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From: "John Covici" <covici@ccs.covici.com>
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Organization: Covici Computer Systems
Reply-To: "John Covici" <covici@ccs.covici.com>
To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET
Subject:   How The Confederacy Revived The Klan and Created Hollywood
Status: RO
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D.W. Griffith and {The Birth of a Monster''} How the Confederacy 
Revived the Klan and Created Hollywood 
By Mark Calney

In the context of the campaign to tear down the statue of Ku 
Klux Klan founder and Confederate General Albert Pike in Washington, 
D.C., and the need to remove, as well, the successors of the 
Confederacy from control of the U.S.  government, this report 
is being issued to address two related topics: 1) the revival 
of the Ku Klux Klan as a mass-based, fascist movement in the 
United States in the twentieth century, and 2) the birth of 
modern culture's ``Rosemary's Baby''--Hollywood.

The mediator for these two phenomena was D.W. Griffith's 1915 
motion picture, {The Birth of a Nation}--originally titled {The 
Clansman}--a film which presented a rewriting of the history 
of post Civil War Reconstruction by the same Confederate traitors 
against whom the war had been fought. It portrayed African-Americans 
in the post-Civil War South as depraved, lascivious beasts, 
whose rampant lawlessness and alleged domination of the South--through 
military force and control of the state legislatures--threatened 
to destroy ``Southern civilization'' and ``mongrelize the races.'' 
The film asserts that this could only be stopped by the glorified 
lynchings and reign of terror carried out by the ``honorable'' 
new, secret order of the ``chivalrous'' Knights of the Ku Klux 
Klan.

These twin evils--Hollywood and the KKK--come from the elite 
group of Anglo-Americans made up of the direct heirs, philosophically 
and often biologically, of the old Confederacy.  They are the 
same treasonous scoundrels who organized the U.S. entry into 
World War I on the side of the British, and organized the Versailles 
System at the end of that war which created the pre-conditions 
for the outbreak of World War II.

The `Invisible Empire'

The creation of the Ku Klux Klan
in 1865, and its later revival, was not a spontaneous social 
phenomenon.  In both cases, we find the guiding hand of those 
individuals and institutions, such as the Scottish Rite Freemasons, 
who have always opposed the republican principles upon which 
the United States of America was founded and the Christian idea 
that man is created in the living image of God, ``imago viva 
Dei.''

The revival of the KKK in the early part of this century was 
ushered in by a project which culminated in the release of the 
two-hour and forty-five minute silent movie, {The Birth of a 
Nation.} Never before or since has a motion picture generated 
the kind of political and social explosion that this one did.

The initiating ceremony reviving the Ku Klux Klan occurred on 
Thanksgiving Eve of 1915, when a group of fifteen men huddled 
together in the cold autumn air before a makeshift altar of 
rocks atop of Stone Mountain, Georgia, sixteen miles outside 
of Atlanta. That dubious assemblage included two members of 
the original Klan and a Georgia legislator. When ``Colonel'' 
William J. Simmons stepped forward and lit a match to the kerosene-soaked, 
pine boards rising above the altar, a burning cross lit up the 
Georgia countryside. Colonel Simmons intoned: ``Under a blazing, 
fiery torch the Invisible Empire was called from its slumber 
of half a century to take up a new task and fulfill a new mission 
for humanity's good and to call back to mortal habitation the 
good angel of practical fraternity among men.''

That ritual had been in preparation for some time, and was executed 
on that day in order to complement the opening of {The Birth 
of a Nation} one week later in Atlanta. The day the film was 
shown, the local newspaper carried Colonel Simmon's announcement 
of ``The World's Greatest Secret, Patriotic, Fraternal, Beneficiary 
Order,'' next to the advertisement of the movie.

{The Birth of a Nation} was literally a recruitment film for 
the Ku Klux Klan, and the target of its revival was not the 
South but was the old Union strongholds of the Northern states. 
It not only appealed to the popularized Southern conception 
of ``unjust Reconstruction'' policies imposed after the Civil 
War, but more importantly promoted the ideas of white race supremacy. 
This dovetailed with the ongoing British Empire campaign of 
eugenics, the so-called ``race science,'' which in the U.S.A. 
found it's most enthusiastic sponsors among such Anglophile 
financiers as John D.  Rockefeller and Averell Harriman.

-  {The Clansman} -

D.W. Griffith's film {The Birth of a Nation} was based on a 
book written by Thomas Dixon, Jr. in 1905, titled {The Clansman--An 
Historic Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.} Dixon dedicated his book 
to the memory of ``A Scottish-Irish leader of the South, My 
Uncle, Colonel Leroy McTee, Grand Titan of the Ku Klux Klan.'' 
Dixon considered himself a great defender of the Anglo-Saxon 
race, claiming that ``the beginning of Negro equality is the 
beginning of the end of this nation's life.''

