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OLD PURPOSE, “NEW BODY”:THE BIRTH OF A NATION AND THE REVIVAL OF THE KU KLUX KLAN1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Katherine Lennard
Katherine Lennard*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
email: klennard@umich.edu
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Extract

When a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan first arrived in Butte, Montana, in the summer of 1921, he placed an ad in the Butte Miner depicting a white-robed man astride a bucking horse. Borrowed from the publicity materials for D W. Griffith's groundbreaking film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), this image of a uniformed figure was a fixture of Klan propaganda. The advertisement faced two directions: it connected the newly formed Klan with its Reconstruction Era predecessor, while also demonstrating that the Klan imagined itself through the revisionist lens of Griffith's film and its textual inspiration, Thomas Dixon Jr.'s play and novel The Clansman (1905). The image of a white-robed Klansmen in the Butte Miner was thus a symbol of what Klan leaders and the popular media alike called the Klan's “revival,” the process through which the historical organization was brought to life in a new form.

Type
Public Commemoration: The Birth of a Nation
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 616 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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Footnotes

1

Thanks to Elaine Frantz Parsons, James W. Cook Jr., Ellen Crain, Rachel Miller, Alex Olson, Dan Patch, Wendy Sung, and Anna Weber.

References

NOTES

2 Butte (MT) Miner, July 16, 1921.

3 Crucial exceptions are found in the following works, which track changes between various iterations of novel, play, and film. Johnson, Stephen, “Re-stirring an Old Pot: Adaptation, Reception and the Search for an Audience in Thomas Dixon's Performance Text(s) of The Clansman,” Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film 34 (Dec. 2007): 4–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W Griffith & the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009); Anthony Slide, American Racist the Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004); Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

4 Parsons, Elaine Frantz, “Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan,” The Journal of American History 92 (Dec. 2005): 811–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Linking the Klan to fraternal practice had been a way to justify and validate the existence of the order since at least 1884, when former Ku-Klux John C. Lester, and Minister D. L. Wilson published their sympathetic history of the organization. Lester and Wilson, Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment (Nashville: Wheeler, Osborn and Duckworth Manufacturing Co., 1884).

6 Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905), 215, 323.

7 For Dixon's experience as a member of Kappa Alpha at Wake Forest University, see History and Catalogue of the Kappa Alpha Fraternity (Nashville: Kappa Alpha Order, 1891), xxvi, 229; “The Review of a Decade,” Kappa Alpha Journal 10:11 (Oct. 1892): 8Google Scholar. Dixon's fraternal model of the Klan borrowed from “The Revised and Amended Prescript Order of the ***,” a copy of which was discovered in a Columbia University Library in 1900, to envision the hierarchical organization of the Klan. This text was the product of a gathering of Tennessee Klansmen in 1868, and outlined an (unsuccessful) attempt to organize disparate local Klans into a regionally administrated militant fraternal order. “Ritual of the Ku Klux Klan,” Times (Washington D.C.), Mar. 12, 1901; “Kuklux Secrets,” Brownsville (TX), Daily Herald, Mar. 20, 1901. Prescript reprinted in Lester and Wilson, The Ku Klux Klan; and The Clansman, Play Souvenir (Southern Amusement Company, New York, n.d.), Ku Klux Klan Collection, folder 30, box 1, Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

8 Stage directions on various extant scripts for the play only mention Klan costume in brief handwritten additions to the printed text. See Dixon, Thomas, “The Clansman: An American Drama,” Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film 34:2 (Dec. 2007): 135, note 149Google Scholar.

9 Billboard, June 30, 1906, 13.

10 Billboard, Oct. 7, 1905; Kansas City (MO) Star, Feb. 21, 1906; Wilkes Barre (PA) Times, Mar. 27, 1906; Rock Island (IL) Argus, Apr. 17, 1906; Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 8, 1908.

11 Dixon, The Clansman, 339; Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 24, 1908.

12 The Clansman, Play Souvenir, Klan Collection, folder 30, box 1.

13 “Details of the ‘Clansman,’” Rock Island (IL) Argus, Apr. 17, 1906; St. Landry Clarion (Opelousis, LA) Oct. 26, 1907; Bee (Earlington, KY), Jan. 30, 1908; East Oregonian (Pendleton) Oct. 8, 1908, Evening Edition; Arizona Republican (Phoenix) Dec. 2, 1908; St. Landry Clarion (Opelousas, LA), Oct. 26, 1907.

14 Times Dispatch (Richmond, VA), Sept. 17, 1905; East Oregonian (Pendleton), Oct. 17, 1908; Daily Ardmorite (Ardmore, OK), Nov. 10, 1907.

15 In her memoir, actress Lillian Gish noted that Klansmen “white and scarlet robes” as dictated by Dixon. The robes in The Clansman are all white with scarlet trim, but it is possible that the dark robes in the film are entirely scarlet, like the robes worn by the traitorous Klansmen in Dixon's novel and play The Traitor (1907). Lillian Gish with Ann Pinchot. Mr. Griffith, The Movies, and Me (New York: Prentice Hall Trade, 1969), 138; Pensacola (FL) Journal, Oct. 25, 1908.

16 Precisely who made the Klan costumes for the film is still up for debate. The most likely candidate was the Los Angeles office of Goldstein and Co., a new branch of a San Francisco based Theatrical Costume and Wig Shop. Robert Goldstein, the company's heir was one of the largest investors in the The Birth of a Nation. Stokes, D. W. Griffith, 97, 176–77. Costume Designer Clare West is credited for her work on the film, but she was not yet affiliated with a studio or shop to actually produce the robes. The most direct account of the film's costume is from star Lillian Gish, who claimed that her mother made some of the costumes. Gish, Mr. Griffith, 138.

17 Stokes, D. W. Griffith's, 195.

18 William J. Simmons, “The Ku Klux Klan: Yesterday, Today, Forever” (Atlanta, 1916), 1. The Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

19 “Constitution of the Order” in Simmons, “The Ku Klux Klan.”

20 Ibid.

21 Simmons, “The Ku Klux Klan.”

22 Ned McIntosh, “Capitol Gossip: New Ku Klux Klan gets Charter from the State,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 7, 1915; Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 14.

23 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan “Kloran” (Atlanta, 1916), 13. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan. On the religious properties of Klan ritualism, see Baker, Kelly J., “Robes, Fiery Crosses, and the American Flag: The Materiality of the 1920s Klan's Christianity, Patriotism, and Intolerance,” Material Religion 7:3 (2011): 312–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.