Abstract
David Wark Griffith was born on January 22, 1875, in Oldham County in the north of Kentucky, about twenty miles east of Louisville. Abraham Lincoln had been born slightly less than sixty-six years earlier in the southeastern part of Hardin County, Kentucky, approximately sixty miles due south of Louisville and two counties removed from Griffith’s birthplace. While Griffith only entered the world a decade after Lincoln’s assassination, the two men would be tied together by more than the geographical accident of their birth. Griffith would contribute to the historical construction of Lincoln’s memory and reputation by representing him in two major motion pictures: the silent-era The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the biopic “talkie” Abraham Lincoln (1930).
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Notes
Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith and the Birth of Film (London: Pavilion, 1984), 551.
Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 59–62.
Cornelius Regier, The Era of the Muckrakers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), 13–14, 17, 20–21.
Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), 96–7,
Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 161.
Mary E. Tomkins, Ida M. Tarbell (Boston: Twayne, 1974), 38.
Harold S. Wilson, “McClure’s Magazine” and the Muckrakers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 73–4.
Jack Spears, The Civil War on the Screen and Other Essays (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1977), 65, 67–70.
Robert C. Roman, “Lincoln on the Screen,” Films in Review, 12 (February 1961): 87–90.
Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 180.
Joseph Smith, The Spanish-American War: Conflict in the Caribbean and the Pacific 1895–1902 (London: Longman, 1994), 102.
Frank Freidel, The Splendid Little War (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1958), 33.
See Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” in Robert Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 281.
Everett Carter, “Cultural History Written With Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation,” American Quarterly (Fall 1960), reprinted in Fred Silva, ed., Focus on “The Birth of a Nation” (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 133–4; Carl E. Milliken to Will W. Alexander, August 9, 1930, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress.
Maldwyn A. Jones, The Limits of Liberty: American History, 16071980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 412.
See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 204–207, 212–19.
Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).
The first Africans to arrive in the British colonies in America were seemingly the twenty blacks who landed at Jamestown, Virginia, from a Dutch frigate in 1619—twelve years after the founding of Jamestown itself and a year before the Pilgrim Fathers sailed on the Mayflower. The idea of the existence of a white “Eden” before the arrival of Africans is consequently near-unsustainable. See John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 56.
David Turley, “A Usable Life: Popular Representations of Abraham Lincoln,” in David Ellis, ed., Imitating Art: Essays in Biography (London and Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1993), 59–60.
One study lists forty-four films that featured Lincoln between Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and his 1930 biopic. See Frank Thompson, Abraham Lincoln: Twentieth-Century Popular Portraits (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Co., 1999), 194–204.
Vlada Petric, “Two Lincoln Assassinations by D. W. Griffith,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3 (Summer 1978): 347.
Edward Wagenecht and Anthony Slide, The Films of D. W. Griffith (New York: Crown, 1975), 252.
Merrill Peterson, Lincoln in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 344.
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© 2011 Iwan W. Morgan
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Stokes, M. (2011). D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln. In: Morgan, I.W. (eds) Presidents in the Movies. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_3
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