12. The antebellum South was glorified in an early feature length film made in America
One of the readers who enjoyed Dixon’s books was a fledgling film director named David Wark (D.W.) Griffith. Griffith wrote a screenplay based on The Clansman, hired Lillian Gish to portray a Southern belle, and created what was at the time the most sophisticated motion picture ever made. It depicted the assassination of Lincoln and told the story of Reconstruction from the viewpoint of a Southern family, as well as the changes in the north through a Northern family. In the film, the Ku Klux Klan arose in the South to protect Southern womanhood from the depredations of free blacks and ravaging Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags. They were an extension of the knightly Southern cavaliers of the Civil War.
The film, The Birth of a Nation, was the first ever to be shown at the White House, screened for President Woodrow Wilson and invited guests. It was one of the first films to depict slavery. It depicted caring and gentle slave owners, happy slaves faithful to their masters, and freedmen brutally exploited by Northern intruders. It was entirely supportive of the Lost Cause, a movement which belied slavery as the cause of the Civil War, and promoted the nobility of the antebellum South. It was wildly popular, though frequently controversial in the North. It changed the perception of the pre-war South and the Confederacy for many of its audience, and its precepts were followed in succeeding films, books and plays.