1915
“BIRTH OF A NATION”:
The Second Rising of the Klan
The 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation, originally called The Clansman, was a technological breakthrough; it pioneered closeups and fadeouts and was the first American-made film with a musical score for an orchestra. It was the first film screened inside the White House, where it was viewed by President Woodrow Wilson and members of his cabinet.
Because of its racially inflammatory content, the film has been called “the most controversial film ever made in the United States and “the most reprehensively racist film in Hollywood history.” The film, which centers on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, portrays Black characters (many played by white actors in Blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive toward white women, and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, coming to the rescue of white women and protecting American values and white supremacy.
In romanticizing and popularizing the Klan, the film helped inspire a resurgence of the terrorist organization, which had been shut down by the federal government in the early 1870s.
This “second coming” of the Klan expanded across the country during the 1920s under the guise of enforcing Prohibition. The Klan’s main targets at that time were Black Americans and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, especially Catholics. Prohibition advocates had already linked them with drinking and criminality, and for Catholics, the era was a time of raids, violence, and terror.
The KKK sold itself as a law enforcement organization that could do what the government couldn’t—put a stop to the Catholic immigrants supposedly violating the law.
“The reason that the Klan was able to basically bring millions of Protestant white evangelical Americans to its ranks in the 1920s is definitely related to the passage of Prohibition and the 18th Amendment,” says Lisa McGirr, a history professor at Harvard University and author of The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. “Prohibition provided the Klan essentially a kind of new mandate for its anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, white Protestant nationalist mission,” she says. “The Klan often gained a foothold in local communities in the 1920s by arguing that it would clean up communities, it would get rid of bootleggers and moonshiners.”
During the 1920s, the Klan—along with its auxiliary “Women of the Ku Klux Klan” and three KKK youth groups—spread across the North and South by arguing that Catholics and immigrants were breaking Prohibition, and only a vigilante police group like the Klan could put a stop to it.
Between 1920 and 1925, the Klan’s membership grew to 2 to 5 million, and there was a lot of overlap between these new members and those who’d supported Prohibition. Prohibition lasted less than 15 years, but it left behind a large legacy; when it ended in 1933, the U.S. government had a more powerful FBI and a lot more prisons. As for the Klan, the upheaval and chaos that it created during the 1920s eroded its support in the ‘30s. Yet the organization’s history didn’t end there, as another resurgence would come during the 1950s and 1960s, with the civil rights movement.
Sources
Anthony Slide, “American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon,” (University Press of Kentucky, 2004).
Ed Rampell, “The Washington Post,” March 3, 2015
Lisa McGirr, “The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State,” (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016).