President Woodrow Wilson, an acknowledged racist and a college classmate of Dixon’s, aired the film at the White House, the first movie shown there. The audience marveled at the new technology and soaked in the film’s racist dogma. Wilson founded his candidacy on both southern progressivism and white supremacy. According to Wilson, “Negro rule under unscrupulous adventurers has been finally put an end to in the South and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class has been established.”126 Wilson purged the federal bureaucracy of any blacks who had managed to secure
...more
