A Lyric Theatre advertisement in The Allentown Leader of 18 March 1916 sells D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation with attendance figures, production costs, and the "wild ride of the Ku Klux Klans."
What the ad prints
The advertisement is a wall of numbers. Columns list the size of the cast, the horses, the months of production, the cost, the orchestra, and the length of the run in four cities, before the film's title appears. Below it, four lines say what the audience will see. Excerpts from the FRAME transcription:
The Great American Play at Last!
D. W. GRIFFITH'S EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD
[...]
830 Consecutive Performances in N. Y.
400 Times in Chicago
300 Times in Boston
200 Times in Philadelphia
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
[...]
WILD RIDE OF THE KU KLUX KLANS.
20 Million People Have Seen It Without Adverse Criticism
Content note: the ad promotes a film that makes heroes of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan, and lists the Klan's ride as an attraction.
Who placed it
The Lyric Theatre in Allentown, Pennsylvania, under manager W. D. Fitzgerald, placed the ad in The Allentown Leader of 18 March 1916. It announces a return engagement for the week starting Monday, 27 March, with matinees every day and prices from 25 cents in the gallery to a dollar on the lower floor. The archive took the scan from Wikimedia Commons on 2 October 2026 and records it as public domain.
How to read it
The figures argue by crowd. If twenty million people have seen it, the reader is invited to stop asking whether it is true. The ad also tells the reader there was no objection at all, and offers nothing to support that. Its billing of the Klan's ride as a thrill, set among burning cities and the Lincoln assassination, sells a terror organization as entertainment.
The film was speech, and the remedy for a lie told in a theater is a truer account told in public. That answer requires people to make it. The site's case study A hooded order paid its salesmen by the head quotes this ad and records that the founder of the 1915 Klan expected the film's premiere to give his order a boost, and it follows the NAACP's work against the revived Klan. Related pages: the Klan's own Imperial Night-Hawk, and the Wilson administration essay.
Sources
- FRAME object record, "'The Great American Play at Last!' The Birth of a Nation, Lyric Theatre advertisement (Allentown, 1916)." Lyric Theatre, Allentown, Pennsylvania (W. D. Fitzgerald, manager). The Allentown Leader, 18 March 1916, via Wikimedia Commons, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (US newspaper advertisement published 1916; Commons PD-US).
