Docents expressed a host of concerns with the exhibit film The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson and Reconstruction (Legacy), which was played for visitors in the final bedroom at the end of the semiguided tour. The film attempted to reconcile the public memories of the president and the era with the silent blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (Birth). Docents expressed unease about the clarity, racist imagery, and negative tone of Legacy. They worried it misrepresented Wilson’s feelings and ideas about Birth and minimized his achievements. Docents also thought a portion featuring the reworking of Birth by sound and visual artist DJ Spooky needed greater context. Less than a year after the MoRE opening, the docents’ concerns ultimately resulted in Historic Columbia’s approving a major in-house script revision in collaboration with the local production company that produced the original exhibit film. But in addressing docent concerns, the new version demonstrated how complicated interpreting Birth was and threatened to erase Black voices.

Legacy was one of the last exhibit pieces vetted by staff, film producers, and historians and finalized before the MoRE reopening.³ It devoted the most time to contextualizing Birth for unfamiliar audiences. At that time none of the other HHMs devoted to Wilson in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington, DC, directly addressed Wilson’s screening of the film in the White House in 1915 unless prompted. Although the exhibit at the WWPLM in Staunton includes Wilson’s time at Johns Hopkins, there is no mention that he met Thomas Dixon there. On the centennial of Birth’s release, S Street in DC displayed a movie projector and screen to demonstrate that Wilson brought the first films to the White House, but none was mentioned by name.⁴

In the development of the exhibit film at MoRE, clarity was always a major concern to Historic Columbia’s interpretive team. They hoped to explain Wilson’s relationship with Reconstruction while avoiding academic jargon or vagueness. However, team members felt apprehension about other language and word choices. Scriptwriters corrected normative writing that specified the race of some people and groups but not others. DJ Spooky was described as Black, for example, while D. W. Griffith’s race was never noted. The text referred to “Columbians” when it meant white Columbians. Daniella Cook, a professor who specializes in racially just and equitable schooling for communities traditionally underserved by public education, suggested avoiding the word racist because it might detract from white southern visitors’ revising their Reconstruction interpretation. She cautioned there was “not a right or easy answer” to discussing race. However, scripts and training texts should offer explicit behaviors and specific quotes as evidence and be specific in naming the kinds of Black representation Birth promoted, such as Black Page 193 →men being “over-sexualized animals.” As such the MoRE interpretive team included scenes from the film that directly addressed themes included in or myths of Reconstruction overturned on the tour: Black troops barring white citizens from voting, negative depictions of Black legislators, Gus grabbing Flora Cameron’s arm, and two Ku Klux Klan scenes, one in which the riders drop Gus’s lynched body on a porch and another of their fighting Black troops to regain control of the town.⁵

The most powerful imagery and persuasive evidence of white supremacy in the MoRE’s exhibit film was archival footage of a 1926 Columbia parade commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Red Shirt campaign. William Esper Czarnitzki, a regional Boy Scout executive in South Carolina, shot the Wade Hampton Day parade as part of a larger collection of his home movies depicting his family, nature, and scout parades and camping. The parade itself was one of many parades and reunions celebrating the Red Shirts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though the reunions lost momentum after 1911, the fiftieth anniversary of Hampton’s 1876 victory brought the Red Shirts back out of the closet. The celebration was a family affair, as demonstrated by Czarnitzki’s extensive coverage of the scouts’ involvement and his crowd footage. The fifteen-minute home movie captured a marching band, women dressed in white sitting atop floats, men on horses, and, of course, the Hampton statue at the State House.⁶ The moving images were persuasive and haunting in visually conveying white supremacy and memory, taking pressure off of weekend docent Halie Brazier to tell it. She witnessed the footage commemorating the return of white rule physically jolt one of her visitors.⁷ For Brazier the shocking nature of Birth and the parade were a “great way to hammer home” her tour narrative that white supremacy and its memory of Reconstruction endured, a topic she struggled to expand on with docent-guest dialogue alone. These primary sources backed her words with visual evidence to support current scholarship for people who had learned a different interpretation or silently dismissed the violence and racism she had discussed. Because Birth is fictional rather than an archival film, she favored the 1926 Red Shirt parade, as did another docent.⁸ But the film was not fake to all of its early twentieth-century audiences. It did for mainstream cinematic Reconstruction memory what the Dunning School had for the history profession. Film critics and Hollywood were well aware that the film promoted negative stereotypes of Reconstruction and Black Americans. White Americans and recent immigrants who were negotiating their whiteness readily consumed these stereotypes when they watched the film. According to historian Karen Cox, by the end of World War II, Americans were three times more likely to see a film than read a periodical or newspaper.⁹

