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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. Pa ge 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
Kl ansmen 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 t he 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 se ts 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 thegenerator 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 [e-mail]


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