Vidor, a third-generation Texan, encountered black workers employed at his father's sawmills when he was child and there he became familiar with their spirituals. As an adult, he was not not immune to the racial prejudices common among whites in the South of the 1920s. His paternalistic claim to know the character of "real negro" is reflected in his portrayal of some rural black characters as "childishly simple, lecherously promiscuous, fanatically superstitious, and shiftless". Vidor, nonetheless, avoids reducing his characters to "Uncle Tom" stereotypes and his treatment bears no resemblance to the overt racism in D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915).