Dixiecrats Triumphant

The secret history of Woodrow Wilson.

Charles Paul Freund from the March 2003 issue

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Wilson discharged that debt by helping Dixon and Griffith overcome the protests building against their movie. He arranged for publicized screenings for his cabinet and for Congress (the Supreme Court also had a screening), and most important, he gave Dixon and Griffith an endorsement they could exploit. "It is like writing history with lightning," Wilson said of this KKK celebration, "and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

Wilson's support was an important factor in defusing the movement against the film; indeed, Birth of a Nation went on to help spark a major Klan revival. The first half of Wilson's endorsement is still affixed to prints of the film that are screened for film students studying Griffith's advances in editing.

Obviously, Southern hopes that Wilson could force blacks into servility were delusional. Nevertheless, Wilson's Jim Crow presidency remained an available model for segregationists and supremacists who came later. Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats didn't necessarily require a model of triumphalist racism, but in Wilson they had one.

The Lott affair was widely treated as if its origins lay in 1948. They didn't. The past isn't dead, said Mississippian William Faulkner. "It's not even the past." He might have added that the past with which we grapple is often not even the real past.