President Woodrow Wilson during a private screening at the White House is reported to have enthusiastically exclaimed: “It’s like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true. www.youtube.com ” To his credit, Griffith later (by 1921) released a shortened, re-edited version of the film without references to the KKK. In its explicitly caricaturist presentation of the KKK as heroes and Southern blacks as villains and violent rapists and threats to the social order, it appealed to white Americans who subscribed to the mythic, romantic view (similar to Sir Walter Scott historical romances) of the Old Plantation South. Many viewers were thrilled by the love affair between Northern and Southern characters and the climactic rescue scene. The film also thematically explored two great American issues: inter-racial sex and marriage, and the empowerment of blacks. Ironically, although the film was advertised as authentic and accurate, the film’s major black roles in the film — including the Senator’s mulatto mistress, the mulatto politican brought to power in the South, and faithful freed slaves — were stereotypically played and filled by white actors – in blackface. [The real blacks in the film only played in minor roles.] Its climactic finale, the suppression of the black threat to white society by the glorious Ku Klux Klan, helped to assuage some of America’s sexual fears about the rise of defiant, strong (and sexual) black men and the …