Lillian Gish was barely 21 when she agreed to appear in a movie being made by her mentor, David Wark Griffith, for whom she had worked since she was 19, making a long series of films. This new one was to be exceptional, Griffith told her, a large-scale film re-creating historical events that were pivotal to his life and to America’s. Gish, by then already under the spell of this man of obvious genius whose innovations had set the youthful film industry spinning, understandably assented.
More than a century later, her heritage is paying the price of that assent—a ridiculous and petty price, complicated by what can only be called chicanery. For Lillian Gish in old age donated funds and memorabilia to Bowling Green State University, in the region of Ohio where she and her sister, Dorothy, had grown up, to build and endow a theater. Now, BGSU has decided to remove the Gish sisters’ names from the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Film Theater, albeit while retaining the money and the memorabilia that Lillian donated. The reason? The film Griffith made, with the barely adult Gish in a principal role, was The Birth of a Nation—one of the pivotal works of film history as well as one with a dark cloud of political controversy hanging over it. Though she made nearly a hundred other films before dying in 1993 at age 99, and had a long history of important stage appearances as well, Gish is being punished retroactively, 26 years after her death, for having had the temerity to appear in this one film when she was barely out of adolescence. And her sister, Dorothy, who did not appear in The Birth of a Nation, is being punished for nothing at all, except perhaps for having been Lillian’s sister. (A letter protesting the University’s decision, signed by more than 50 stage and screen luminaries including James Earl Jones, Helen Mirren, and Martin Scorsese, was organized by Joseph McBride, professor of cinema at San Francisco State University. BGSU has not responded.)
This is, self-evidently and embarrassingly, political correctness gone mad. Not only does the university’s decision betray the trust the Gish sisters invested in it when they made their gift, but it also insults the entire history of film and stage that the Gishes embodied in their long careers.
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Far worse even than that, the university’s decision in effect blames the subordinate participating artist for decisions made by the film’s creators and wholly out of their hands, as well as blaming the vulnerable female for the creative choices made by her older male mentor. Lillian Gish did not either write or direct The Birth of a Nation. She may have had some grasp of its subject matter, but she could not have known, as her segments were shot, the film’s overall scope and breath, the cumulative effect its assembled scenes would produce, or the powerful repercussions the assembled result would have, for good and for ill. And please remember that this took place in a time when male authority, in the arts as elsewhere, went largely unquestioned; women would not even gain the right to vote for another six years.
It is very hard to perceive Lillian Gish as anything but an innocent victim on whom a wholly unjust punishment is being enacted. That she is 26 years beyond seeing it, and that the long-dead sister whom she loved has been dragged, willy-nilly, to share the punishment with her, only renders the retributive action pettier and more absurd. Bowling Green State University presuming to hold its benefactress responsible for something created by others in the earliest phase of her career, while ignoring the vast succession of achievements that followed it, is ludicrous. Here is a woman about whose performances critics, historians, and filmmakers have gone into ecstasies, whose name shines through the memoirs of a thousand artists, theatergoers, and film viewers. Bowling Green State University would be piffle if Lillian Gish had not chosen to honor it. If it dishonors her, it is piffle.
In fairness, one must note that many things can and must be said against The Birth of a Nation. As cinema it is, without question, a masterpiece; but as history it is a mishmash, and in its treatment of race relations it is, incontrovertibly, racist. Even while agog at the brilliance of Griffith’s camerawork and editing, you can find yourself loathing the film and wishing with all your heart that it had never been made. Griffith himself regretted it when he saw its consequences, and made the gigantic Intolerance in an effort to stem the tide of hatred that Birth had unleashed. It is a masterpiece that can only be learned from and regretted, never loved. It is on every college’s film history syllabus, and every professor who teaches it wishes inwardly that it would go away, that some other film less odious could be found to take its place. But no other film can replace it; it is a milestone. It will look increasingly quaint as it ages, but it will never lose its power, and it will never, never go away. It sits, blocklike, at the very first turning on the highway of film history, and everything that follows after owes something to it.
Griffith was a Southerner, and though his outward intentions may have been conciliatory, deep down he was still unreconciled. He adapted for his film two novels by Thomas Dixon Jr., an unreconstructed Southerner and a diehard white supremacist. Much of the film catches the Civil War in breathtaking detail: Battle plans, participants’ memoirs, and Mathew Brady photographs poured their data into Griffith’s all-encompassing scheme. But for Griffith, the South’s defeat led directly to Reconstruction, which he saw as an orgy of anarchic self-indulgence brought on by Northern exploiters, and to its necessary reform, by white Southerners organized in the Ku Klux Klan. The centerpiece of this segment of his narrative involves Gish, as a young girl abducted by an out-of-control black man (played, like virtually all the film’s black characters, by a white actor in dark makeup), and rescued by the Klan, riding in hot pursuit.
