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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>

====Did Woodrow Wilson share author Thomas Dixon Jr.'s worldview?====

Dixon was a Baptist minister from North Carolina, serving churches in the North while also working as a lawyer and an author. More specifically, he was “a professional racist who made his living writing books and plays attacking the presence of African Americans in the United States. A firm believer not only in white supremacy but also in the ‘degeneration’ of blacks after slavery ended, he thought the ideal solution to America’s racial problems was to deport all blacks to Africa. In the short term, his goal was to proselytize a southern view of Reconstruction to the rest of the country. In his mind, white southerners were the victims, not the villains, in American history, and ought to be portrayed as such.”<ref> Raymond A. Cook, “The Man behind The Birth of a Nation,” <i>North Carolina Historical Review</i>, 39 (Oct. 1962), 519–40; Corliss, “D. W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation 100 Years Later.”

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