D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” released in 1915, is widely regarded as one of the most hateful films ever created. It glorifies the racist terror perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan, while demonizing the Black people those crimes were perpetrated against.
But far fewer people know about Griffith’s follow-up, which has a fairly ironic title: “Intolerance,” sometimes presented as “Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages.” Released in 1916, the film presents a sweeping history of cautionary tales about the moral dangers posed by intolerance of those with different beliefs.
That should raise some eyebrows, coming from a filmmaker who had lionized the KKK just a year before. While there is a temptation to believe that Griffith made the film to atone for the damage done by “Birth of a Nation,” this is sadly not the case.
The NAACP had heavily (and rightly) protested “Birth of a Nation,” and some cities even banned the film to quell the protests. Despite this, Griffith did not believe he had done anything wrong, and saw his film as a victim of censorship.
In 1916, Griffith published a lengthy pamphlet on the subject, titled “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.” In the pamphlet, he wrote the following:
“How does any man dare to invest his money in any picture that speaks against any certain class or condition of people, however evil and open to condemnation their works may be, when he knows how easy it is for a few individuals to go to any one of the many hundreds of censorship boards in the country and influence them to destroy the property which the producer has gone to great pains and care to build up?” [CTR emphasis]
The pamphlet repeats the word “Intolerance” on every second page, accompanied with a cartoon purporting to show the damage it has done throughout history.
The film “Intolerance” goes the same way – implicitly equating those historical examples to the criticism Griffith had received for the overt racism in “Birth of a Nation.”
The film presents four stories, all interspersed with the film’s central symbol: a mother rocking a cradle while observed by three women, reminiscent of the mythological Fates, in the background. They are as follows.
- A contemporary tale in which a working-class family is torn apart by economic strife and malicious social “uplifters,” all linked directly or indirectly to a Rockefeller-esque mill owner.
- The 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which French Protestant Huguenots were murdered en masse in a plot orchestrated by Catherine de Medici and other Catholic nobility.
- The fall of ancient Babylon to Persian forces, enabled by priests upset about the favor given to a rival god.
- The last days of Jesus Christ before the crucifixion (yes, really). This section gets a small fraction of the screen time devoted to the other three.
That’s right – to Griffith, those are all functionally equivalent to people protesting his film for promoting racism.
Still, in many ways “Intolerance” pushed the limits of what film could do at the time. That spectacle was fully on display on Sunday, when a restored print of the movie was screened at Denver’s Sie FilmCenter during the 2024 Denver Silent Film Festival.
Clocking in at over three hours, “Intolerance” is the very definition of a spectacle. Notable are the massive walls used for the Babylon segments – so large that, after filming had finished, Griffith left them standing, letting them fall into decay for years. Creating “Intolerance” was so expensive that he no longer had enough money to take them down.
That’s a good metaphor for the movie as a whole: an overinflated colossus that ultimately threatens to collapse under its own weight. The narrative conceit, juxtaposing four separate stories against one another by virtue of their shared theme, gave me a sense of whiplash, as the perspective slingshotted back and forth across the centuries, jumping to a breakneck pace as the film reached its climax. At the same time, I’m admittedly a sucker for extravagant art, and it was fun to let “Intolerance” pull me along on its ridiculous ride.
The four action-packed endings – the fall of Babylon, the slaughter of the Huguenots, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the race to save the Boy from being executed for a crime he did not commit – are all juxtaposed together. But the Mountain Girl is too late to warn Prince Belshazzar of the High Priest’s betrayal; Prosper is too late to save his beloved Brown Eyes from Medici’s mercenaries; and, predictably, Jesus does in fact get crucified. Only the Boy, in the modern day, is spared just moments before his slated hanging.
This is followed by a montage in which the narrator pleads for an end to intolerance. The message of the arrangement seems to be that in this modern, more enlightened age, we can look back on the evils in the past, learn from them, and try to break the cycle.
It’s a noble message, but it’s awfully rich coming from Griffith, especially after he doubled down on his previous film’s anti-Black racism. “Intolerance” has quite a bit to unpack, but it also isn’t exactly free from bigotry, to say the least.
In one example, the teetotaling female “uplifters” who work to ban alcohol, public dancing, and ultimately snatch babies out of poor mothers’ arms are dismissed with common misogynistic tropes, as being unhappy because men aren’t attracted to them. One title card makes it explicit: “When women cease to attract men they often turn to Reform as a second choice.”
“Intolerance” directly compares these uplifters to the Pharisees who, in the Bible, helped betray Jesus to the Romans. There’s definitely a strain of antisemitism in that portrayal – further compounded by how the uplifters’ work is exclusively financed by Mr. Jenkins, a wealthy business magnate, to keep his workers obedient and efficient.
I’m reminded of fringe conspiracies that claim feminism, LGBTQ rights, and other boogeymen of the far-right are being propped up by a nebulous “elite” to control the social order. (Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the cartoons in Griffith’s pamphlet – many of which depict Intolerance as an old man in a suit with a distinctly long nose, reminiscent of common antisemitic caricatures.)
The peculiar part is that “Intolerance” seems very aware of social injustices – but only insofar as they apply to white people. The contemporary story’s inciting incident is Jenkins slashing wages for his mill workers, leading to a strike in which many workers are brutally gunned down by the state militia.
The Boy turns to crime largely as a result of the economic uncertainty that follows. This has a cascading effect on the rest of his life – when he tries to clean up his act to raise a family, his boss plants contraband on him, and his previous criminal record is cited as a justification for his imprisonment. Without his support, his wife is left impoverished. Her poor living conditions, along with the aforementioned criminal record, are used by the uplifters to justify taking their baby into custody.
This is a real phenomenon that happens to this day. Low-income families are disproportionately likely to have run-ins with Child Protective Services, often through no fault of their own. But crucially, Black families are even more likely to be the victims of this, due to the compounding effects of both economic disparities and racial bias.
But to Griffith, the “works” of Black people are “evil and open to condemnation.” How can someone preach tolerance, love, and peace, but refuse to recognize when he himself is being intolerant?
There’s an oft-cited adage commonly called the “paradox of tolerance,” coined in Karl Popper’s 1945 book “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” The book states, “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” To summarize, blindly promoting universal tolerance allows intolerance to flourish.
This idea seems lost, perhaps willfully, on modern conservatives, and far-right Christian nationalists in particular. In a recent example, in response to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) cataloging and documenting the extremist actions and rhetoric of Christian conservative groups, the “New Tolerance Campaign” released its own map branding the SPLC and others as “agent[s] of hate.” And conservative pundits such as Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, and others have made careers out of spreading hateful rhetoric on college campuses, and then complaining about protesters trying to “silence” them.
It seems that even today, the hypocrisy exemplified by Griffith lives on in the American right.