This is the nub, though not the only cause, of African-Americans’ objection to The Birth of a Nation, which has been rousing their protests since its premiere in 1915. (The fledgling NAACP grew in strength at least partly from educated blacks’ drive to protest the film’s first run.) It is easy to see, and to share, their anger: The scenes are repugnant and insulting, as false to artistic truth as they are to history. And for African Americans, the scenes carry with them an even more infuriating fear, which was validated by the film’s enormous success nationwide: Thanks to its melodramatic power, the Klan, which had largely been moribund, found new adherents, chiefly in southern Indiana and the rest of the southern Midwest, far from its original stomping grounds. (A photo apparently exists of Donald Trump’s father at a mid-1920s Klan rally in Queens.)
This repulsive inheritance is the film’s baneful burden, an exceptionally vicious Mr. Hyde growing out of the body of a brilliantly astute and aesthetically daring Dr. Jekyll. No surgery can separate the two. If you view The Birth of a Nation, you must accept its racism as part of its maker’s sensibility. Under these circumstances, it is easy to understand why, for instance, the Black Student Union at Bowling Green State should feel a deep rage at the thought of The Birth of a Nation’s very existence.
The film has its place, too, in a long and dismal tradition which all sane Americans unite with African Americans in wanting to see destroyed. The North may have won the War, but the white South, digging in its heels, has spent the decades from then till now rewriting history, in a paroxysm of wishful thinking, in an effort to win the propaganda war. African-American rage at their persistence is wholly understandable.
But should the rage of Bowling Green’s African-American students be directed against the memory of Lillian Gish, who thought only to pay tribute to the region of Ohio where she and her sister spent their childhood by donating a theater to the university? Here we come to a parting of the ways. Of course the Black Student Union is right to hate The Birth of a Nation. I hate The Birth of a Nation. I don’t know anyone, black or white, who loves film and knows Griffith and who doesn’t hate The Birth of a Nation. For us, however, the problem is that we also revere it. Even while staggering under the burden of its racism, it is a masterpiece, a work of incalculable brilliance that changed the world’s thinking about film. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of filmmakers the world over, for five generations, have been stimulated by the range of cinematic ideas and innovations in The Birth of a Nation to make films of their own. And none, or at least very few, of those films could conceivably be called racist. No, the Black Student Union was right. But the fools in power at Bowling Green State who gave in to them were wrong: Instead of using the occasion to help their students learn to become more deeply right, they surrendered to them, throwing away, with their facile decision, the precious heritage of Lillian and Dorothy Gish. (And the heritage was easily accessible: One of the presents Lillian gave the university was a set of 25 of her films shown in a Museum of Modern Art retrospective of her career.)
That heritage, particularly in Lillian’s case, demands exploring. For Lillian Gish’s career did not stop short when, as a nervous and submissive young actress of 21, she began to shoot the scenes her mentor had selected for her to perform in The Birth of a Nation. She grew up to be a sagacious woman, who lived to the ripe age of 99, and worked nearly up to the end. A story, apparently apocryphal, alleges that on Gish’s very last film, The Whales of August (1987), she is said to have called the crew together on the last day of the shoot and apologized to them for the temperamental behavior of her costar, Bette Davis; she explained that aging was a difficult process and one must be patient with those, like Davis, who find themselves resenting it and inflict their resentment on others.
I do not know if, in her later life, she would have said similar things about Griffith’s view of race, for she idolized Griffith, as any young artist might idolize the first genius he or she encounters. But I do know that she would not have tolerated injustice. In 1975, in an otherwise woebegone and misconceived revue called A Musical Jubilee, I saw Lillian Gish stand proudly on a Broadway stage, at the height of the Vietnam War, and speak-sing the lyrics of a World War I pacifist song called “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” I have forgotten everything else about the show; I cannot forget the staunch presence of Lillian Gish.
There were many other such occasions, on stage and screen, for Gish to display her staunchness. The first four of them came with Griffith, for whom in the years following The Birth of a Nation she played central roles in four more masterpieces: Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and Orphans of the Storm. In the second of these, she plays the physically abused daughter of an alcoholic prizefighter. I showed this film, not many years ago, to a first-year acting class. The scene in which Gish barricades herself in the closet to escape her drunk father remains one of the most harrowing ever filmed—and I can attest, from my students’ reactions, that I was not the only person harrowed. (And note that this film, like Intolerance before it, was a part of Griffith’s efforts to refute the charge of “racist” that had stuck to him because of The Birth of a Nation.)