Page 194 →The revision process for Legacy was long and arduous with wide variations of drafts considered. The search for funding and script reviews began in the summer, only months after the 2014 President’s Day reopening of MoRE. A small group of docents provided early feedback. After three revisions a draft circulated in mid-August for internal review. Historic Columbia began meeting with local director and documentarian Lee Ann Kornegay in the fall, but it would be well after the new year before a near final version of the script circulated.¹⁰ The in-house scriptwriters, MoRE interpretive staff, Kornegay, and docents went back and forth on a number of issues, including a short-lived suggestion to cut the 1926 parade. This debate demonstrated both the popularity of the parade footage with docents and visitors and how tumultuous the exercise of revising a short exhibit film would be. A parade is an experience most visitors could relate to, and the film suggested the commemoration could be mistaken for a Fourth of July parade. Shots of men, women, and children, the “cross section of people” that attended the parade, were ultimately returned to the exhibit film with a new sensory experience of crowd sounds.¹¹ This was but a small skirmish in the battle over the film’s interpretation. The real interpretive crusade was The Birth of a Nation.

The sheer complexity of Birth from historical and media studies perspectives and the need to keep the final exhibit film in MoRE brief were key interlocking issues. However, docent critiques of Legacy complicated this problem further. In addition to concerns about overall clarity, docents wanted more about Wilson’s presidential policies beyond the Fourteen Points, the Nineteenth Amendment, and segregation. Historic Columbia scrapped an introduction rewrite, a fumbling attempt to recenter the Wilson family after they left Columbia, reconnect Wilson’s presidency with Columbia, and link his Civil War and Reconstruction experience to his foreign policy in Latin America and during World War I.¹² The team added an excerpt from a new interview with Wilson biographer A. Scott Berg, who happened to be holding a book signing at Historic Columbia at the time of revisions. This allowed a Wilson expert to speculate about the impact Reconstruction had on the future president and his policies. Some team members and volunteers welcomed the addition, but a few public historians took issue with the echoes of an older Reconstruction interpretation in how Berg framed the period through Wilson’s eyes as “potentially a good idea.”¹³ The interpretive team wanted to keep an audio recording of an excerpt from one of Wilson’s speeches that opened Legacy originally, but even the most devoted proponents of the audio artifact acquiesced. The speech’s focus on industry and monopolies felt out of a place with the needs of the film and required introducing additional context, including about Wilson’s brand of progressivism and the 1912 presidential campaign.¹⁴ Meanwhile, the revised conclusion Page 195 →lacked a cohesive, workable chronology for three events the team wanted to include: Wilson’s death, the 1926 parade, and saving the home, all of which happened within a span of four years.¹⁵ The team returned to the film’s first conclusion and its critical thinking cues for visitors to explore “the legacy of Reconstruction and the impact it may have had on a fourteen-year-old boy named Tommy who later became president of the United States.”¹⁶ These would be the easy decisions.

