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'A Public Menace': The Liberal Fight Over Banning 'The Birth Of A Nation'

'A Public Menace'
By 

Editorial Fellow, HuffPost

Actors costumed in the full regalia of the Ku Klux Klan chase down a white actor in blackface in a still from 'The Birth of a Nation,' the first-ever feature-length film, directed by D. W. Griffith, California, 1914. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Actors costumed in the full regalia of the Ku Klux Klan chase down a white actor in blackface in a still from 'The Birth of a Nation,' the first-ever feature-length film, directed by D. W. Griffith, California, 1914. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In 1916 a 41-year-old man in Los Angeles published a short pamphlet called “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.” In passionate if somewhat pompous tones, the author described motion pictures as “the laboring man’s university,” but warned that their power to educate and instruct the nation could be “muzzled by a petty and narrow-minded censorship” that would create “a sugar-coated, virtuously-garbed version … in order to satisfy the public mentors of our so-called morals.” He quoted dozens of journalists and politicians who opposed censorship, cited Shakespeare and the Bible for good measure, and protested that “this new art was seized by the powers of intolerance as an excuse for an assault on our liberties.”

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