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.Footnote ² 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.

The Birth of a Nation is often credited with reviving the Ku Klux Klan, or at least reviving popular interest in the organization. But popular narratives that attribute the revival of the organization to the film suggest a technological determinism that underestimates the sophistication of early twentieth-century audiences as they encountered new media. And focusing on the technological and artistic innovations of the film can neglect the impact of Dixon's novel and play, which helped Americans see a more unified version of the Klan almost a decade earlier.Footnote ³ Thanks to the obvious ties among novel, play, and film, it is easy to collapse the complex network of Dixon's influences, including his experiences in a college fraternity, early published histories of the Klan, contemporary racial science, and romantic poetry. Untangling the origins of the white-robed figure pictured in the Klan's recruiting materials can get complicated quickly. Still, the Butte Miner advertisement gets to the center of a major problem identified by early critics of both Dixon's and Griffith's work. What was the relationship between Progressive Era artistic representations of the nineteenth-century Klan and the enactment of violence in real life? Did these representations have causal power? This short essay will focus on how the design of costumes in The Birth of a Nation complicated, rather than solidified the primacy of, Dixon's representation of white uniformed Klansmen, thus troubling the relationship between the film and the newly revived Klan.

While many Progressive Era historians and cultural producers used images of the Ku Klux Klan as symbols of the “lost cause,” no representation of the organization was as influential as those produced by novelist and playwright Thomas Dixon, Jr. One of Dixon's most enduring legacies was his aesthetic revision of the motley and colorful costumes actually worn by Reconstruction Era Klansmen.Footnote ⁴ Clad in uniform white robes, Dixon's romanticized Klansmen performed violence as a moral duty, in response to the social unrest of Southern Reconstruction. The strange shape of the long robes and spiked helmets Dixon described resembled garments worn by some Reconstruction Era Klansmen, but their ritual uniformity was Dixon's primary innovation. Uniform robes evoked the hierarchical structure of military orders, while also drawing on the “timeless” or “exotic” aesthetics that many fraternal orders adopted at the turn of the century.Footnote ⁵ Their shape highlighted distinctions between white-robed Klansmen and Civil War soldiers, whose uniforms, Dixon's characters argued, were devalued through their use by black Union soldiers.Footnote ⁶ This aesthetic transformation was part of Dixon's larger project to rehabilitate popular memories of the Klan. Building on his own experience in a college fraternity that had been driven underground by administrators, Dixon portrayed the Reconstruction Era Klan as a hierarchical and disciplined fraternity that reported to a network of Klan leaders across the South.Footnote ⁷ White uniform robes with dramatic helmets demonstrated both the otherworldly character of the order's mission, and the solemn discipline of the fraternity's adherents.

When The Clansman was adapted for the stage, the Klansmen's costumes were drawn directly from the florid descriptions of the white-robed “knights” that populated the novel.Footnote ⁸ Dixon's aesthetic symbolism was amplified by the need to attract an audience for an already-controversial show. While tours of The Clansman clearly profited from the “acrimonious discussions” surrounding the play, the production staff sought to meet this controversy with a visually spectacular production.Footnote ⁹ On stage, the whiteness of the robes was not only symbolically significant, but provided a blinding spectacle when lit with stage lights in the large theatrical houses that the tours played.Footnote ¹⁰ But where Dixon's novel could describe a “squadron of 250 men” on horseback, even the most grandiose theatrical touring company had limits on the number of Klansmen they could put on a stage—though they did include horses for effect.Footnote ¹¹ Production photographs of the Northern touring company show a total of sixteen men dressed in matching robes, with minor decorative variations to demonstrate the wearer's rank.Footnote ¹²

Judging by the volume of press coverage that discussed the stagecraft required to mount these productions, turn-of-the-century audiences were fascinated with the labor that went into making Dixon's vision of uniformity visible on stage. While far fewer than in Dixon's novel, the costumes shown in production photos demonstrate the work of skilled costume artisans.Footnote ¹³ Uniformity was to be maintained throughout—between the actors of any given cast, by the costumes worn by a particular actor over a long tour, and across the various companies of the production that toured simultaneously. Due to the wide availability of the book, and regular debates over the historical and artistic merit of the production in the popular press, audiences had developed their own expectations of how a “historically accurate” Klansmen should look. And thanks to these often-syndicated reports, Americans knew when Dixon's image of the Klan was being drawn upon. A 1907 article suggests that Dixon's distinct version of the Klan was understood as original: a group of actors portraying Klansmen were arrested in Fort Worth, Texas on the charge of theatrical piracy.Footnote ¹⁴