Dixon described the importance he placed on his poorly written 
work in its preface: ``|`The Clansman' is the second of a series 
of historical novels planned on the Race Conflict.... `The Clansman' 
develops the true story of the `Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy,' which 
overturned the Reconstruction regime....

``In the darkest hour of the life of the South, when her wounded 
people lay helpless amid rags and ashes under the beak and talon 
of the Vulture, suddenly from the mists of the mountains appeared 
a white cloud the size of a man's hand. It grew until its mantle 
of mystery enfolded the stricken earth and sky. An `Invisible 
Empire' had risen from the field of Death and challenged the 
Visible to mortal combat.

``How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the 
Clansmen of Old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against 
overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon's 
death, and saved the life of a people, forms one of the most 
dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.''

Thomas Dixon, Jr. was born in Shelby, North Carolina, during 
the Civil War in 1864. He graduated from Wake Forest College 
in 1883, and went on to study at Johns Hopkins University, which 
at that time was a hotbed of British intellectual subversion 
of the United States.  Its Anglo-Saxon History Department became 
famous, along with its promotion of Social Darwinism, exemplified 
by Thomas H. Huxley, who was the inaugural speaker at the school's 
founding in 1876. While at Hopkins, Dixon became a close friend 
of another southern student of history, a Virginian by the name 
of Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Dixon's friendship with the future 
U.S.  President would play an important role in {The Birth of 
a Nation.}

After returning to school in North Carolina, Dixon received 
a law degree and was elected to the state legislature. But it 
was as a Baptist minister that Thomas Dixon, Jr. first achieved 
national fame. He preached for a decade (1889-1899) in New York 
City and associated closely with the Social Gospel Movement, 
and formed the non-denominational ``People's Church'' in downtown 
Manhattan. It was there that Dixon caught the eye of John D.  
Rockefeller, who talked of building him a great tabernacle. 
But Dixon traded his pulpit for a lectern, hit the lecture circuit 
from 1899 to 1903, and wrote the first of two novels of his 
racist trilogy. The first, {The Leopard's Spots,} subtitled 
{A Romance of the White Man's Burden 1865-1900} (1902), concluded 
that peace could only be achieved through the separation of 
the races. The second novel was titled {The One Woman} (1903).

Reverend Dixon submitted his manuscript of {The Leopard's Spots} 
for publication to an old friend from North Carolina who had 
also attended Johns Hopkins University and had been the editor 
of a Raleigh newspaper, the {State Chronicle.} That old friend, 
Walter Hines Page, had become the coowner of the New York publishing 
firm of Doubleday, Page and Company. A virulent Anglophile, 
Page later became U.S. ambassador to Great Britain under President 
Woodrow Wilson, and played a critical role in organizing the 
American entry into the First World War on the side of the British 
Empire.

The Confederate gushings of Thomas Dixon's pathetic, racist 
novel found a warm reception in Walter Hines Page, the son of 
a slave-owning family. Page eagerly published Dixon's {The Leopard's 
Spots} and the book sold more than 100,000 copies in the first 
three months after its release. The publication of {The Clansman,} 
in 1905, outsold Dixon's first two books, and induced Dixon 
to rewrite the {The Clansman} as a theatrical production.

In June 1906, {The One Woman} was rewritten by Reverend Dixon 
as a play in which he asked two then little-known actors to 
perform--D.W.  Griffith, and his wife, Linda Arvidson.

The Real D.W. Griffith

David Wark Griffith is the man worshiped by the modern cultural 
mafia as the ``genius director'' who revolutionized cinematic 
technique, catapulted the moving picture into an ``art form,'' 
and thereby created the idea and form of what Hollywood has 
become today. Griffith can be looked upon as a bridge built 
by the Confederate Army Corps of ``social engineers.'' One end 
of the bridge is firmly rooted in the old plantation despotism 
of the Confederate States of America (CSA), characterized by 
the British oligarchical free trade policies of slavery and 
usury, and accompanied by all its inherent Romantic, cultural 
baggage. The other end of that bridge brings us to Hollywood--``Entertainment 
Capital of the World''--which from its very inception, to the 
present day, has been run by an overlapping combination of Anglo-American 
financiers, organized crime, and cultural warfare experts of 
the most degenerate sort.

