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Did Woodrow Wilson state that the film The Birth of Nation was "like writing history with lightning'
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[[File:TheBirthofaNation.jpg|thumbnail|left|300px|This promotional poster from the 1915 film Birth of a Nation shows the “uniform” of the Ku Klux Klan and the revered status, as knights saving the South, the film gives the group. (IMDB)]]__NOTOC__
By Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes
In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson watched The Birth of a Nation, a film by D. W. Griffith that falsified the reality of the post–Civil War Reconstruction period by presenting blacks as attempting to dominate southern whites and sexually force themselves on white women. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), in violently oppressing blacks, was ultimately portrayed by the production as the savior of the South’s white female nobility. After that private screening of the film at the White House, Wilson reportedly stated, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”<ref>The Birth of a Nation, dir. D. W. Griffith (David W. Griffith Corp., 1915).</ref>
====What is the plot of "The Birth of a Nation"?====
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The film lays out that process and its results in stark, albeit silent, detail. In one of the most telling scenes, labeled “An Historical Facsimile of the State House of Representatives of South Carolina as it was in 1870,” the black men who were elected to the state legislature as the result of Stoneman’s and his colleagues’ efforts “conduct their business with the decorum of a pack of wolves. One takes a swig from a bottle with a gesture as obvious as a stage whisper. Another makes a motion that all white people should salute black officers in the street. The men raise their fists in heated support. Representatives cheer, dance, and eat fried chicken as they pass a bill permitting the intermarriage of blacks and whites.”<ref> Richard Corliss, “D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation 100 Years Later: Still Great, Still Shameful,” Time, March 3, 2015. </ref>
The Birth of a Nation is as much the story of the Cameron and Stoneman families as it is about the Civil War, Reconstruction, or the KKK. However, the second subtitle in the silent film, and the first to deal specifically with the plot, provides a clear understanding of where Dixon (and obviously also Griffith) placed the blame not only for slavery but also for the Civil War: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.”<ref>Ibid.</ref> The core of the novel and its cinematic portrayal are driven by that level of division and inequality. Dixon, and, by extension, Griffith, revel in that coarsest of racial imagery.
====Why was "The Birth of the Nation" shown in the White House?====
[[File:President_Woodrow_Wilson_by_Harris_%26_Ewing,_1914.jpg|thumbnail|left|250px|President Woodrow Wilson]]
On February 18, 1915, projectionists dressed in evening attire showed The Birth of a Nation on the white wooden panels of the East Room of the White House. Dixon had been a Johns Hopkins University classmate of Wilson, and that connection allowed Dixon to screen the film for the president, his daughters, and a few cabinet members.
====References====
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