The Rose of Kentucky (1911) User Reviews

It Looks To Me Like The Klan Are The Bad Guys In This Griffith Short

[boblipton · 6/10 · 21 February 2020]

Tobacco planter Wilfred Lucas takes in orphan Marion Sunshine when her mother dies. After she comes home from school, her loving vivacity wins her over... and also wins over his younger partner, Charles West. Lucas decides he is too old for Miss Sunshine, and encourages her with Mr. West, but these machinations are interrupted when the Night Riders try to recruit him. He refuses, and they will have their revenge.

While the other reviewer points out that these Night Riders are not the Klan, they sure look like them, and the Black people are terrified of them. I doubt very much whether Griffith differentiated much, or expected his audience to. This was the story he was telling, and as always, he told it as well as he could.

Miss Sunshine.... well, that was her stage name. Born Marion Tunstall Ijames, she appeared in vaudeville, on the legitimate stage, and wrote songs, among them the lyrics to Them Peanut Vendor.' She died in 1963, age 68.

The Rose of Kentucky review

[JoeytheBrit · 6/10 · 4 June 2020]

Set in D.W. Griffith's home state of Kentucky, this melodrama treads familiar ground with a man willing to sacrifice his chance at happiness with the woman he loves in order to do what he believes is right. Wilfred Lucas plays the plantation owner who develops feelings for the girl (Marion Sunshine) he adopted as a child but who has now grown into a beautiful young woman, and to be honest there is something just a little not right about this relationship. Anyway, the incident that sways her feelings towards Lucas instead of his cowardly partner (Charles West) is an attack by the Night Riders, who are dressed up to resemble the Ku Klux Klan, but who were actually a vigilante outfit that rebelled against the exploitative practices of American tobacco companies

good vigilantes-bad vigilantes - the réac of Kentucky

[kekseksa · 7 December 2017]

Perhaps some who watch will not appreciate that it was dealing with very recent history. The "nighriders" who figure in the film were a vigilante group formed to enforce, often by violence, the boycott by the tobacco plantation owners of Kentucky (Griffith's home state of course) and Tennesee of the American Tobacco Company, which had drastically reduced the prices they were willing to pay the farmers. The so-called Black Patch Wars (the tobacco growing area was known as the Black Patch) lasted from 1904-1909 and the boycott proved ultimately successful, forcing the ATP to back down and give in to the farmers' demands.

However reprehensible some of their actions, the ATP was operating a highly exploitative monopoly and the absurd prices they were offering would have completely ruined the tobacco farmers. If their use of violence is difficult to justify, their industrial action in itself was entirely justified. Although their activities bore a superficial resemblance to those of the Ku Klux Klan (Griffith portrays their get-up as identical), the nightriders were not in any way a racist organisation and were essentially combattants against, and not in favour of, oppression and privilege, It is, to say the least, interesting that Griffith should here be expressing support for the blackleg farmers and disapproval of the nightriders when, just four years later, he would notoriously sing the praises of the racist vigilantes of the 1860s, the Ku Klux Klan, in a film that was to a large degree directly responsible, if not for the re-founding of the Klan, at least for its immense popularity.

I believe it is the Irish actor William Butler who done play de "good" blackface n....r lackey.

The film is well made with a charming performance by Marion Sunshine but Griffith's putrid politics are frankly indefensible!