A descendant of Britain's Lord
Barrington (1700s), D.W. Griffith was born 20 miles east of 
Louisville, Kentucky in 1875. His family were slaveholders, 
owning a small 264 acre estate in Oldham County. At the outbreak 
of the Civil War, and with Kentucky joining the Union, his father, 
Jacob Wark Griffith, organized the First Kentucky Cavalry which 
became attached to the Confederate Army's famous ``Orphan Brigade'' 
and became a colonel. After the surrender of Confederate Commander 
Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, the secretary of state of the CSA, 
John C. Breckinridge, assigned Col. Jacob Griffith the task 
of secretly escorting CSA President Jefferson Davis to a small 
remaining spot of ``Confederate soil'' in Kentucky in order 
to keep alive the CSA government as a resistance operation, 
in hopes that the Confederacy would somehow rise again.

As a young man, D.W. Griffith got his start in show business 
working part-time as a ``super'' at the local theater in Louisville, 
Kentucky. It was during this time that he joined the Masons 
and began his acting career. By 1908, Griffith began working 
as a film actor for the Edison Studio in The Bronx, N.Y., and 
later that same year began directing films for Edison's American 
Mutoscope and Biograph Company.

Griffith's memories of his Confederate father and of the burning 
down of the Griffith estate must have been quite vivid, as he 
picked up the project of transforming Dixon's {The Clansman} 
into the first American epic motion picture. Later, while filming 
the picture in California in 1914, Griffith was often heard 
bragging about how his father had ridden with the Knights of 
the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1913, Griffith started working for Harry and Roy Aitken as 
head of production for Mutual Film Production, the distributing 
agency for the production companies of Majestic and Reliance, 
also owned by the Aitkens.

During the winter months of those years (beginning in 1909) 
Griffith had started to shoot films in a small town north of 
Los Angeles where there was sunny, fair weather 300 days out 
of the year. In the spring of 1914, Griffith was working out 
of a studio at 4500 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. 
His production of movies such as {The Battle of the Sexes} had 
attracted such investors to Griffith's filming set in New York 
as Crawford Livingston and Felix Kahn (owner of New York's Ritz 
theater and brother of Otto Kahn, the Wagnerian proprietor of 
the Metropolitan Opera).

It was during this time that Griffith and an associate film 
critic, Frank Woods, obtained the first copyright for the motion 
picture production of {The Clansman.} The story is conveyed 
in Griffith's autobiography: ``One fortunate day he (Woods) 
brought a book in to me. It was }The Clansman} by Thomas Dixon. 
I skipped quickly through the book until I got to the part about 
the Klansmen, who, according to no less than Woodrow Wilson, 
ran to the rescue of the downtrodden South after the Civil War.  
I could just see these Klansmen in a movie with their white 
robes flying.''

The first meeting between the Aitken brothers, Thomas Dixon, 
and D.W.  Griffith was in 1914. By summer, arrangements were 
made for Dixon's participation in drafting the script for the 
film and his payment for the screen rights. The Aitkens and 
Griffith formed a corporation, Epoch Productions, for the exclusive 
purpose of releasing {The Clansman} and by March had sold over 
107,000 shares of stock. Shooting of the film started on July 
4, 1914, in Hollywood.

In addition to consulting with Dixon about the period of Reconstruction, 
Griffith drew heavily on Woodrow Wilson's {A History of the 
American People} from which he quotes directly in the written 
captions of the movie. For Klan material he utilized {Ku Klux 
Klan--Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment} by John C. Lester 
and D.L. Wilson.

{The Klansman

The silent film's first scene is captioned: ``The bringing of 
the Africans to America planted the first seed of dis-Union'' 
which is followed by shots of slaves at an auction. The story 
line of the film centers around two families, the Stonemans 
from Pennsylvania and the Camerons from South Carolina. The 
first segment of the film portrays the supposedly peaceful, 
idyllic, ante-bellum South where the Stonemans visit the Camerons, 
and romance begins to stir between the young Elsie Stoneman 
(played by Lillian Gish) and Ben Cameron, the ``Little Colonel.'' 
However, Civil War disrupts the tranquil proceedings, and the 
sons of both families enlist in their respective opposing armies. 
Amidst the famous battle scenes directed by Griffith, several 
of the sons die.

After the tragic assassination of Lincoln, Congressman Austin 
Stoneman, the radical Republican Senator (a vile caricature 
of Thaddeus Stevens) goes to South Carolina with his mulatto 
protege Silas Lynch.  Lynch says, ``We shall crush the white 
South under the heel of the black South.'' ``The blacks shall 
be raised to full equality with white,'' Stoneman declares.

The scene then changes to the ``Carpetbaggers' rally before 
the election'' where Stoneman is the honored guest and signs 
are displayed reading, ``Forty acres and a Mule'' and ``Equality 
.. equal marriage.'' On election day, according to the film, 
``All blacks are given the ballot, while the leading whites 
are disfranchised,'' giving control of the courts and legislature 
to the African-Americans. ``The helpless white minority'' is 
now at the mercy of the newly elected South Carolina House of 
Representatives where the African-American delegates are portrayed 
as whiskey-swilling, bare-foot bums who engage in the ``Passage 
of a bill providing for the intermarriage of blacks and whites.'' 
Lynch has been elected lieutenant-governor, and becomes intoxicated 
with his new-found power.

