“Klan Mouse: The Birth of a Nation Redux and White Cultural Nationalism in the 1920s PNW”

Michael Aronson, Cinema Studies, and 2023–24 OHC Faculty Research Fellow In 1922, despite the efforts of African American activists in our region, The Birth of a Nation, made its widespread return to movie theaters across the Pacific Northwest. All the involved theaters were operated by John Hamrick, an influential Seattle exhibitor and a member of the KKK. This project is designed to recover and analyze this (re)exhibition history of the Klan’s cinematic urtext, to establish exactly how the region’s Klan made use of it in this postwar cultural moment, and how Hamrick and his industry made use of the Klan.