HILD 2C

Cesar Vigil-Ruiz

4/12/11

What does the film ‘The Birth of a Nation’ tell us about the U.S. in 1915?

From what the film portrays, the U.S. is considered a nation that promotes the white race as the
dominant race above and superior to the black race. It fudged some of the facts to allow many people to
see how united the North and South can be and must be in order to be a powerful nation against a
particular race. In particular, to allow for interracial marriage seemed impossible to allow, especially in
the story of Silas Lynch and his desire to marry Elsie. When under the circumstance that the Camerons,
southerners, can hide in the home of 2 union soldiers, a picture of unity is displayed, especially when it
is written, “The North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright.”

I thought the movie could easily have been used to be a propaganda film (and found out to be true) for
the Ku Klux Klan, especially since the movie was based off of 2 books written by Thomas Dixon, a
southerner, and one was entitled The Clansmen. If the U.S. is to look anything like the film portrays, it’s a
uniting of 2 divided groups that come together to fight against the black race in marriage and in voting,
calling them out as a race that tried to take over. The U.S. did not see the black race as a legitimate race
to be involved with the affairs of reconstruction, and especially not for the upcoming war the U.S. would
actually go through.