(From FB)
Since many high school students across the country will be back to learning their history of the US from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, it's perhaps instructive to recall that when Birth of a Nation premiered at Clune's Auditorium in LA, to large protests by the NAACP, it was still called The Clansman, the title of the racist novel by Thomas Dixon it was based on. In fact, it's possible that the print that was shown at the White House, which generated such a frenzied reaction from Woodrow Wilson, was still called The Clansman. Dixon was a pal of Wilson's and had arranged the showing, the first film ever screened at the White House. Apparently, the film hit Wilson with a kind of cinematic gestalt, liberating his inner racist, which, of course, was never too deeply submerged in his twisted psyche to begin with. After emerging from Griffith's three hours of depraved melodrama, which rewrote American history as a story of white grievance and retribution, Wilson pronounced: "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Birth of a Nation was the first blockbuster. It played to packed movie houses across the country and Europe. People cried and cheered and gave the film standing ovations. And the film also did exactly what the NAACP predicted, it revived the KKK from its zombie-like repose with the imprimatur of the nascent Hollywood and a Democratic president. There were 700 hundred lynchings in the year following its release. They haven't stopped yet, although most are now done by police and filmed by their own bodycams. Birth of a Nation was also a story of the commidification of racism. The film built fortunes. In fact, it many ways it built Holllywood. Thomas Dixon, the writer of the novel, earned 25% of the profits of the film, which were enormous. By one account, Birth of a Nation amassed a global box office of $50 million, in 1915, as Europe was at war with itself. And Louis B. Mayer, then the owner of movie theaters in Boston, somehow wrangled the distribution rights for all of New England. He pocketed a million from the deal and soon moved to Hollywood himself and became one of the first moguls, never forgetting the themes and tropes of the picture that made him rich. Fortunes are to be made in the promotion of racism, which is probably the lesson that will be taught in economics classes across the New (ie., no longer restricted by the Mason-Dixon Line) South. Of course, they've been teaching the same thing using different terms at the University of Chicago for decades.
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