As the disenfranchisement of Southern whites grows under increasing 
abuses of ``Negro domination,'' Ben Cameron determines to create 
a secret society of hooded vigilantes: ``The Ku Klux Klan, the 
organization that saved the South from the anarchy of Black 
rule, but not without the shedding of more blood than at Gettysburg.'' 
Thus begins ``The new rebellion of the South.''

The first ``beneficiary'' of KKK justice in the film was Gus, 
captain of the black Union soldiers, who, in his attempt to 
rape Ben Cameron's sister, Flora, forces her to leap to her 
death. Gus is then hunted down by the Klan, given a ``fair'' 
trial by his hooded betters, found guilty, and killed. His body 
is left on Lynch's doorstep with a note pinned to his chest 
with the picture of a skull and crossbones and the letters ``KKK,'' 
as the following title appears on the screen: ``On the steps 
of the Lt. Governor's house. The answer to the blacks and Carpetbaggers.''

The next evening, a `blood and soil' ritual takes place, with 
all the Klansmen in their full regalia. Taking his dead sister's 
shawl (a Confederate flag!), the ``Little Colonel,'' Ben Cameron, 
dips it in a pail of her blood and then does the same with a 
small wooden cross, as he swears: ``Here I raise the ancient 
symbol of an unconquered race of men, the fiery cross of Old 
Scotland's hills.... I quench its flame in the sweetest blood 
that ever stained the sands of Time!'' The Klan is now prepared 
to storm the town and ``disarm all blacks that night.''

To the relief of all, except those African-Americans slaughtered 
in the process, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan ride to the 
proverbial rescue to the blaring sounds of Wagner's {Ride of 
the Valkyries.} In one of these scenes, several members of the 
Cameron and Stoneman families take shelter from a band of crazed 
black soldiers in a cabin occupied by two white Union veterans. 
The following original screen title gives the viewer the central 
message of the film's producers and promoters: ``The former 
enemies of North and South are united again in common defense 
of their Aryan birthright.'' Later editing of the film replaced 
the words ``Aryan birthright'' with a phrase regarding the ``Carpetbaggers' 
political folly.''

The film culminates in a ``Parade of the liberators'' through 
the town by the Klansmen, while the orchestra plays ``Dixie.''

The Truth About the ``Radicals''

Central to the theme of {The Birth of a Nation} is the post-Civil 
War lie promoted universally by the British and their Confederate 
allies which claims that Abraham Lincoln was really a ``Southerner.'' 
A political myth was created that cast Lincoln as a ``liberal'' 
in direct opposition to the ``radicals'' in Congress led by 
Thaddeus Stevens. This myth, reported in every current high 
school history textbook, goes on to claim that once Lincoln 
was murdered, the ``radicals'' were left unchecked, and their 
policy of ``vengeance'' against the South dominated Reconstruction. 
This is clearly shown in {The Birth of a Nation} by the scene 
of a confrontation between Lincoln and Stoneman (Stevens) titled: 
``Stoneman's protest against Lincoln's policy of clemency for 
the South.''

However, what is not discussed in the film, or by Southern historical 
revisionists, such as Edward Pollard, is the fundamental economic 
policies which Lincoln and Stevens both represented, and over 
which the Civil War was fought. This Confederate school of history 
is reflected by the most prominent 20th-century Lincoln ``scholar,'' 
Carl Sandburg, who many years after the production of {The Birth 
of a Nation} presented his work on Abraham Lincoln to Lillian 
Gish and stated: ``I think you will find the first two volumes 
especially interesting, because I tried to put into them the 
same American flavor and spirit that Griffith got in {The Birth 
of a Nation.}''

Thaddeus Stevens was Abraham Lincoln's closest ally in the Congress.  
Both were leading exponents, along with Lincoln adviser Henry 
Carey, of the American System of economics, which was diametrically 
and explicitly opposed to the British System of usury and slavery.

So, in viewing Griffith's {The Birth of a Nation} we see that 
he, for instance, duplicated the set used for the interior of 
the South Carolina House of Representatives in every detail, 
but the content of his story and the debates which actually 
occurred in that hall are distorted beyond the grotesque. During 
Reconstruction, those white representatives in the state legislatures 
of South Carolina, Virginia, and elsewhere who lobbied for the 
implementation of railroads and other infrastructure projects 
were labeled as ``nigger lovers'' by the KKK/Confederates and 
ultimately were forced from office.

