Born in Columbia: The Birth of a Nation and Nationalizing a City’s Reconstruction Memory

My poster will help develop a section of a dissertation chapter with a heavy visual focus.  My dissertation traces the memory of Reconstruction in Columbia, South Carolina and the recent creation and opening of a museum of Reconstruction housed in the teenage home of Woodrow Wilson.  While my dissertation explores how Columbians shaped this memory throughout the twentieth century and the ways in which Woodrow Wilson was a product and vehicle for this memory, my poster will concentrate on the visual connections linking the film The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) to Reconstruction-era Columbia.  My working thesis is that this film should be viewed as a representation of Columbia rather than its setting of Piedmont, South Carolina.  Not only does the plot’s emphasis on state politics require action to take place in the capital city, but the film also mirrors locations in and historical images of Columbia.  Two conspicuous examples include a mythical urban plantation and black representatives ill-prepared for service in the South Carolina state legislature.  A poster is ideal for communicating these ideas as I will be able to juxtapose numerous archival images of Columbia with stills from the film.  I intend to bolster my visual argument with brief excerpts from Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman and the script adaptation he penned for Griffith's film.  Dixon attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins with Woodrow Wilson, and their encounters with one another may have yielded discussions about the Reconstruction era in Columbia, which in turn influenced Dixon's novels.  Furthermore, when President Wilson viewed the film in the White House at Dixon's request, he may have imagined Columbia given the film's imagery. 

It has been argued that a Ku Klux Klan trial in York County, South Carolina inspired The Clansman.  Although the KKK emerged in South Carolina in 1868 and had eroded by the early 1870s, in Birth, the group rode valiantly into the city on horseback to overthrow Silas Lynch's rule as Lieutenant Governor and end Reconstruction.  Historically, the intimidation and violence perpetrated by the paramilitary rifle group the Red Shirts, rather than the KKK, made Wade Hampton III's 1876 victory as governor possible and returned white Democratic rule to the state.  As such, Griffith and Dixon depicted the Red Shirts, a well-commemorated group, as donning the more distinctive Klan uniform.  I will be able to reinforce the Red Shirt's importance in shaping local memory with stills from a 1926 home movie, housed at the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina, of a parade in downtown Columbia in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Hampton's Red Shirts.  Although in its preliminary stages, my research indicates that not only did The Birth of a Nation contribute to a national narrative of reconciliation and the perceived failure of Reconstruction but that the film repackaged and disseminated white Columbia's memory of Reconstruction, and the violence surrounding it, for national consumption.