Is it possible to create an artistic masterpiece whose content is morally and politically loathsome? If so, what should we make of such art? I can think of one clear example: Birth of a Nation, the silent film directed in 1915 by D. W. Griffith. About its repellent message there can be no doubt. The story of two families, one in the North and one in the South, during and after the American Civil War, it is pure propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan.
Based on two novels by Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots, Griffith’s epic movie paints an idealized picture of the antebellum South, where slaves lived in happy harmony with their white masters. This paradise of racial hierarchy is brutally disturbed by northern liberals, who not only win the Civil War but also give blacks the right to vote, thereby upsetting the “natural order.” Given their freedom, the blacks in Griffith’s movie start behaving like sex-crazed, power-hungry savages. White women are no longer safe. Chaos reigns. And only the heroic march of the white-robed KKK saves the virtue of white womanhood and the honor of white men.