D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"-- How Woodrow Wilson Helped Revive the KKK, and the Lynching of Leo Frank

D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"-- How Woodrow Wilson Helped Revive the KKK, and the Lynching of Leo Frank

So, this is some history worth knowing. In February of 1915, the most infamous silent film in US history, D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" opened in American Theaters. It was Hollywood's first ever epic blockbuster full length feature film, literally the film whose nationwide box office success made Hollywood the world's capitol of movies. The movie was based on a novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. and the original title was "The Clansman".

Racist Confederate sympathizer President Woodrow Wilson at the time praised the film as "the true story of the Civil War", and its technical achievements as being like "History written with lightning".

It was in fact a propaganda film, glorifying the Confederacy, defending Slavery, and raising up the Ku Klux Klan as heroic knights on horseback, who came to the rescue of fair haired Southern damsels threatened by Black Union Army rapists in the post Civil War South. It depicted Blacks as subhuman, and railed against their election to the state legislature of South Carolina, depicting them as eating Watermelon and Fried Chicken during official sessions. You have to actually watch the movie to believe it. 

(Photo- the movie scene depicting the above first Black Legislative majority in South Carolina)

(Photo- the original movie poster)

The impact of the film itself, and Wilson's praise for it, resulted in the revival of the KKK into a mass based national organization of millions, after it had gone defunct not long after Reconstruction, including large membership in Northern states like Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. It's membership rose from an estimated 5,000 in 1920 to 5,000,000 in 1925.

(Photo, a Ku Klux Klan affiliated Church in Alabama, in April of 1927)

Wanting to make their mark, the newly constituted Klan decided to commit a high profile political lynching to announce their comeback. Seizing their opportunity, they decided to kill a Jew, thereby announcing that their race hatred would be extended to other minorities and foreigners. (tapping into great waves of revived anti-immigrant ferment in the 1920's)

Leo Frank was an American Jewish factory manager in Atlanta. The factory made pencils. He was unjustly accused and convicted of the murder of 13 year old Mary Phagan, a Factory employee. The case was nationally explosive, as Frank had received a large dose of "Southern Justice" usually only reserved for Blacks. 

He was defended by a large national following which decried the travesty of his trial, while at the same time, he became the symbol of a great wave of anti-semitism by those who wanted a dead Jewish scapegoat. The anti-semitism which erupted at that time was so intense that the B'nai Brith formed its national organization, the Anti Defamation League in response. Frank was actually exonerated, but for him that meant only a sentence reduction from death to life in prison.

On August 16, 1915, not long after the Birth of a Nation fueled Klan revival, a crew of armed Klansmen stormed the jail and kidnapped Frank, infuriated by the commutation of his sentence, then took him to nearby Marietta Georgia, and lynched him from a tree limb. The lynchers included prominent Marietta citizens who were never charged. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned Frank posthumously in 1986!!!

One of the reasons for the later notable activism and financial support for Martin Luther King by American Jews was the memory of the injustice against Frank, as well as their general sympathies with African American victims of slavery and persecution. 

Also noteworthy was the disgusting and evil protection of the Klan by racist sociopath,  J. Edgar Hoover, later the Director of the then recently formed FBI. Hoover's loyalty was to the tradition of the Confederacy, and its terrorist arm, the Klan. What Hoover did do was to assume high profile leadership of the "Palmer Raids," a "Red Scare", in which he declared war on American European Immigrants, especially of Mediterranean based and Eastern European descent, and accused them of importing Communist Anarchist terrorist doctrines into the US. This wave of persecution found purchase in the aftermath of the McKinley assassination in 1901 by the Emma Goldman protégé, immigrant Leon Czolgosz, and an anarchist bomb blast which hit Wall Street on September 16, 1920, killing forty and seriously injuring hundreds.. 

Hoover, like Trump today, demonized immigrants as vermin, filth, radicals, criminals, vagrants and rapists, and used the Palmer Raids to gain notoriety and rise to the top of the FBI.  Over the next few years during and after "The Great War" Hoover organized a racist operation like that of Trump's ICE, to round up immigrants on a pretext and deport them back to their native countries, despite being legal immigrants. German Americans were heavily targeted, not surprisingly since we had been at war with them.  The anti German sentiment was so fierce that Frankfurters and Wieners were renamed Hot Dogs, and Sauerkraut renamed Liberty Cabbage. Operas and concert halls, orchestras that performed Beethoven or other German composers were shut down by vigilante mobs and local politicians, and its musicians deported now not having jobs. And of course, the racist Hoover gave his blessing to the lynch mobs of the South and their murder of thousands of Blacks over a 50 year or more period.

Not inconsequential for our situation today is that Donald Trump's father Fred, and Trump's lawyer Roy Cohn were both very very close to Hoover, and Daddy Trump's racist landlord discrimination tactics in New York protected by Hoover's friends. Fred Trump had received actual news coverage of his attendance and brief detainment after a KKK rally in New York in 1927,  which had turned violent and led to arrests. Though never identified directly as an active member or supporter, he was in attendance at this 1,000 person parade in Jamaica NY, and was detained by police. It is, however, hard to imagine that with 5 million members nationwide, the racist father of Donald Trump wasn't at least a follower. And as they say, "The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree."

This "Virus" of KKK racism has, as we know, been there all along, remaining active, until it was brought into the Lab of the 2016 Trump campaign, engineered, weaponized, and set loose to infect our population again.

There's a direct line of continuity from "Birth of a Nation's" revival of the KKK, and what you see in Trump's borrowing of the language of George Wallace with his threats to shoot protesters and rioters today. Trump's Presidency has had the same or worse impact on America as Woodrow Wilson's endorsement of Birth of a Nation, in reviving something incalculably evil and destructive from the slime pit of our history and spreading it into a mass movement. Hopefully, it doesn't take it 50 years again to shovel it back into the pit.