I have heard that D.W. Griffiths classic movie (“Birth Of A Nation”) re-energized the Ku Klux Klan…at a time when it was dying off.
Is this true?As far as I know, the KKK was founded immediately after the Civil War (1865), and its main goal was to terrorize black people, so that they would not be able to vote, and overturn local governments. By 1900 or so, the Klan was almost moribund-why would the release of a movie be enough to revive it? Or was its revival in the 1920’s, a reaction to a new “invasion” of the Deep South (the first round of industrialization of the South)?
An essay on the American Experience website attributes the Klan’s revival largely to the marketing efforts of William Joseph Simmons, a salesman of memberships in fraternal organizations who saw the film in 1915 and thought it would be excellent PR for a KKK membership drive.
Other way around, AFAICT: the nation’s shift to urban living and cosmopolitan lifestyles and the growth of Northern cities was threatening to rural agriculturalists who led the way in the Klan revival.
The way I understand it is that the Klan essentially went extinct shortly after the end of Reconstruction during the 1880’s. The Klan revival in the 20’s was certainly a response to industrialization, the new wave of immigrants and other social factors but the role Birth of a Nation played was that it glorified and reminded people of the first Klan. Had it not been for the film, the racist rage still would have existed but there might not have been the notion of dressing it in the trappings of the old Klan.
Note that the Klan in the 1920s was double evil: not only was it a racist organization, but it was also a multilevel marketing scheme, much like Amway.
Klan members were encouraged to buy Klan merchandise and regalia; a cut went to the person recruiting them. If you recruited someone, you got a cut of what they purchased. The money moved up the chain of command, making those at the top millionaires. Ironically, the Klan was basically ineffective in making changes; the people involved were more interested in making money than in carrying out their program.
The History Detectives just did an episode featuring a Klan album as one of the researched objects. It touched on the post-WWI resurgence of the Klan and I’m pretty sure “Birth of a Nation” was mentioned.
Worth checking out, I think you can stream episodes off the PBS website.
The Klan faded in post-reconstruction because the South had gotten what it wanted. They had their statehood back and blacks were now ‘in their place’ officially. The Klan trying to do anything more would just a attract unwanted Northern attention. Plus the Army had made inroads against the Klan while reconstruction had been going on. Nobody wanted to be part of a group that was fighting for a goal that was already won and would just get yourself into trouble or your state in trouble.
Birth of a Nation was instrumental in inspiring the new Klan. The movie is a massive strokefest of the Klan. Griffith was a very, very bad man for writing this crap, even without the benefit of modern attitudes. He has blood on his hands.
Thanks for the replies. I would think that by 1915, the Civil War was a fading memory in the South-most of the veterans were in their 70’s, and two generations had grown up since the war. The movie did portray the invading yankees in a bad light, and also portrayed the KKK as a patriotic group. Still, its hard to see how a movie alone could have broght the moribund klan back to life.
In a way one could wonder, given the historic period, if absent Griffith feeding them that media fantasy version of the Klan the new wave of racist/economic rage would have instead led to the formation of something more resembling of the then-contemporary European fascist-nationalist movements.
I also understand that the 1920’s version of the KKK showed up in places where it never originally existed (states like Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky).
So it seems that the KKK in the 1920’s was a completely different organization.
The laundry list of factors behind the post-WWI revival of the Klan would include all of the following:
The easing of hostility between white Northerners and Southerners, partly as a result of the Spanish-American War, partly because of the passage of time;
The emergence of the Dunning School of historians, who argued (early 1900’s) that allowing black people to vote during Reconstruction had been a Really Bad Mistake, and that restoration of white supremacy was natural and proper, which became the dominant view of Reconstruction for the next sixty years;
The works of Thomas Dixon, who reasoned that if Reconstruction was bad, anyone opposed to it was good, and wrote a series of novels romanticizing and glorifying the Klan, and added made-up nonsense like burning crosses;
The Griffiths movie, which borrowed from Dixon;
The backlash against radicals which followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, and the associated backlash against immigrants, who were often perceived as disloyal during the war and radical afterward;
Increasing Northern racism as black people moved to northern cities and took industrial jobs during the war;
Increasing hostility in all parts of the country toward Catholics and Jews, as a concommitant to the backlash against immigrants, exemplified by the Frank trial;
feelings of dislocation among rural and small-town Americans, as the country urbanized and formerly independent small farmers watched their sons move to cities and take jobs on assembly lines;
and finally, not to be neglected, per RealityChuck, the drive of a single individual who figured out a way to make money off of all of this and invented an insidious MLM scheme.
So as you can see the movie was only one factor among many.
The revival had little to do with the actual Civil War and everything to do with the present day situation in the 1920s.
Freddy the Pig’s excellent list shows a number of the major trends at work, but I can think of even more.
We think of the world changing rapidly today, but compared with the period from 1900-1925 we are as static as the Dark Ages. The staggering growth in the size of cities, both from internal migrations from farms and small towns and the nearly million immigrants per year, changed the balance of power from a rural-dominated world to an urban-dominated one. These immigrants were largely from Eastern and Southern Europe, both darker than earlier waves and heavily Catholic. Cities electrified, put in massive public transit systems, tunnels, and bridges, built huge school, hospital, water, police, and fire systems, raised newspapers and wire services to a true national media, added telephones, radio, airplanes, and electric appliances, and paved streets and built highways for the automobile to create unprecedented individual movement. A parallel Catholic set of systems, especially schools and hospitals, grew to service people often unwelcome from the political machines that created the municipal services. World War I staggered the country and then the Flu epidemic of 1918-19 created waves of fear that we can no longer imagine. Harding’s victory in 1920 really was about normalcy. Everybody was tired of change and wanted to go back to simpler days - but the pace of change increased rather than stopped.
The long battle against liquor was largely drawn across class and religious boundaries, pitting rural Protestants against urban Catholics. This fit into and helped build a religious revival of fundamentalism. The new Klan used this as a base for drawing those who felt they were on the losing side of change. They were against blacks, but also against Catholic and Jews. They were against urbanization and change. The Civil War and southern dominance of white non-urban Protestants made for a fantastic symbol. Symbols unite people; they’re easier to grasp than an intellectual argument and can substitute for an amorphous dislike. Being against change has some power - some fraction of the population always is and they can get political traction if they come together - but that’s always a minority in the U.S. Being against “them” as the cause for change is a surefire way to get that minority together and into power.
Birth of a Nation was a gigantic national talking point in an age when movies were popular as a group but individually small. Becoming a national sensation was still rare; that gave it disproportionate power as a symbol. But it was a symbol played off on by forces that were already in existence.