D. W. Griffith's seminal 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is often approached as a paradox in that it embodies both an extreme commitment to white supremacy, on the one hand, and technical innovation and artistic vision, on the other. While its technique and aesthetics reached to the modern, revealing the promise of the still-new media of film, its celebration of racial oppression reached to the past, justifying and expressing nostalgia for a world in which white people wielded complete control over black people through a tight combination of natural superiority and unapologetic violence. As the essays in this forum underline, the film's modernism and its celebration of white supremacy not only happily cohabited, but reinforced one another. The film revived elements of nineteenth-century racism, and dressed them in the clothes of the modern.

More than a generation before its twentieth-century revival, from 1868–1871, the Klan had terrorized many parts of the South. For years after its decline, it largely disappeared both as an active violent force and from cultural memory. It would occasionally reemerge: through the 1870s and 1880s a few local violent groups claimed a Klan identity, and a handful of insiders published books promising to shed new light on the original Klan. And a few U.S. history textbooks in the mid-1880s began to include the Klan in their narrative of Reconstruction.

Popular interest in the Klan grew substantially toward the turn of the century. In 1892, British author Arthur Conan Doyle made the Klan the key to one of Sherlock Holmes's mysteries, “The Five Orange Pips.”Footnote ¹ Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898) celebrated the Klan.Footnote ² Thomas Dixon's book, The Clansman (1905) which would serve as the basis of The Birth of a Nation, was another of many manifestations of this increasing interest.Footnote ³ At the same time, professional historians producing the first scholarly histories of Southern states in the early years of the twentieth century included the Klan in their accounts, and the Klan's appearance in history textbooks became increasingly reliable, until by 1915 it had become an expected part of the historical narrative with which students across the United States were raised.

The five essays in this forum help explain what white American film audiences in 1915 wanted from the Klan that caused it, and the revived Klan that William Simmons built around it, to succeed so dramatically. The short answer can only be that it confirmed their racial prejudice and justified their racial sins. But American racism could take many forms, and violent white supremacy had thrived in the late 1870s and 1880s with rather little interest in either a historic or contemporary Ku Klux Klan.

The longer answer is that the Klan had characteristics that made it a suitable and compelling subject for culturally influential whites in the late Progressive Era. At a time when Americans were keenly aware of the influence of new media, the Ku Klux Klan provided a visual language of white supremacy that was deeply integrated with traditions of popular spectacle. The Reconstruction-era Klan had effectively mobilized contemporary tropes and symbols to achieve the pragmatic ends of racial dominance. Reconstruction-era Klan costumes and performative behaviors had been inspired by carnival, minstrelsy, and early burlesque. These were the same forms out of which the content of early film was derived. It is not so much that Griffith recognized the particular suitability of the Klan to the big screen: the Klan and modern film were blood relatives. As Katherine Lennard argues in this forum, the revived Klan was intricately entangled with the aesthetics not only The Birth of a Nation, but of Thomas Dixon's Clansman and the many popular stagings of it. The aesthetics, as much as the ideology of the Klan, recaptured by popularizers such as Dixon and then Griffith, spoke to the interests of white modern America.

Those with an ear to the ground in the Progressive Era understood that culture, as much as violence, undergirded white racial supremacy. Black protestors against The Birth of a Nation, as Cara Caddoo describes, were mobilized by their rich appreciation of the damage that the film was just about to do. Films developed by and for black audiences, and film depictions of bold figures such as boxer Jack Johnson, had encouraged blacks and caused whites not only discomfort but real problems. Racist films, too, would have real consequences. The spectacular form of film, like the spectacle of lynching that waned while it waxed, not only produced racial terror but drew hesitant whites into an exclusive racial solidarity made to seem inevitable.

But if black film audiences and producers fully recognized the need to fight racial oppression at the level of popular culture, they soon discovered that white cultural elites, together with the agents of the state, had ways of assuring that whites would prevail. The police brutality described by Caddoo's essay and the emergent regime of strategic local censorship analyzed by Jennifer Fronc's essay effectively prevented black protesters from intervening to challenge defamation and the celebration of racial violence.

With police and other white elites running interference for him, D. W. Griffith could tell the history of the Ku Klux Klan with little concern about black objections. And he did, surreptitiously presenting it as an interpretive key to racial tensions in the 1915 urban North. At a time when black migration and a discourse of black racial pride were becoming hazily visible in Northern cities, Griffith filled his film with scenes that, as Melvyn Stokes notes in this forum, naturalized white supremacy by juxtaposing white competence, dedication, and physical strength with black incompetence, laziness, and physical degeneracy. Davarian Baldwin argues in his essay that one of the film's crucial innovations was its scenes offering intimate and detailed depictions of various forms of black viciousness. Such scenes justified the potentially unsavory discriminatory and violent tactics whites were using to suppress black mobility. Despite Griffith's later backpedaling, Baldwin and Stokes reveal the deliberate and strategic detail with which he adapted his message of Progressive Era white supremacy to the new medium of film.

A century ago, Griffith's film served as a midwife to a racism fitted to the interests and needs of whites in a modern America. The film found ways to effectively adapt degrading old minstrel tropes to take advantage of the full potential of the new medium. It gave rise to a new system of local voluntary self-censorship that would prove highly effective. It gave impetus to the organization of a massive national movement dedicated to white supremacy, and made that organization appear both respectable and inevitable. As Caddoo suggests, however, at the same time it generated a nationwide network of protests, producing the very black public that the film so monstrously and so memorably condemned.

The idea of the Klan has remained powerful while other contemporary movements have safely receded into the past. Who today worries about a revival of the Molly Maguires or the Order of the White Camellia? A century after The Birth of a Nation, the Klan's special relationship to popular culture still catches our attention, and makes it available to be reappropriated, updated, and utilized by those advocating white supremacy.