On a cool evening in March of 1915, as the dusk fell over Washington, D.C., President Woodrow Wilson settled into his seat in a darkened room of the White House. It was March 21, and the event was a special screening of a new motion picture—still a novelty in those days—called The Birth of a Nation.
The celebrated D.W. Griffith directed the film, which was adapted from The Clansman, a novel penned by Thomas Dixon, an old friend of Wilson’s from his North Carolina boyhood. Dixon, a gifted storyteller with a flair for the dramatic, had long harbored a vision of the post-Civil War South that was, at best, highly romanticized and, at worst, dangerously distorted.
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As the flickering images played out on the screen, no ordinary motion picture unfolded. It was a sweeping spectacle, epic in scale, and masterfully crafted for its time. But it told a story that twisted history beyond recognition. In Griffith’s telling, the Reconstruction era was one of unrelenting chaos, where formerly enslaved black men—depicted with cruel, dehumanizing stereotypes—wielded tyrannical power over virtuous Southern whites. The Ku Klux Klan was cast not as a vigilante terrorist organization but as noble knights in white robes, riding to the rescue of their embattled race and civilization.
Nothing about it was true. It was not just a distortion but a complete inversion of historical fact. During Reconstruction, it was Southern whites, not blacks, who held the reins of power in most of the South. It was they who subjected black Americans to brutal violence and exploitation. The Ku Klux Klan was not a band of heroic defenders but a secret society that spread terror and carried out hundreds of murders in a ruthless campaign to reassert white supremacy.
And yet, the power of Griffith’s film was undeniable. As the final reel ended and the lights rose, Wilson, who had once been a historian of some repute, reportedly turned to those around him and said, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Whether the President uttered those exact words remains a matter of debate, but the story spread like wildfire, and the damage was done.
The reaction across the country was as swift as it was disturbing. African-American audiences, subjected to the film’s malicious caricatures, wept openly in theaters. In Northern cities, white audiences cheered. In some places, riots erupted—Boston, Philadelphia—and the film was barred from theaters in cities like Chicago, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. But the fury of opposition was matched by a wave of white enthusiasm. In Lafayette, Indiana, a white man, inflamed by what he had seen on screen, murdered a black teenager shortly after leaving a showing of the film.
Thomas Dixon, ever the showman, was thrilled by the controversy. He boasted that the Birth of a Nation had accomplished precisely what he had hoped. “The real purpose of my film,” he later confessed, “was to revolutionize Northern audiences so they would transform every man into a Southern partisan for life.”
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), still in its infancy, fought tirelessly against the film, launching protests and campaigns to ban it. They were largely unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan, dormant for decades, seized upon the film’s sensational success and used it to mount a massive recruitment campaign. By the early 1920s, the Klan’s membership had swelled into the millions.
Stung by criticism and perhaps troubled by his conscience, D.W. Griffith attempted to make amends. In 1916, he released Intolerance, an ambitious film denouncing bigotry and prejudice in all its forms. It was a work of staggering complexity and grand vision, but it failed to match the phenomenal success of The Birth of a Nation. Griffith would never again wield the same influence over the American imagination.
The Birth of a Nation remains a turning point in American cultural history—a breathtaking artistic achievement that unleashed a terrible power, shaping attitudes and fueling divisions that would haunt the nation for generations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"The Birth of a Nation (1915)." Jim Crow Stories, PBS.