1915 Having established itself in Hollywood (to escape copyright complications about camera technology on the east coast, and to take advantage of California’s never-ending sunshine), the movie industry eagerly sought material to film. They found it in popular fiction. At first (as with camera technology) they plundered, reaping where they had not sown.
The formal relationship between screen and printed page was inaugurated – controversially – on 15 April 1914 when D.W. Griffith closed a deal to buy the rights to Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (Griffith’s employees, reports Wyn Craig Wade in The Fiery Cross, ‘thought their boss had gone mad’). Griffith began shooting the movie in California on 4 July – meaningful date.
Dixon (1864–1946) was born, during the Civil War, in North Carolina, one of five children of a Baptist minister. Before the war the Dixon family was rich. After the war they found themselves plunged in abject poverty, down there with the ‘darkies’ they had always lorded it over. It had a (de)formative effect on the growing Thomas.
During these hard years his father (also Thomas Dixon) rode with the Ku Klux Klan and became a senior member, or ‘Wizard’, as did other disaffected members of his family. The KKK, an underground movement, was formed by veterans of the Confederate Army to assert white supremacy (by violence if necessary) against reforms imposed by the victorious North and the hated Republican party. It established a surrogate aristocracy for an unfairly (as they thought) degraded master-class.
A clever boy, Thomas went to Johns Hopkins on a full scholarship, qualifying as a lawyer in 1886. One of his contemporaries at Hopkins, and a personal friend, was the future president, Woodrow Wilson.
Dixon was elected to the North Carolina legislature in 1885 but resigned a year later to enter the Baptist ministry. He was a wildly popular ‘lyceum lecturer’ and gave dramatic sermons to admiring congregations as far north as New York and Boston.
Dixon’s career in fiction began with his seeing a stage performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which inflamed his dormant KKK sentiments. He resolved to strike back with romans à these arguing the southern cause, notably The Clansman (1905), which sold 40,000 copies in its first ten days of publication.
The narrative opens with victory for the Union being shouted through the streets of Washington. Young, beautiful and ‘fair’ Elsie Stoneman has nursed back to health a young Rebel officer, Ben Cameron, who will face the firing squad when he recovers for the crime of fighting behind enemy lines as a ‘guerrilla’. Elsie goes to Lincoln and successfully pleads in person for Ben’s life. The fatherly president gladly grants a pardon. He goes on to explain that his aim for the United States has never been negro emancipation, perish the thought, but repatriation of the former slaves to Africa: ‘I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the Negro into our social and political life as our equal.’ ‘Mulatto citizenship’ is an abomination.
Elsie and Ben duly marry and return to his native South Carolina, only to discover that ‘the white man’s day is done’. A band of blacks gang-rape Ben’s former love, the ‘belle’ Marion Lenoir, and her mother. Unable to live with the shame, the ladies commit suicide. The Klan avenges them. Bloodily. The ‘Fiery Cross’ burns everywhere. The white-sheeted riders restore justice and (for the uppity blacks) condign retribution. The novel’s last words are: ‘Civilization has been saved, and the South redeemed from shame.’
Immortality was bestowed on The Clansman when D.W. Griffith took it as the source for his epochal film, The Birth of a Nation. Dixon was the first novelist ever to receive ‘subsidiary rights’ ($2,000) for a film adaptation of his work. After a successful sneak preview in Los Angeles, Griffith prepared for the major release in New York. The newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) mounted a series of legal protests, on the grounds of racial defamation.
Dixon – by now a veteran in racist polemic – wrote to his college friend Woodrow Wilson on 3 February 1915. The president, he suggested, might like to look at this crowning achievement of the burgeoning American film industry. On 18 February 1915 there was a private showing of the movie in the East Room of the White House for Wilson, his wife and daughters. Dixon and Griffith were present. The president was impressed: ‘It is like writing history with lightning’, he said.
All legal challenges overcome, the film was released in New York (at a massive $2 a ticket) on 3 March, at the aptly named Liberty Theater. Men and women (many wearing antebellum fancy dress) packed out the opening evening.
The Birth of a Nation – which closely follows the plot of The Clansman – is regarded as a classic of American film. And also, alas, an everlasting blemish on American race relations.