NY Post on "Birth of a Nation" (1915)(LONG); Asked you to jump (1928)

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:00 PM -0500 1/23/05, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>NY POST ON "BIRTH OF A NATION"
>
>I walked to the New York Public Library. It's open on Sunday. But,
>of course, it was closed. There was not even a sign on the door.
>
>So I splurged $2 on a subway to NYU. I don't see the quotation
>here...Way back, about 20 years ago, I wrote a play about the Ku
>Klux Klan and Plessy V. Ferguson called A FOOL'S ERRAND, based on
>the work of Albion Tourgee. It was about as successful as my
>etymology career.
>
>
>NEW YORK POST, March 4, 1915, pg. 9, col. 3:
>
>_"Birth of a Nation."_
>
>An appeal to race prejudice as subtle and malicious as any that has
>been made in New York, a thrilling historic spectacle of the battles
>and life of the days of the Civil War, and an explanation of
>Southern feeling in the reconstruction days in defence of the Ku
>Klux Klan which terrorized negroes during that period--these were
>the things presented to the spectators who filled the Liberty
>Theatre last evening for the first presentation of the
>motion-picture drama, "The Birth of a Nation." As an achievement in
>motion-picture photography upon a tremendous scale, surprisingly
>effective in artistic realization, the film is as remarkable as it
>is audacious in its characterization of the negro as a primitive
>brute, either vicious or childlike, only to be controlled by
>violence.
>
>People were moved to cheers, hisses, laughter, and tears, apparently
>unconscious, and subdued, by tense interest in the play; they
>clapped when the masked riders took vengeance on negroes, and they
>clapped when the hero refused to shake the hand of a mulatto who has
>risen by political intrigue to become lieutenant-governor. This
>remark, made by a typical New Yorker leaving the theatre,
>characterizes the sentiment which was expressed to much of the
>comment: "THat show certainly does make you hate those blacks. And
>if it gets that effect on me, when I don't care anything about it,
>imagine what it would be in the South, with a man whose family was
>mixed up in it. It makes you feel as if you'd do the same thing."
>

Of course that was then (although I can imagine the same objection
leveled in the Post of my own childhood, quite a liberal rag at the
time).  Anymore, the Post would probably defend the racial portrayals
in BOAN.

>--------------------------------------------------------------
>IF FRED SHAPIRO ASKED YOU TO JUMP OFF THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE,
>YOU'D DO THAT, TOO?
>
>This was popular in the 1960s. I remember Saturday Night Live's Jane
>Curtin playing a mother and saying this, about 1978.
>
and in the 1950s, especially if you were growing up in Washington
Heights, almost in the shadow of the bridge.  But I've also long
heard the alternate version involving the Empire State Building,
which must have implied a greater degree of gullibility, given the
relative difference in the heights of the two structures.

Larry