Moving Picture Madness
by Bob Foreman © 2014
A scant fifty years after the unpleasantness between the States, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 photoplay “The Birth of a Nation” sallied into town, and Atlanta would never be the same again.
“The Birth of a Nation” was no ordinary silent flicker, too immense to play anywhere less than Joel Hurt’s 1650-seat Atlanta Theater, home to touring legit and recently host to the white-washed musical version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
In a town where no movie had ever played longer than a week, this pro-South recapitulation of the War and Reconstruction played three, for total admissions of 60,000 or a quarter of the population. “Nation” would return a year later to play another turn.
Drama critics dubbed the film a scenic opera because it trouped with a thirty-piece pit orchestra comprised of New York players. This was the big time, make no mistake, and all previous attractions, stage or otherwise, “sank into insignificance.”
“Through hot, slippery tears you will see 18,000 people, 3,000 horses, and 5,000 scenes,” ran the publicity, as well as “the shot that killed Abraham Lincoln, the pillaging of Atlanta by Sherman’s invaders, and the surging patriotism that drove your grandfather to don a suit of gray. You will regret to your dying day if you fail to witness D.W. Griffith’s Gigantic Spectacle.”
“Nation” was the first movie to feature an original hit tune (“The Perfect Song”) in its musical score, and it was the first picture ever unspooled in the White House. The film resulted in the creation of cinema criticism and the eventual construction of motion picture palaces, including the Howard built here six years later. Until “Gone with the Wind” a generation later, “Nation” was the highest grossing picture ever made.
The film was not without controversy: Ohio Governor James Cox who would later purchase all three Atlanta newspapers and WSB radio, banned the showing of “Nation” throughout his state, and in Boston angry protesters mobbed the box office demanding tickets to a sold out performance. Yet President Woodrow Wilson was quoted as saying, "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."
The frenzy surrounding the movie fired the imagination of two Atlantans, serving as catalyst to bring both visions to fruition.
William Simmons, like D.W. Griffith the son of a Confederate veteran, timed his dream to the local premiere: reactivation of the Ku Klux Klan, dormant since 1869. On opening night the new “beneficiary order” burned a cross atop Stone Mountain to dedicate the mount “to sacred purpose”.
Eighty-five year-old Confederate widow Helen Plane also had her eye on the privately-owned Stone Mountain for the construction of a permanent monument to the Southern cause. She engaged the services of Yankee sculptor Gutzon Borglum to create a Robert E. Lee memorial, which scope Borglum promptly broadened to include “a veritable army” marching across the face of the mountain. Plane wrote Borglum: “Since seeing ‘Birth of a Nation’ I feel it is due to the Ku Klux Klan which saved us from carpet-bag rule. Why not represent a small group of them” in the sculpture?
The monument to Lee (sans Klan) was finally completed in 1970, and if history was not written with lightning, it was nonetheless carved in stone.
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