SOURCE: Silverman, Joan L. “The Birth of a Nation: Prohibition Propaganda.” Southern Quarterly 19, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 1981): 23-30.

In the following essay, Silverman points to the ways in which D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation used the material in Dixon's novels The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman to promote temperance.

In discussing the passage of the Prohibition Amendment, historians tried to focus on the relentless lobbying of the Anti-Saloon League which implemented the educational spadework of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. They cite both organizations as representing a last-ditch effort by evangelical small town and rural Protestants to impose their morality on an increasingly urban, non-Protestant America. These groups in their campaign are perceived as taking advantage of a widespread surge of wartime patriotic fervor that sought to conserve grain for humanitarian reasons and simultaneously get the supposedly traitorous German brewers out of business. Moreover, historians point...