"Birth of a Nation". Matter o' fact the KKK didn't even exist at that point, having been extinguished in the 1870s. But then a Georgia salesman named William Simmons saw the film and acted it out, gathering some disciples and charging up Stone Mountain with burning crosses (that icon comes directly from the film) to restart it. That became the Klan most of us are familiar with, and by far the biggest and most wide spread.
Like I said FIRST movie shown in the White house and VERY pro KKK.
What, is this repeat-your-post day?
You can't really be "pro-" something that doesn't exist, but it was a romantic/nostalgic flick based on a racist book called "The Clansman". This matters because
the film spurred the reorganization of the KKK.
It was also the most popular film in the country. Wilson was not the devil, just typical of his time.
It was a landmark in film for its techniques, and of course highly controversial, even in that time, which was the most blatantly racist period (turn of the century into the 1920s) that we've ever had. The standard history books kind of forget to mention all the race riots, the "Red Summer" of 1919, the Tulsa race riots that left hundreds dead and thousands homeless... even today not a lot of people know Bob Dylan's epic song "Desolation Row" is about one of those riots, that his father witnessed in Duluth. White people actually generated postcards commemorating lynchings and sold victims' body parts as souvenirs.
In the
20th century this went on. Part of that inconvenient context the more simpleminded don't bother to figure out, like imagining that Iran was invented in 1976.
Btw the actual first film to screen at the White House was an Italian movie called
Cabiria (1914, the prior year), on the White House lawn. Fun fact.