Breech Birth

Lillian & Dorothy Gish

For the past few years, a political movement has been gaining momentum in the world that is best known as "populism," but which could be more accurately described as "illiberalism." One of the major driving forces behind the movement has been a strong reaction against political correctness, an aggressive kind of radical liberalism that takes liberal values to altogether absurd lengths.

The May 4 issue of the Toledo Blade ran the following story:

"BOWLING GREEN — The longstanding Gish Theater is no more. Bowling Green State University trustees Friday afternoon voted 7-0 to remove the Gish name from the campus theater following student calls to do so, according to a university spokesman. For more than 40 years, the theater has honored actresses Dorothy and Lillian Gish. Members of the college’s Black Student Union questioned the theater's name because Lillian Gish is particularly well-known for starring in The Birth of a Nation. The film is a 1915 D.W. Griffith-directed silent-movie tribute to the Ku Klux Klan that is credited for reviving the white supremacist group. It also found that while the Gish sisters 'do not appear to have been advocates for racist or exclusionary practices or perspectives,' the content and historical impact of an actor’s work should be taken into account. The task force also stated it could not find documentation that Lillian Gish ever denounced the themes of the film or distanced herself from the director or his views."

According to the university spokesman, “We struggled with historical issues in today’s time and I think that, at the end of the day, that's what universities are all about ... As a public university we engage in these discussions and debate. While not everyone will agree with this decision, I know, this is what makes strong democracy. We listen to each other, learn from each other and move forward.” (1)

Oh, how they must have struggled! It is a well-worn fact that the pioneering D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915) tells the story of the Civil War from the slave-owner's side and has a powerful propagandistic aspect. As I put it ten years ago on this blog, "The case for the movie as a motion picture landmark is secure, but its content is compromised by its distortions of both history and morality in the portrayal of a 'heroic' antebellum South filled with cheerful slaves and slave owners cavorting in a bucolic paradise, destroyed by the greed and envy of Yankees. The heroes of Griffith's movie are the Ku Klux Klan, riding to the rescue in the film's last reel ... When it was released it was a sensational hit, and made Griffith a fortune. This was due largely to the riots the film's screening provoked and the refusal of some major cities to show it simply in the interests of public order. It also inspired lynchings, an activity that usually needed no provocation in many places in America. It was attacked in the press and Griffith was labelled as a racist. In response, Griffith was inspired to make his next blockbuster, the extravagant and simple-minded Intolerance (1916). Lillian Gish continually defended 'Mister Griffith,' as she called him against the charge of racism. But the film tells a very different story."

Lillian Gish needn't have bothered trying to defend Griffith. It shouldn't have come as a great surprise that the first American film to argue, convincingly, for the artistic potential of the film medium should have been such an electric reminder of America's Original Sin. Griffith was a major artist of the 20th century, but the stories that he decided the new medium should tell were at least 50 years old when the film that practically invented Hollywood was made. The Birth of a Nation stands like some monument to an outdated understanding of why the Civil War was fought. And, like so many other such monuments, like the one for Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, its legitimacy as a historical statement is being questioned. I have already expressed my own opinion on the subject of monuments to Confederate heroes. They stand not as reminders of our sins, but as rebukes to the outcome of what many Southerners still call the War Between the States, a war that, for them, hasn't concluded.

The Birth of a Nation is, if you will, a magnificent work of propaganda - comparable to Leni Riefenstahl's love poems to Hitler, Olympiad 1936 and Triumph of the Will. When Griffith died so ignominiously in Hollywood in 1948, James Agee, himself a Southerner, got carried away enough to write this about him:

"Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength ... There is not a man working in movies, or a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anybody else." As generous and well-intended as some of Agee's words sound, he was incapable, in 1948, of seeing just how far we have come from Griffith's attitudes in the seventy years since.

But why should Lillian Gish be held responsible for it? She was an actress who, like hundreds of others, appeared in the film, collected her fee, and moved on to her next project. (As much as I am appalled at the sheer waste of acting talent lavished on trash like the Harry Potter movies, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and the superhero movies, it's impossible to blame the actors, for whom they are nothing but [extremely] well paid gigs.) Gish was from Ohio, where Bowling Green State University is situated. Griffith was the son of a Confederate colonel who had a score to settle with the United States. Doubtless, Gish was utterly oblivious of Griffith's agenda in making The Birth of a Nation. He himself was incapable of seeing its broader implications and would never have dreamed how we react to it more than a century later. In 1969, Stanley Kauffman could write, "Trotsky's famous remark about Celine is that he 'walked into great literature as other men walk into their homes.' In aptness of genius, at least, the same can be said of Griffith and film. By now it's a commonplace that he gave the new medium its grammar; he also gave it many of its aspirations. What we see, first and fundamentally, in Griffith is a change of mind toward film that epitomizes - precedes - a huge cultural shift. At first he was ashamed of being associated with 'flickers'; he was a theatre actor and playwright, and he wanted to remain one. Within five years he had become oracular and evangelical on the subject of film ... The right man had come along at the right historical moment, and the result was a fury of creation that helped refashion the culture of the entire world." (3) All of this is just what any cinephile would say in any final assessment of Griffith's legacy to film. But the people who wanted Lillian Gish's name expunged from their campus were most definitely not cinephiles.

Needless to say, the BGSU spokesman was correct in admitting that not everyone agreed with their decision. Film historian Joseph McBride eloquently expressed his disdain for the decision in an essay published by Bright Lights Film Journal last Tuesday titled "Political Correctness Run Amok: Life and Lillian Gish at Bowling Green State University , Ohio." Expressing his understandable outrage at the decision, he wrote, "A university should be a place where the history of the arts is studied with care and perspective and the debate over artists’ legacies should be allowed to flourish, rather than a place where, as too often happens today, we try to obliterate from awareness the controversial aspects of our troubled history." (4)

Clearly, nobody has time for careful debate. Ours is an era of political intolerance, exacerbated by the election of a devisive and clumsy fool as president who seemed, during his campaign, to deliberately try to lose by spouting utterly stupid, sexist, racist statements, insulting every standard of civility. He continues to do so practically every day. And instead of provoking unanimous revulsion for him, tens of millions of Americans saw him as the Last White Hope and voted for him. As a reaction to his appeal to the lowest, commonest denomination, the rest of America is acting just as petulantly by demanding the immediate expulsion of every suggestion of disagreement or variation from the new draconian standards of correct behaving and correct thinking and correct expressing. As I suggested above, it is engendering a backlash that appears to be sweeping the world. It's getting to be difficult to imagine a positive outcome.

(1) Toledo Blade.
(2) James Agee.
(3) Stanley Kauffmann.
(4) Joseph McBride. McBride mentions in his essay that Quentin Tarantino denounced John Ford as a racist for his having appeared as a Ku Klux Klansman in The Birth of a Nation. This business of singling out actors for having appeared in a film that has fallen out of the Zeitgeist's favor reminds me of how Hitler went after actors who had appeared in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. One of them, Kurt Gerron, fled Germany to France, and thence to Holland. When the Nazis invaded, he and his family were taken first to Theresienstadt, where he was forced to make a film painting a cruelly false picture of life in the camp for foreign consumption. As soon as it was finished, Gerron and his family were shipped to Auschwitz and killed.