The commitment to Dixon's image of uniformity that characterized theatrical productions of The Clansman did not extend to The Birth of a Nation's set. Lead actors in the film wore white robes with pointed helmets, similar to costumes in the theatrical production of The Clansman. Background actors donned garments that could vary widely in shape or decoration, as in the “Parade of the Klansmen,” where colored (possibly scarlet) robes and elaborately decorated helmets are visible.Footnote ¹⁵ These variations are more consistent with evidence about the costuming of the Reconstruction Era Klan than Dixon's uniforms, particularly in the decorative appliques and designs on some of the hoods and robes. Yet the presence of these non-uniform garments may say more about the creation of this film during a transitional moment in the emergent studio system. One of the first films to commission the production of costumes, The Birth of a Nation was made at a time when many actors and most extras still provided their own costumes, and before independent costume shops were fully incorporated into studios to enable large scale construction, and coordination of costumes.Footnote ¹⁶ Griffith commissioned the production of military uniforms from a local costume shop, but there seems to be no record of the production of Klan regalia for the film. As Melvyn Stokes has argued, the predominance of white robes in Griffith's film occurred despite the significant historical research that Griffith undertook to ensure an authentic depiction.Footnote ¹⁷ Whether the result of a developing industry, or an attempt to demonstrate some historical fidelity, the appearance of these robes in the film suggests that the singular image of a white-uniformed Klansman was not as coherent as we might now imagine.

If nineteenth-century Klansmen dressed in strange costumes to demonstrate their rejection of both political and social order, early twentieth-century Klansmen used regalia to demonstrate their commitment to the order that their predecessors rejected. When William J. Simmons announced his Klan revival in 1915, he used white uniform robes to show that his order “reincarnate[d] the spiritual purpose” of the Reconstruction Era Klan in a “new body.”Footnote ¹⁸ This new body was, in fact, quite literal. Simmons dressed his Klansmen in robes modeled on those designed by Dixon, precisely because they evoked the Reconstruction Klan, but also signaled the twentieth-century Klan's new ideological project. While still “original” and authentic,” Simmons's Klan now also defined itself as “a fraternal, patriotic, ritualistic society of national scope.”Footnote ¹⁹ The newly designed regalia demonstrated members’ uniform beliefs, and their disciplined adherence to the organization's cause.Footnote ²⁰ A commitment to patriarchal white supremacy was the “spiritual purpose” that united both old and new Klans. White uniform robes thus became symbols of both ideological change and continuity. These transformations were made visible on the dressed bodies of contemporary Klansmen, thanks to the familiarity of fictional representations of Reconstruction Era Klan, which mediated the move from old to newly revived Klan.

Just as advertising materials for the film proudly signaled its connection to Dixon's novel and play, advertisements for the newly revived Klan announced the aesthetic influence of the film and its marketing campaign. The lack of uniformity within the representational world of the film did not undermine its aesthetic relationship to the new Klan because Simmons self-consciously used these garments to present a “revived, reconstructed, remodeled, refined and expanded” organization.Footnote ²¹ Like previous cultural producers, Simmons used the design of Klan robes to convey the symbolic properties of the organization. This design was a palimpsest of representations—collapsing images from the novel, play, and film, as well as other historical and fictional depictions of the Klan. The primary aesthetic inspiration for the image of the revived Klan was actually Dixon's work, but several modifications for the sake of convenient mass production suggest the ways that the logistical challenges of costuming large groups faced on Griffith's film set also affected the new Klan as well. Simmons changed the shape of the helmets worn by his Klansmen, from the spiked helmets designed by Dixon, to cones of stiffened buckram, similar to those worn by background actors in the film. This change was likely a concession to the need for these garments to be commercially manufactured, a concern that seemed to shape Simmons's design of the robes from the start. Production of uniform Klan regalia commenced in an Atlanta factory no more than two weeks after the organization's revival, in late November of 1915.Footnote ²²

Mapping an aesthetic lineage that takes into account the ideological character of these representations, as well as the logistical factors that shaped their formal properties clarifies how The Birth of a Nation and other representations of Reconstruction Era violence may have shaped the 1915 revival of the Klan. This layered network of influences helps us to better untangle the doublespeak that Simmons used to describe the organization and its relationship to violence—both past and present. Simmons argued that the Klan's paternalistic white supremacy was designed to protect the nation and its citizens.

As Klansmen sang at the start of every meeting “before our sturdy phalanx, all hate and strife shall fall.”Footnote ²³ White uniform robes were intended to demonstrate the internal and organizational transformation of the Klan, from the intentional disorder conveyed by the costumes worn by nineteenth-century Klansmen, to a new Klan committed to orderly patriotism. But the Klan's appropriation of advertising materials from The Birth of a Nation tells the story of this transformation with more formal and conceptual complexity. Simmons chose to build his own design for Klan robes using material from existing representational forms. In doing so he created a symbolic image that could also materialize as a garment to dress the bodies of his new Klansmen nationwide. The uniform robes and helmets that these Klansmen adopted demonstrated the organization's commitment to both patriotic order and terrible violence, all at the same time.