Griffith was not satisfied with directing the filming of his 
epic tribute to the Ku Klux Klan, but also oversaw production 
of the monumental musical score which was to complement the 
silent picture. Griffith contracted Joseph Carl Breil, a popular 
composer of sentimental tunes, to write a score for the film. 
Breil's music for the tender scenes between the ``Little Colonel'' 
and Elsie Stoneman was later published as ``The Perfect Song,'' 
which became the theme song for the racist radio show {Amos 
`n Andy.}

The music called for a 40-piece orchestra with an offstage chorus 
and sound effects. In addition to the popular songs of the Civil 
War era, the musical accompaniment drew from Schubert, Schumann, 
Mozart, Grieg, Tschaikovsky, Mahler, and most importantly and 
prominently, Richard Wagner. Wagner, a worse anti-Semite than 
Adolph Hitler and an Anglo-Saxon ``race patriot'' in his own 
right, was appropriately used to provide the ``Clan Call,'' 
a two-note fanfare for brass identical to {The Ride of the Valkyries.}

The official premiere of {The Clansman} took place on February 
8, 1915, at the opulent Los Angeles theater of W.H. Clune, an 
investor in the film and owner of the Clune Auditorium, who 
also provided the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The opening, 
however, did not meet with universal approval by all the city's 
citizens. One group, in particular, was all too familiar with 
the racist outpourings of Reverend Dixon. That was the small 
local Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which went into court 
in an attempt to obtain an injunction against the showing of 
the film. The legal argument employed, which was to be used 
subsequently by other branches of the NAACP, was based on the 
grounds that exhibiting the film would be a threat to public 
safety, by heightening racial tensions that could incite violence 
and possible rioting. The Los Angeles NAACP only won an injunction 
that prevented the matinee showing on opening day. The evening 
event witnessed a packed house of 2,500 people.

Mr. Griffith Goes to Washington

Less than two weeks after its Los Angeles premiere, {The Clansman} 
arrived in New York City.  Harry Aitken announced that the Liberty 
Theater would begin showing the movie twice a day, all seats 
reserved, for the admission charge of the then unheard-of price 
of $2. The first showing was to a select group, which included 
Rev. Thomas Dixon. After viewing the film for the first time, 
Dixon approached Griffith and told him that such a magnificent 
work deserved a more appropriate title, and ought to be called 
{The Birth of a Nation,} the subtitle for the picture which 
had appeared on poster advertisements.  However, simply changing 
the name on Griffith's cinematic bottle of poison was not deemed 
adequate by the film's creators and promoters to stave off the 
expected adverse public reaction to such an explicit display 
of Confederate treason. Therefore, it was decided that before 
the film's public opening in New York, it would be wise to garner 
endorsements for the film by some of America's more ``accepted'' 
establishment figures. Thinking big, Griffith's KKK roadshow 
headed for the nation's capitol, Washington, D.C.

The Reverend Dixon wrote a letter to his old college friend 
from Johns Hopkins University, now President Woodrow Wilson, 
requesting a half-hour interview, which the President granted.  
By mid-February, Dixon was in the White House meeting with Wilson 
and asking him to view Griffith's new movie, as Dixon said, 
``not because it was the greatest ever produced or because his 
classmate had written the story ... but because this picture 
made clear for the first time that a new universal language 
had been invented ... a new process of reasoning by which will 
could be overwhelmed with conviction.''

So, on February 18, 1915, {The Clansman} became the first motion 
picture ever to be shown in the White House. The audience in 
the East Room included President Wilson and his family, members 
of his staff and cabinet, along with their wives.  Wilson's 
comment, after viewing the film was: ``It is like writing history 
with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly 
true.'' This quotation was quickly put into general circulation, 
although the White House staff would later attempt to downplay 
the endorsement. Then, with the help of another old friend from 
North Carolina, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels, Reverend Dixon 
arranged a private meeting with the Chief Justice of the Supreme 
Court, Justice Edward White. The old jurist, who had never seen 
a motion picture, was not inclined to do so, until Dixon told 
him that it was about the Ku Klux Klan. At that point White's 
manner changed, and Dixon reports the following exchange:

``|`You tell the true story of the Klan?' White asked.

``|`Yes--for the first time.' White removed his glasses and 
pushed his book aside, as he leaned towards Dixon and said in 
a low tone: `I was a member of the Klan, sir. Through many a 
dark night, I walked my sentinel's beat through the ugliest 
streets of New Orleans with a rifle on my shoulder.  You've 
told the true story of that uprising of outraged manhood?'

``|`In a way I'm sure you'll approve,' the Reverend replied.

``|`I'll be there!' said White.'' The night after the White 
House

debut of {The Clansman}, another private showing was arranged, 
at Washington's Raleigh Hotel, for a specially invited audience 
of several hundred people, including members of the U.S. Congress 
and the diplomatic corps. True to his promise, Chief Justice 
White attended and brought several other associate justices 
of the Supreme Court with him.

