The Birth of a Movement by Dick Lehr

Author:Dick Lehr [LEHR, DICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

In early January 1915, the NAACP delivered its official response to the White House affair, sending President Wilson a formal letter, along with several newspaper editorials. “This Association does not for a moment CONDONE any rudeness or lack of courtesy to you,” wrote board chairman Joel E. Spingarn, “but wishes to place itself on record as agreeing with Mr. Trotter that the slightest discrimination against colored people in the federal service is a grave injustice.” Simultaneously, NAACP officials were realizing a new firestorm was developing—D. W. Griffith’s The Clansman, with its announced February opening in Los Angeles and (retitled The Birth of a Nation) New York City run beginning in March. The organization’s leaders scrambled to mobilize its opposition, and one problem was figuring out where the filmmaker was taking his movie next. Griffith was not about to notify the NAACP of his schedule, and a cat-and-mouse game began, the association sending out telegrams to its branches alerting them to be on the lookout for any publicized runs in their locale. The first negative reviews had begun to appear, most notably in the March 20 issue of the New Republic, which ran a lengthy analysis by Irish writer Francis Hackett who, while agreeing that “as a spectacle it is stupendous,” concluded “the film is aggressively vicious and defamatory” to the Negro race.

Then, in late March, before any public announcements were made, intelligence surfaced about Griffith’s plans for a Boston run to start sometime in early April. The information came to light when Rolfe Cobleigh, associate editor of the liberal Boston-based magazine the Congregationalist, wrote to Griffith after reading about the movie in the New York newspapers and also hearing from friends who had seen it there. Although he had not yet viewed it, Cobleigh wrote to ask Griffith about the film’s false history, alleged glorification of lynching, and incitement of race prejudice. But Thomas Dixon, not Griffith, was the one who took up the epistolary sword and replied. “You surely could not have seen our picture—or you wouldn’t write the letter in that tone,” Dixon said. “The only two scenes any sane man can object fill just two minutes of a 3 hour entertainment.” For the next several weeks, the two engaged in a war of words through letters and a meeting, during which the novelist cited multiple endorsements from important people, including Wilson—name-dropping that only added to the president’s misery that his favor to Dixon had caused him. In fact, the same week Dixon and Cobleigh had begun their tangle, Joseph Tumulty fielded a letter from a wealthy Washington, DC, matron, daughter of the late James G. Blaine, former Republican governor of Maine and Speaker of the House of Representatives during Reconstruction. Harriet Blaine Beale had just returned from New York City, where she and her sister had seen the movie—which she found to be “calculated to arouse the worst form of race hatred and to send every ignorant white man away with a feeling that every negro should be lynched.

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