When financial reverses forced the always extravagant Griffith to sell his assets and lay off his contracted employees, including Gish, she found work with MGM. They offered her a million-dollar salary; she asked for a lower wage and a percentage of the profits, suggesting that instead they spend the cash she was saving them on higher production quality. She herself apparently was allowed to exercise a good deal of creative control over her MGM silents, which include three more masterpieces: King Vidor’s La Bohème, with Gish playing Mimi to John Gilbert’s Rodolphe; and two works by the Swedish director Victor Sjöström (his surname anglicized by MGM to Seastrom): The Scarlet Letter and The Wind. The latter, Gish’s favorite among her MGM films, is one of the bleakest and most hauntingly chilling films ever made; her contractual percentage brought her no rewards from its huge box-office failure.
MGM wanted the stage-trained and vocally secure Gish to stay on with them as the sound era came in, but she knew that moviegoers’ mores were changing, and did not see herself finding viable roles among the tough-talking Stanwycks and Crawfords of the 1930s. Instead, she went back to her first love, the stage, accepting the offer of an enterprising young producer-director, Jed Harris, to appear on Broadway as the glamorous Yelena in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, with one of the stars of Harris’ hugely successful The Front Page, Osgood Perkins, as her Astrov and Walter Connolly as her Vanya. She was well received, and over the next two decades she became a familiar figure on the stage, playing central roles in a wide variety of classics and new plays. She played the dying Marguerite Gautier in Camille, and a “Young Whore” in Sean O’Casey’s Within the Gates. In 1936 she played a memorable Ophelia to John Gielgud’s Hamlet (Judith Anderson was his Gertrude), and in 1947 played opposite him again in a stage version of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Her résumé includes new works by Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, and T.S. Eliot, as well as Tad Mosel’s Pulitzer Prize–winning All the Way Home, and, in the early 1950s, Horton Foote’s now frequently revived The Trip to Bountiful (last seen on Broadway with Cicely Tyson in the role created by Gish).
As the 1940s gave way to the ’50s, she began making movies again, now as a mature, tough-minded woman who could create a devastating effect in character parts. The filmic high points of this period include Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, now firmly established as one of the era’s cinema masterpieces, and Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb, about which the critic Pauline Kael commented that Gish “comes closest to being the star, even though her part is small.”
Old age seemed to hold few, if any, qualms for her. She appeared in an all-star Shaw revival, expanded her range to include musicals, and revisited Uncle Vanya, this time as the old nursemaid Marina in a production by Mike Nichols. She made frequent television appearances, sometimes as a commentator on showings of her own silent films. Through it all, she seemed to remain sage, imperturbable, supportive of artists and risk-takers, a benevolent spirit using her accumulated wealth as a force for good—and particularly concerned to preserve the memory of her beloved sister, who, in frailer health, had died in 1968 at age 70. When Lillian followed her in 1993, she established in her will the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, through which a six-figure sum is awarded annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world. Recipients have included the film director Ingmar Bergman, the composer-performer Meredith Monk, the choreographer Bill T. Jones, and the solo performance artist Anna Deavere Smith.
This is the Lillian Gish whose name Bowling Green State University has elected to remove from the theater she endowed. Perhaps in Bowling Green, Ohio, the larger cultural context is viewed as too unimportant to prevent such reprehensible actions. But that larger context matters to me, and to large numbers of Americans like me. America has a long history, and Lillian Gish remains a vibrant and significant part of that history.
True, racism has a long part in American history too, and all reasonable people would like to see it eradicated, and yearn for the day when it will be no more. But even on that day, its facts and evidences will remain. We cannot bury them and pretend they never existed; they would only putrefy underground and some dog attracted by their smell would dig them up again. Bitter as it may seem, it is probably wiser to accept their existence as a dead part of the past and move on, leaving them alone. As drama, The Birth of a Nation, with its wordless soundtrack, its archaic look, and its early silent acting conventions, seems laughably dated. For all the offense it carries, it is impossible to imagine any budding white supremacist of today being provoked or stimulated by it. That it can still provoke anger in the people it demeans is a tragic affirmation of Griffith’s genius. No one was ever better at telling a story through images rhythmically spliced together. Learn from his genius, and let the repugnant story he chose to tell fade and die. He moved on, regretting this aspect of The Birth of a Nation for the rest of his life. Lillian Gish, who had only been a working actress following her director’s guidance, likewise moved on, collaborating with Griffith and others in a series of imperishable masterpieces that, on a cosmic scale at least, ought to far outweigh her misguided participation in a film that would cause her such retribution when she, her sister, and Griffith had all been dead for over a quarter of a century.