The blessings and endorsements of Washington officialdom were 
to help overcome the general stormy resistance to Griffith's 
epic film but it was not to be all ``smooth sailing'' for Griffith's 
``Klan Ride'' into the cities of the North.

After the New York City premiere of {The Birth of a Nation} 
on March 3, 1915, the reviews of most of the major papers side-stepped 
the racial controversy and praised the film, as exemplified 
by the following account in {The New York Times}: ``In terms 
of purely pictorial value the best work is done in those stretches 
that follow the night riding of the Ku Klux Klan, who look like 
a company of avenging spectral crusaders sweeping along the 
moonlight roads.'' {Moving Picture World} wrote that the audience 
``felt the grip of the story and sympathized with the work of 
the Ku Klux Klan battling against Negro domination.'' The newspapers 
of William Randolph Hearst ran numerous articles endorsing Griffith's 
Confederate interpretation of history.

Rev. Thomas B. Gregory, a regular Hearst contributor wrote:  
``That the story as told by the pictures is true I am ready 
to swear on the Bible. I am prepared to say that not one of 
the more than five thousand pictures that go to make up the 
wonderful drama is in any essential way an exaggeration. They 
are one and all faithful to historic fact, so that looking upon 
them, you may feel that you are beholding that which actually 
happened.''

C.F. Zittel, of {Hearst's Evening Journal} gave a threatening 
vision of the future destruction of education, when he wrote: 
``First of all, children must be sent to see this masterpiece. 
Any parent who neglects this advice is committing an educational 
offense, for no film has ever produced more educational points 
than Griffith's latest achievement.''

During the filming of {The Birth of a Nation,} someone had mentioned 
to Griffith that if the film were ever shown in Atlanta the 
result would be a race riot. To this, Griffith prophetically 
replied, ``I hope to God they do.''

In most of the Northern cities where {The Birth of a Nation} 
was scheduled to be shown, political fights exploded, and some 
small riots did occur in Philadelphia and elsewhere where the 
film was shown. The NAACP and others attempted to seek either 
a banning of the film completely, or to force the editing-out 
of the most egregious racist scenes. For the most part, those 
attempts were futile.  Endless hearings were held before mayors, 
state legislatures, city councils, and state and city censorship 
boards across the country.

Those hearings became platforms for the pro-Griffith lobby to 
pronounce the alleged virtues of eugenics. In New York City, 
Griffith's lawyer Martin W.  Littleton told Mayor Mitchell that 
the film was a ``protest against the mongrel mixture of black 
and white.''

In Boston, a major battle occurred, led by William Monroe Trotter, 
editor of the local black neswpaper, {The Guardian.} After blacks 
were refused entry to the theater where {The Birth of a Nation} 
was showing, city police and Pinkerton guards cleared the theater 
and surrounding area, and arrested the protesters. A mass meeting 
was held at Faneuil Hall, where Trotter put Mayor James Curley 
on notice: ``It is a rebel play ... an incentive to great racial 
hatred here in Boston. It will make white women afraid of Negroes 
and will have white men all stirred up on their account. If 
there is any lynching here in Boston, Mayor Curley will be responsible.... 
If this was an attack on the Irish race he would find a way 
pretty quick to stop it.'' Curley's predecessor had banned Dixon's 
play {The Clansman,} and Curley himself had banned other controversial 
performances.

Through all of this, the debate raged in the local press. The 
Rev.  Thomas Dixon had a lengthy letter published in {The Boston 
Globe} on April 7 virulently defending the ``truth'' of {The 
Birth of a Nation} which listed six major points, including, 
``It tends to prevent the lowering of the standard of our citizenship 
by its mixture with Negro blood,'' and ``It reaffirms Lincoln's 
solution of the Negro problem as a possible guide....'' Dixon's 
own program (which Lincoln had only briefly considered) was 
to ship every African-American in the United States back to 
Africa. This is another example of historical lying by Dixon, 
who placed the following words into the mouth of Abraham Lincoln: 
``The Nation cannot now exist half white and half black any 
more than it could exist half slave and half free.''

Griffith had a similar letter published in Boston, which stated:  
``The attack of the organized opponents to the picture is centered 
upon that feature of it which they deem might become an influence 
against intermarriage of blacks and whites.'' Griffith's sexual 
fantasies evidently clouded his recognition of the fact that 
the NAACP (publicly referred to by Rev. Dixon as ``The Association 
for the Intermarriage of the Races'') had not even made intermarriage 
an issue in opposing the film.

