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Notes -
I just watched The Birth of a Nation (1915). Despite having a shredded attention span for movies typically, I found it pretty compelling and surprisingly watched it in just a few sittings (same thing I found with the Napoleon silent epic from the 1920s which was even longer). Just great expressive acting, scored well, with a story that flowed at a solid pace (and from a perspective that I can imagine inhabiting, but hadn't seen before). And I can guess how especially impressive some of it was for the time. Though the actors playing mulatto characters were maybe hamming it up too much as the villains, and seemed like they thought they were in a different movie (or maybe the director really wanted to sell that angle).
Given our forum members here, does anyone know of any heterodox witchy takes about the KKK? Are most people fairly accurate in seeing them as shallow dumb racist terrorists, lashing out while hiding their identities in cowardice? Or is that more like history being written by winners, where there was actually more to engage with, some higher theory of mind, like what this movie is trying to portray (revenge, fighting back, or maybe even beyond that)? Back in the day I had the basic high school AP US history, but apparently everything between the civil war and the great depression didn't make a lasting impression, because I find myself really not knowing anything about reconstruction, 'radical republicans', etc. In general I find that time period pretty interesting & appealing, with Monet impressionism, Dostoevsky & Arthur Conan Doyle books, and post-civil-war-set Westerns being most interesting. Just have no idea about the US South vs North around then I guess.
Or failing that, does anyone have any movie recommendations in any similar vein? I used to think of silent movies being mostly slapstick comedies which weren't even that funny, but these two epics I mentioned were great. Or related to this movie in other ways, I tried watching Gone With the Wind and Triumph of the Will, but got bored of both after 10-20 minutes (will give them another shot at some point). The 2012 spielberg Lincoln movie was great too, for DDL acting, and it seems like the Tommy Lee Jones character was rehabilitating the similar character in Birth.
My grandparents grew up under segregation(albeit towards the tail end). They’re glad it changed, and don’t remember the rules having done anything good(or having been very strictly enforced in the general case). I have little nice to say about Jim Crow.
Reconstruction was an actual military occupation(this is what happens when you lose a war). The south was factually invaded and occupied and union troops factually treated southern civilians as enemies. Arbitrary measures to humiliate and break southern society were imposed- such as a ban on speaking French in public in parts of Louisiana. Union imposed governments were incompetent, corrupt, and full of radicals who didn’t particularly care how their ideas worked in practice. There is a reason the radical republicans were overthrown in coups which then wrote constitutions which were racist but mostly limited the governments ability to function. The Texas constitution has(literally) been amended over 500 times because it was such a mess. Granted, lots of these amendments are the sorts of policy changes that should be normal legislative matters, but that’s partly because the constitution requires it. Another way of saying this is that patching the constitutional restrictions on acting like a normal government required more words in constitutional amendments than in the actual constitution.
Perhaps related to this, the south was a low-state-capacity society for most of the solid south period; in low state capacity societies you get vigilante groups and secret societies with radical ideologies and those groups have actual supporters. Many Islamist groups in middle eastern shitholes are a present day example but the second wave of the klan definitely was one themselves; for all their racism a lot of the people they hanged were actual criminals that deserved it and in the roaring 20s KKK patrols regularly administered beatings to people who transgressed social norms, old school policeman style. Much less is known about the first wave of the klan but vigilantism has a long history in the south; the republic of Texas had a civil war over the issue and veterans of that war would have still been alive during reconstruction.
Interesting, thanks. Yeah the wiki article on Reconstruction era referred to "the legal, social, and political challenges of the abolition of slavery and the reintegration of the eleven former Confederate States into the United States" and various laws & amendments being passed nationally, which sounded like what I remembered. But what stood out was looking up what marked the end, the supposed compromise of 1877, simply being when federal troops were pulled out (so it was all an 'era' characterized by gunpoint).
That's the wild part to me, which I somehow never learned or got through osmosis. I always had the connotation of 'carpetbagger' as economic opportunist, northern capitalists coming down to make a buck, a la 'shock doctrine'. Never knew that apparently northern white & black republicans literally went south and became congressmen & governors for a decade. The people who would actually pack up and move to a southern city to try to run/organize politics and government -- that's a mindset I'd also like to see portrayed from the flipside. If it was something other than a naked power grab, I could imagine it positively portrayed as a moral SJW angle, a 'doing my part' missionary flavor, or a more general entrepreneurial spirit.
I was wondering if maybe in the initial wave they were trying to imitate the crusades with the outfits and talk of wizards & knights. Then the revival in the 20s after this movie came out seems a lot more like a fanclub secret society, either larping or wanting more agency of 'you can just do stuff'. Admittedly, the movie poster artwork does look fairly badass, and makes me want to play dark souls or something.
Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed...
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