"The Spirit of 76"

[pnorman]

The Tragic Odyssey of Robert Goldstein

n 1915, D.W. Griffiths produced with Goldstein's assistance, Birth of a Nation, a paean to the Southern Version of the American Civil War. Until the movie Glory came out, Birth of a Nation was the accepted and authorized version. Its success electrified the world. President Woodrow Wilson, whose 'New Freedom' embodied the progressive ideal, called Birth of a Nation "history shot with electricity." Even the Russian Revolutionary Lenin was suitably impressed.

Standing in the shadows of Griffin's success, a mighty profitable place, Goldstein decided to go back to the true birth of the nation, 1776. At an expense of over $200,000 ($48m in today's money), Goldstein produced "Spirit of '76," an epic which spanned from the Battles of Lexington and Concord to Yorktown.

From descriptions of the film in court records, from Lionel Lincoln, the Cooper novel whose story line was followed, and from later copyists which include America (1924) and Howards of Virginia (1940), the movie had a weak plot, organized around historical vignettes which included various British and Hessain atrocities in the Cherry Valley New York and in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania.

The film opened in Chicago in April 1917. Local police acting on orders from President Wilson seized the film. The United States had just declared war on Germany and the war was not quite as popular as the President would have expected. The country was so divided that the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryant, resigned in protest. After the offending scenes were redacted, showing resumed. However, like all Americans who face an arbitrary restriction, Goldstein merely took his film elsewhere to show it in its entirety.
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Goldstein's film was seized and Goldstein was arrested for espionage. In approving the seizure of the film, Judge Beldsoe wrote, "History is history and fact is fact . . . the United States is confronted with . . . the greatest emergency . . . history. There is now required . . . the greatest devotion to a common cause . . . this is no time . . . for souring dissension among people, and of creating animosity . . . allies." Convicted of espionage in having attempted to incite to mutiny U.S. Armed Forces, Goldstein defiantly proclaimed his innocence. A sentence of ten years was accompanied by Judge Beldsoe's lecture on the many freedoms America afforded.
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http://www.angelfire.com/bc/RPPS/revolution_movies/golstn.htm

pnorman

[pnorman]

1. Here's something related to the same jingoistic hysteria in which the above took place:.

DANCE OR BE HANGED - THE PRAGER CASE

As a result of the unprecedented hatred of foreigners which developed after the United States entered World War 1, Robert P. Prager, a German immigrant, was lynched in Collinsville on the night of April 5, 1918. He was the first German to be lynched in the nation and the only one in Illinois. Why did it happen in a place so heavily and so favorably influenced by German immigrants for so long?
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Under pressure, the German language disappeared from schools, churches, and newspapers. The Belleville Turnverein became the Belleville Turners. Mobs attacked German carnival bands; in Staunton a school superintendent called secret service agents to investigate a family whose son failed to salute the American flag during a school ceremony. By decree of the Committee on Public Information sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage." The editor of the Collinsville Herald on Feb. 28, 1917, wrote, "The mass public sentiment in Collinsville at present is in no humor to listen calmly to light or insinuating remarks about America or the war.

It was this atmosphere which Robert Paul Prager - a squat, 33-year-old, unnaturalized German with a handlebar mustache and one glass eye - was forced to combat. Prager had come to Collinsville to work in the mines and had an obsession to become an American. When he attempted to join the United Mine Workers, he was rejected by the president of the local union for being a socialist.

Prager attacked the official in an open letter to the miners; in response, on April 4, a group visited him, took his shoes, and paraded him through the streets draped in a flag. When he was taken into "protective custody" in Collinsville, rumor reached the taverns that a German spy had been captured; and a drunken mob formed. The mob entered the jail past the mayor of the city; bound the four jailers; removed Prager from the jail; and prodded him barefoot through the streets, forcing him to sing the "Star Spangled Banner" and to give three cheers for the red, white, and blue. Two miles south of the city a rope was thrown over the limb of a tree, and Prager was hanged.
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http://riverweb.ncsa.uiuc.edu/IBEX/vignettes/prager_case.htm



pnorman