The `Intolerance' of Griffith

The fact that a significant portion of the American people would 
not readily accept, as simple fact, the distorted and degraded 
view of man displayed in {The Birth of a Nation} incensed D.W. 
Griffith to no end. He was infuriated that he personally had 
to lobby government bodies, such as the Virginia State Legislature, 
to allow the showing of his great ``masterpiece.'' In self-righteous 
indignation, he produced a mass pamphlet, titled {The Rise and 
Fall of Free Speech,'' which argued against the attempts to 
censor his cinematic adaptation of {The Clansman.} This supposed 
``intolerance'' toward Griffith's Confederate view of history 
was to become the subject of his next motion picture extraveganza. 
Thus D.W.  Griffith can be credited not only with the creation 
of Hollywood, but a campaign to justify the mass-distribution 
of Hollywood's perversion by utilizing the ``free speech'' clause 
of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Griffith's vision of the future of the motion picture presaged 
George Orwell's book {1984,} in which there was no need for 
historical researchers.  Libraries would be replaced by ``experts'' 
dispensing their wisdom via hi-tech video equipment. The next 
generation, Griffith said to the press, ``will be wedded to 
the movies. You will not be able to satisfy them with anything 
else ... the arts and possibly the mental sciences....'' would 
be taught by ``audio-visual'' methods.

Griffith's next film, {Intolerance,} was his answer to his critics. 
The film is truly masonic in theme and content. Griffith attempted 
to splice together four separate stories, including St. Bartholomew's 
Massacre and the Crucifixion of Christ, whom he gives the gnostic 
label ``Man of Men.'' But the overwhelming majority of the film's 
time and production costs was devoted to ancient Babylon, which 
Griffith titles: ``The first known court of justice in the world.''

The streets of Hollywood were literally converted into a mock-up 
of the most evil citadel of ancient human history. Movie sets 
of the towering walls of Babylon were constructed hundreds of 
feet into the air. The pitiful, melodramatic story of a pagan 
romance was overshadowed by the plots of princes and priests, 
over which a Satanic god would rule Babylon, as expressed in 
the following scene caption: ``The priest of Bel-Marduk, supreme 
God of Babylon, jealously watches the image of the rival goddess, 
Ishtar, enter the city, borne in a sacred ark.''

Nudity, satan worship, and graphic violence that could compete 
with any modern ``slasher movie'' is what Griffith threw in 
the face of the public with his {Intolerance.} But the American 
people weren't quite ready to drink from that golden cup of 
abominations. {Intolerance} was a financial bomb.

Above all else, {The Birth of a Nation} was a box office smash, 
and as actress Lillian Gish revealed in an interview many years 
later, ``They lost track of the money it was making. But it 
started all the fortunes of Louie B.  Mayer--all the people 
in films.'' At a time when the average entrance fee to a movie 
theater was 15 cents, the admission cost to {The Birth of a 
Nation} was $2. By the end of 1915, the gross receipts for New 
York City alone were $3.75 million. It ran for almost a year 
in Boston and Chicago. At one point, there were 28 companies 
touring the film in the United States, Europe, South Africa, 
and Australia. In the South, the film ran for twelve consecutive 
years. In the first two years of its showing, Griffith's film 
played to an audience of over 25 million people in the United 
States.  Estimates are that the total box office take was more 
than $100 million. The cost of making {Birth} was only about 
$61,000 with another $30,000 spent in advertising and making 
duplicate prints.

Hollywood: Mother of Harlots

It became apparent to all that there were big profits to be 
made from a relatively small investment in motion pictures. 
So, the floodgates opened and fast-buck artists, common criminals, 
and Wall Street investors poured into Hollywood.

In 1915, Louis B. Mayer ran the
distributorship for a small string of theaters out of Haverhill, 
Massachusetts. As {The Birth of a Nation} was about to start 
its continuous showing in New York, Mayer arranged a deal to 
distribute the film in New England, for his payment of $50,000 
and a fifty-fifty split, after costs. In that single deal, Mayer 
made at least $500,000, though Harry Aitken, the film's distributor 
maintained (and was later proven right) that Mayer had fudged 
his books and made an extraordinary profit. With that profit, 
Louis Mayer went on to found the Hollywood studio company of 
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). In 1939, MGM released the first full-length 
sound and color motion picture based on the Confederate tradition 
of D.W.  Griffith--{Gone With the Wind.} Its author, Margaret 
Mitchell, after obtaining fame and fortune, wrote to her mentor, 
the Rev. Thomas Dixon, to relate the tremendous influence that 
his novels had had upon her since childhood.

Felix Kahn, one of the early investors in {Birth,} sold his 
large New York theater to Paramount, and became both a member 
of its board of directors, and a close friend of the owner, 
Adolph Zukor. It was through Felix that Zukor met Otto Kahn, 
a partner in the Warburg financial firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. 
By 1919, Zukor had arranged a $10 million loan from Kuhn Loeb 
through Otto Kahn, and created the Paramount film empire, putting 
film production, distribution, and exhibition in the same hands.

