15,697
edits
Changes
Did Woodrow Wilson state that the film The Birth of Nation was "like writing history with lightning'
,no edit summary
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 (kkkKKK), 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>
Wilson’s statement was inaccurate, at best. The events and images that the silent film presented were untrue stereotypes; the events, politics, and culture of the Reconstruction era were the opposite of what occurs in the film’s plot. In reality, whites dominated blacks and assaulted white women during Reconstruction, and, rather than a vigilante justice group, the KKK was little more than a white terrorist organization. Regardless of whether Wilson made the infamous statement, once public opinion and official policy began to reject the film’s version of cultural and political reality, Wilson would belatedly attempt to distance himself from The Birth of a Nation. Even so, the film did illustrate his vision of national reunion following the Civil War.
====What is the plot of "The FilmBirth of a Nation"?====
Produced for $100,000, The Birth of a Nation was “the seminal blockbuster of the silent-film period and was the most widely seen of all motion pictures until it was eclipsed by another Civil War epic, Gone with the Wind, in 1939.”<ref> Erin Blakemore, “‘Birth of a Nation’: 100 Years Later,” J-Stor Daily, Feb. 4, 2015. </ref> The essential narrative and principal fictional characters for The Birth of a Nation were originally created by the former North Carolina Baptist minister Thomas Dixon Jr. for his 1905 novel <i>The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan</i>.<ref>Thomas Dixon Jr., <i>The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan</i> (New York: A. Wessels, 1905).</ref> Dixon wrote The Clansman as a message to northerners to maintain racial segregation during Reconstruction: he reasoned that blacks, when free, would become savage and violent, committing crimes such as murder, rape, and robbery far out of proportion to their percentage of the population.
