Introduction: The Clansman as Process

'The Birth of a Nation is an elaborate justification for mass murder.' James Baldwin (46)

So much has been written about The Birth of a Nation that it is daunting to report on even the most tangential research associated with it. Excellent works detail the film's creation, the protest surrounding its opening, and its subsequent influence. Likewise, the antecedents to the film in the novels of Thomas Dixon, and in nineteenth century melodrama more generally, have been intelligently assessed in several recent works (see especially Williams). Dixon's stage version of The Clansman, however, unlike the novel from which it was (partly) taken, has been regularly mentioned in the critical literature, but seldom read (see DaPonte, Martin, Williams for previous efforts that inform this study). Its performance history, in particular, bears further attention for a number of reasons. It is another piece of the puzzle in a continuing re-reading of Birth of a Nation. It is also a property with a stage life of its own, that in many ways parallels, foreshadows, and influences the artistry of the film--as well as the protest surrounding it. The play and film taken together on equal terms (rather than treating one as a minor precursor to a monolithic, final cinematic 'product') constitutes a test case in the flexibility of different media to disseminate an extreme ideology, and the extent to which artists and proselytizers will adapt form to content, content to form. In this case, the ideology is a radical racism, transmitted through sermon, lecture, pamphlet, novel, play, and two attempts at film. The fact that the final means of dissemination was both overwhelmingly successful and is still in existence--in a way that a stage production can never be--should not overshadow this long-standing process of adaptation by Thomas Dixon, and then by Dixon and his gifted associate, D. W. Griffith. To this end, this essay revisits the remnants of the process of adaptation, including correspondence from the first production's producer and stage manager, extensive collections of reviews from across the United States, and an examination of three separate versions of the play, all of which give some sense of the look, sound and tone of the touring performance, the range of receptions it stimulated, and of change over time. The film will be examined as an additional example of process of adaptation, examining the degree to which Dixon's 'message' was muted, communicated, or intensified.

The premise of this re-examination, that the 'matter' of the 'Clansman' was a process of continual adaptation affected by time, geography, and media, can be seen--by way of introduction--in the extant playtexts for the stage version. There are three separate versions of the play, closely related but clearly distinguishable. The first exists as two identical (carbon) copies deposited in the Library of Congress in 1905 for copyright protection only; one can still be read in the Library, the other at the Harvard Theatre Collection. Neither has any markings at all. The second version was a...