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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.

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.

D. W. Griffith’s film version of Dixon’s fiction also explores Stoneman’s Reconstruction beliefs and activities, but does so through a lengthier narration of the Civil War and its aftermath, as seen through the eyes of Stoneman’s northern family in New York and a comparable southern family from South Carolina, the Camerons; both families connected when the eldest Stoneman son and the eldest Cameron son attend boarding school together prior to the war. As the plot progresses, when war breaks out, the Stonemans cast their lot with the Union North, while the Camerons are loyal to the Confederacy of the South, although they retain their mutual respect across the Mason-Dixon line. Both families lose sons in battle, but after the war, another Cameron son, Ben, distressed that his beloved South is now under the rule of blacks and carpetbaggers after the region’s defeat, organizes several like-minded southerners into a secret vigilante group, the KKK, in response to legislator Stoneman’s push to equalize the racial and economic power hierarchy in the South.

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>

This group, known in the film as the Night Riders, begins waging war on such out-of-control behavior as displayed by the freed slave Gus and, more broadly, on the northern-inspired Reconstruction government, ultimately restoring “order” to the South. By the end of the film, white supremacists are able to strip power from blacks through intimidation tactics, and, in a religious coda meant to symbolize the second coming of “the prince of peace,” Jesus and his angels stand approvingly over the scene.<ref>Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2008).</ref>

====Why "The Birth of the Nation" shown in the White House?====