Warner Brothers Pictures became a major studio with the 1925 
investment made by Goldman, Sachs and Company.

The man who became the movie mogul of Columbia Pictures, Harry 
Cohen, was a notorious lecher and an ardent devotee of the Italian 
fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Cohen made a documentary 
of ``Il Duce,'' and accepted an invitation to visit him in Rome, 
becoming so infatuated with Mussolini that, upon his return 
to Hollywood, he redecorated his entire office to look like 
that of the dictator. The detail went down to the semi-circular 
desk, on which he displayed a photograph of Mussolini, even 
after World War II had ended.

Cohen was not alone in his admiration for Mussolini. In 1924, 
upon his return from Italy, D.W. Griffith told the New York 
press corps: ``Mussolini is a great man. With the allegiance 
of youth behind him, he could do great things.  Who knows but 
that he may be a Napoleon who'll sweep the world.... I believe 
that anything may happen as a result of this fascism. I should 
like to put into a film the remarkable spirit of the fascisti.''

Later, we would see publicly identified mobsters including Meyer 
Lansky, Moe Dalitz, and Bugsy Siegel involved in Hollywood's 
``legitimate'' operations. For example, two members of the Dalitz 
mob, Merv Adelson and Irwin Molasky, found Lorimar Produtions, 
which was responsible for such TV series as {Dallas} and {The 
Waltons,} and such unforgettable items as the {Jane Fonda Workout} 
video-tape. In April 1919, Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas 
Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin founded United Artists Corporation. 
The man who drafted the legal articles of incorporation and 
also became a partner in United Artists was the former U.S. 
Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, the son-in-law of Woodrow 
Wilson, who became the Ku Klux Klan's candidate for the 1924 
Democratic Party presidential nomination. Even the old Rev. 
Thomas Dixon took a stab at being a Hollywood producer in 1917, 
when he built The Dixon Studios, Laboratory and Press on Sunset 
Boulevard and Western. One of his more forgettable films was 
{The Fall of a Nation,} an anti-German propaganda piece designed 
to build popular support for U.S. entry into the First World 
War on the side of the British.

As World War I began, D.W.  Griffith's role as a propaganda 
agent for British strategic policy was to take an even more 
prominent position.

Even though the film {Intolerance} was a flop, it was officially 
banned by the federal government because of its ``anti-war theme.'' 
However, Charles S. Hart, a Hearst executive and the director 
of the U.S. government's film propaganda division, asked D.W. 
Griffith to head Woodrow Wilson's Liberty Loan drive.  Griffith 
was subsequently invited to the White House prior to the U.S. 
entry into the war. President Wilson requested that he go to 
England to ``make some picture showing our fight for democracy.''

Griffith immediately packed his bags and set sail for London 
with his troupe of actors and cameramen. A meeting was arranged 
for Griffith at No. 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister, 
David Lloyd George. Lloyd George informed Griffith that he had 
``the greatest power in his hands for the control of men's minds 
that the world had ever seen,'' and that he should seriously 
undertake Winston Churchill's ideas for film scenarios to promote 
the war effort. ``I want you to go to work for France and England 
and make up America's mind to go to war with us,'' Lloyd George 
told the director. Griffith readily accepted, and with the financial 
backing of the French and British governments he and his company 
were soon in France shooting the film {Hearts of the World.}

Though America entered the war on the side of the British Empire 
before {Hearts of the World''}was finished, the film's ``successful'' 
showings in America and Europe in the post-war period certainly 
tempered the public's attitude towards the side of the Anglo-American 
elites in their imposition of the hideous Versailles System 
on the world.

The high point of Griffith's tour in Great Britain was a formal 
meeting arranged by Lord Beaverbrook at Buckingham Palace with 
the Queen Mother Alexandria. Griffith would later constantly 
refer to the incident as his ``greatest hour'' and wrote about 
it in his autobiography: ``Now I was going to meet the Queens! 
Filled with dreams, I was determined to make an impression on 
these ladies ... one that they would never forget. In fact, 
I was mentally already right in the bosom of the royal family.''

Far from being the generator and exporter of human culture, 
Hollywood and its environs has become the largest manufacturing 
center of pornography in the world. It is the producer of the 
mental pabulum that fogs the mind from the crimes of Confederate 
``justice.'' It has become one of the leading centers for organized 
child abuse. It has also become one of the nation's nexus points 
for drug-money laundering. This organized destruction of the 
human mind, often called ``entertainment,'' is an accurate reflection 
and logical extension of the Confederate legacy which David 
Wark Griffith established 78 years ago.

>From New Federalist, V20 #2.
-- 
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com