The Birth of a Nation : How a Legendary Director and A
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5>.. K' •.— •*-,X DICK LEHR $26.99/$30.oo can “By telling the story of the sweeping and headline-making cultural clash between filmmaker D. W. Griffith and brave newspaperman Monroe Trotter—and telling it with brio and panache—the gifted Dick Lehr should be highly commended. This book is both timely and important.” —WIL HAYGOOD, author of In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr. IN 1915, TWO MEN—ONE A JOURNALIST AGITATOR, the other a technically brilliant filmmaker—incited a public confrontation that roiled America, pitting black against white, Hollywood against Boston, and free speech against civil rights. Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a post-Confederate South. Almost fifty years earlier, Monroe’s father, James, was a sergeant in an all-black Union regiment that marched into Charleston, South Carolina, just as the Kentucky cavalry—including Roaring Jack Griffith, D. W.’s father—^fled for their lives. Griffith’s film. The Birth of a Nation, included actors in blackface, heroic portraits of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and a depiction of Lincoln’s assassination. Freed slaves were portrayed as villainous, vengeful, slovenly, and dangerous to the sanctity of American values. It was tremendously successful, eventually seen by 25 million Americans. But violent protests against the film flared up across the country. Monroe Trotter’s titanic crusade to have the film censored became a blueprint for dissent during the 1950s and 1960s. This is the fiery story of a revolutionary moment for mass media and the nascent civil rights movement, and the men clashing over the cultural and political soul of a still-young America standing at the cusp of its greatest days. THE BIRTH OF A NATION i aNATION HOW A LEGENDARY FILIVIIVIAKER AND A CRUSADING EDITOR REIGNITED AMERICA’S CIVIL WAR DICK LEHR PublicAffairs New York Copyright © 2014 by Dick Lehr Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107. PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Book design by Trish Wilkinson Set in 10.25 point New Century Schoolbook Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lehr, Dick. The Birth of a Nation : how a legendary filmmaker and a crusading editor reignited America’s Civil War / Dick Lehr. — First edition, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58648-987-8 (hardcover ; alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58648-988-5 (e-book) 1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861—1865—Motion pictures and the war. 2. Birth of a nation (Motion picture) 3. Griffith, D. W. (David Wark), 1875-1948. 4. Trotter, William Monroe, 1872-1934. 5. United States— Race relations—History—20th century. I. Title. E656.L44 2014 305.800973—dc23 2014029679 First Edition 10 987654321 For my daughters, Holly and Dana CONTENTS Author’s Note ix Prologue: January 2, 1915 xi PART hFATHERHND SONS 1. Guns, Bayonets, and Cannon “Grapes” 3 2. The Trotters 15 3. The Griffiths 25 4. On the Firing Line: 1895-1903 40 5. Character Work: 1896-1907 63 PART II: FINDING THEIR VOICES 6. Trotterism: 1903-1908 77 7. The Moviemaker: 1908-1913 91 8. Fame Rising, Fame Falling, Circa 1913 106 PART III: A DIRTS OE A NATION 9. 1914 127 10. The Wilson White House 149 11. Trotter Rides the Rails 163 vii Contents PART IV: IRIS 12. Curley’s Our Man, or Not? 183 13. Bringing Down the House 204 14. “We’ll Hang Tom Dixon ...” 225 PARTY: VICTORY AND DEFEAT 15. Victory at Hand 243 16. The Curtain Falls 261 Epilogue Til Acknowledgments 293 Notes 295 Selected Bibliography 323 Index 331 About the Author 343 AUTHOR’S NOTE ihis is a work of nonfiction. The people are real; no names have been changed; no changes have been made in the chronology of events. Dialogue is based on letters, journals, newspaper reports, and other archival records. Regarding terminology, I made the de¬ cision to use the terms Negro and colored that were commonplace during the period when this story occurred—the early twentieth cen¬ tury. When I read narrative histories I find the use of present terms African American or black jarring; they take me out of the historical moment. Besides, terminology is fluid. For example, the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, in a 1908 article titled “An Ostracised Race in Ferment,” made this observation: “Many Negroes who a few years ago called themselves ‘Afro-American’ or ‘Colored Americans’ and who winced at the name Negro now use Negro as the race name with pride.” It is also worth noting that the Associated Press, long the ar¬ biter of style in journalism, in December 1914 issued this comment about usage: “We have a broad rule to the effect that the word ‘Negro’ should be capitalized in our service, but we do not control the t5T)o- logical appearances of the word as it appears in the newspapers.” The latter part of the comment was the AP’s way of dealing with the fact that many newspapers using its service either changed Negro from upper to lower case or substituted derogatory terms in its place. Finally, Monroe Trotter’s preferred term changed over time; early on he favored Negro, but he later came to think that term suggested separatism and so he switched to Colored or Colored Americans. IX PROLOGUE Januaiy2,1915 Uavid Wark Griffith watched intently as curious residents of Riverside, California, filed into the Loring Opera House for a Sat¬ urday evening preview of a new movie promoted as the “Most Won¬ derful Motion Picture Ever.” The moviegoers crowded the ornate thousand-seat theater, which first opened in 1890 to showcase op¬ era and musicals and had only just begun to present the new me¬ dium of film. Excitement was building. Griffith, the motion picture’s director, had personally arranged the eight p.m. screening. He had even per¬ suaded many of the film’s stars to attend the sneak preview: among them the enchanting Lillian Gish, doe-eyed Mae Marsh, and popu¬ lar leading man Henry B. Walthall. The director had wanted to get away from the hubbub of his Holl5rwood studio, choosing this young city sixty miles inland from the expansive, big-sky locations in the California hills where he’d filmed some of the movie’s panoramic battle sequences. As was his custom for test screenings, Griffith settled into a seat at the back of the theater, not far from the booth where projectors were hand cranked. The operator had to find a frames-per-second speed that would satisfy Griffith: The pace had to suit both the fury of galloping horses and the solemnity of a death scene. His secretary and film editor—then called a film cutter—by his side. XI Prologue Griffith was at once studying the film and gauging the audience’s reaction, dictating notes for additional edits. “Every single subtitle, every situation, every shift in scene or change in a sequence that is made in editing a film, has to go before an audience for its test before being accepted as part of the complete product,” the director said about his process. Griffith was fanatical about his finishing touches. He was preparing for the premier in Los Angeles the next month, with even bigger things to come afterward, including a trip to Washington DC, to show the movie to President Wilson in what would be the first-ever film screening inside the White House. The Kentucky-born director was to celebrate his fortieth birthday in three weeks, but the personal milestone paled in comparison to the impact his film was going to have on the history of American cinema. For Griffith, 1915 marked the culmination of a professional journey that had begun in earnest at the turn of the century with his arrival in New York City as a raw, aspiring actor. He turned to directing in 1908, but nothing he’d made so far came close to the production quality of his new movie that took up twelve reels, or about 12,000 feet of film, consisting of more than 1,300 shots and 230 separate titles. For the most part, films had previously consisted of a series of long shots. The camera would stay in a fixed position, recording actors as though they were on a stage. Griffith moved the camera around, shooting a scene multiple times from various angles and then editing the footage to assemble a sequence of action shots that was more compelling, intense, and intimate. With his work, Griffith did more than any other director to legitimize film as art. He insisted that critics and the public move past the conven¬ tional view that movies were unworthy “spectacles” and recognize “photo-plays”—the term he preferred—for the sophisticated forms of artistic expression that they were. It was a campaign Griffith started in earnest with his new work. Titled The Clansman, this photo-play had been adapted from a popular novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction by southern author Thomas Dixon Jr.