The white South’s perspective on the Reconstruction was told in Thomas Dixon’s enormously popular novel The Leopard’s Spots (1902), which sold over one million copies. It was followed by The Clansman (1905). Both novels portrayed the Klan as redeemers of the South. D. W. Griffith transformed Dixon’s novels into that cinematic masterpiece of racist propaganda The Birth of a Nation (1915), first seen at the White House and praised enthusiastically by President Woodrow Wilson. Whites, especially in the South, loved Birth and regarded seeing it as a “religious experience.”
