One might expect that D.W. Griffith’s rural settings would express pure conservatism by sowing nostalgia for a pre‐modern paradise lost. Iris Barry (1940) and Sergei Eisenstein (1949) rooted Griffith’s conservatism in his Old Kentucky birthplace, and most film scholars have followed suit. However, historians of the Progressive Era (1893–1917) have overturned the familiar dichotomy of conservative provinces and the liberal city. In fact, social justice reforms hewed to a pastoral ideal; Progressives envisioned state agencies, urban parks, and rural modernization programs that would create harmony between city and country, tranquility and wildness, old and new. Pastoral images in Griffith’s Biograph films (1908–1911) reflect the era’s liberal vision of progress.