, for the time period: this was not a plantation spectacle, or a minstrel show. The black characters here are declaring the end of the white man, and are explicitly making a travesty of the democratic voting process. This would have created an even deeper rift between audience expectations (in regards to plantation spectacles or Southern melodramas), and Dixon’s racial melodrama. 8
At its most simplistic, The Clansman establishes the need for the Klan in the South immediately following the war – mostly to protect the white ladies. Flora, the hero’s younger sister, commits suicide rather than be raped by a black man. Cameron’s sweetheart Elsie, daughter of the carpetbagger August Stoneman, must be revenged or protected by the Klan. The racial politics of August Stoneman – based on Thaddeus Stevens, who Dixon seemingly believed was nothing short of demonic – jeopardizes the virtue of white women. White men – abused and divested of voting and political power by the corrupt Radical Republican process – must be reinstalled as the head of the hierarchy. General Nathan Forrest makes a brief fictional cameo, convincing the hero Ben Cameron that the South is at the brink of destruction. He describes his visit to the “black parliament at work:”
I…watched them through fetid smoke, vapors of stale whiskey and the deafening roar of half drunken brutes, while they voted millions in taxes their leaders had already stolen, and I had a vision. I stood beside the open grave of the South! Beneath that minstrel farce I saw a tragedy as deep and dark as was ever woven of the blood and tears of the conquered people. I heard the death rattle in the throat of my race, barbarism strangling civilization by brute force. 9
At the vortex of this white race death is Silas Lyn