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July 5, 2023

Nation building and racial animus

What impact did racist narratives have on the reconciliation of the North and South after the US Civil War?

Tyler Smith

Source: Linda Parton

Historians have thoroughly documented the violent and racist legacy of the first Hollywood blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. But an understudied aspect of the movie is how it united Whites from the North and South after the Civil War.

In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Elena Esposito, Tiziano Rotesi, Alessandro Saia, and Mathias Thoenig find strong empirical confirmation that The Birth of a Nation contributed to national reunification in the early 20th century.

The Lost Cause narrative behind The Birth of a Nation downplayed slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War and identified the enfranchisement of African Americans as a common threat to Whites after the conflict. 

Using a variety of methods to survey public sentiment from 1910 to 1920, the authors estimated the impact of the first screenings of the film on American attitudes toward White supremacy, division, and patriotism. The regression estimates of these effects are shown in Figure 6 from their paper.

Figure 6 from Esposito et al. (2023)

In the chart, the dark and light gray circles represent the effects of the movie on former Unionist and Confederate states respectively, while the black circles represent overall effects. All estimates are standardized.

The impact on attitudes toward reconciliation, supremacism, and discrimination come from textual analysis of over 3,760 local newspapers across more than 1,000 US counties. Enlistment measures the increase of enlistments in the US Navy, one way to gauge levels of patriotism. And the enemy-sounding name index (ENI) measures how frequently babies born between 1910 and 1920 were given names that evoked the former enemy’s regional identity.

The findings indicate that The Birth of a Nation fostered significant reconciliation in the public debate in both former Confederate and Unionist states. Moreover, they show that racist sentiment permeated both regions with roughly equal force, indicating the broad cultural power of the Lost Cause narrative in postbellum America.