From the beginning, interpreting Birth was the greatest conundrum for Historic Columbia and its docents. Those working most directly with docents recognized the need to contextualize the scenes from the film effectively in both the tour script and exhibit film. After the tour a few visitors expressed confusion to the gift shop manager about why an offensive film would be privileged; however, this critique did not show up on visitor evaluations.¹⁷ One volunteer was so concerned about the film that she requested a meeting about her reluctance to continue training after a sample training tour. She was uncomfortable conducting tours, especially because of the alarming images from the film of blackface actors, a dead body, and racist tropes. So distracting were these images that she missed the closing statements of the tour. Members of the interpretive team met with her and offered reassurances that revisions were coming both to the film and to a secondary background section of the script. She did not complete training.¹⁸ Based on my conversation with her, the docent seemed trapped in her own personal connections to novelist Thomas Dixon. Several generations of men in her family had established and continued to serve in a Baptist church where Dixon’s father was the first minister. She also recommended to me a chapter titled “Reconstruction and the Negroes” from the North Carolina edition of the WPA state guide that Louise Jones DuBose edited for South Carolina.¹⁹ That work and its impact on cementing a white supremacist memory of Reconstruction via tourism is discussed in chapters 3 and 5.

Another problem for docents was a quote wrongly attributed to Woodrow Wilson that he endorsed Birth of a Nation. Dixon tapped Wilson to quell criticism of the film. They met for thirty minutes on February 3, 1915. Afterward Dixon coordinated with Wilson’s daughter Margaret to schedule a private screening on February 18, 1915, attended by Wilson, his daughter, his doctor, Dixon, director Griffith, and cabinet members and their families. (The Wilsons had watched the first film in the White House, Cabiria, eight months earlier.) Dixon used the private screening to convince members of Congress and the Supreme Court to watch the film. Groups like the NAACP attempted to stop its general release by citing censorship laws that Page 196 →prohibited films or artistic productions that could incite public unrest or riots. Newspapers and critics also protested and condemned the film, citing its misrepresentation of Reconstruction and Black people, glorification of lynching, and promotion of bigotry against people of color. Wilson’s implied political endorsements ended the censorship battle in New York City, setting a precedent to screen the film in other US cities.²⁰

The question of how friendly Dixon and Wilson were gets to the heart of the interpretive and scholarly debate about Wilson’s relationship with and endorsement of the film. The interpretive team even debated whether to refer to the two men as acquaintances or associates.²¹ Wilson met Dixon during his brief stint at Johns Hopkins University. They both studied under German-trained scholar Herbert Baxter Adams and Richard T. Ely. Rooted in Hegelian theory, Adams’s Teutonic germ theory that American democracy evolved from Germanic and Anglo-Saxon bloodlines gave the southerners a larger framework for their existing regional views. Wilson certainly came off as more subtle in his racism than Dixon did in his fictional works. In a 1905 curtain speech in Columbia for his stage version of The Clansman, Dixon proclaimed that he used Reconstruction and the white southern experience to unite the nation and spark a global movement to help colonial powers facing similar racial crises.²²

Dixon and Wilson exchanged letters but did not correspond frequently. Dixon clearly admired Wilson, so much so that he convinced Wake Forest College to give his honorary degree to Wilson and later dedicated his novel The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln to the president. He also wrote to Wilson about politics. As a North Carolina legislator, Dixon shared news about a Confederate veterans’ pension bill. He wrote in support of Wilson’s governorship and presidential ambitions and as an advocate for white supremacy. He recommended a cabinet position for his friend Josephus Daniels. As young men in the early 1880s, the two had been members of Raleigh’s Watauga Club, a group committed to an industrialized New South. As editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, Daniels was co-architect of the 1898 Democratic campaign in North Carolina that fueled the Wilmington massacre and coup d’état. Dixon used the events and historical figures as inspiration for The Clansman as well as his first novel, The Leopard’s Spots. Glenda Gilmore, in her study of Jim Crow North Carolina, called Daniels “the New White Man’s mouth” and Dixon “his libido.” Wilson ultimately appointed Daniels, a key engineer in segregating federal offices, to the office of secretary of the navy. Wilson also appointed Walter Hines Page, Watauga Club member and Dixon’s publisher, as ambassador to Great Britain. Daniels in fact arranged the meeting between Chief Justice of the United States Edward D. White and Dixon to convince the former Louisiana Klansman Page 197 →to host a screening of Birth. Dixon also wrote Wilson to encourage the withdrawal of a Black candidate for a Treasury Department position and received Wilson’s assurances that there was no risk of interracial mixing.²³

Wilson and Dixon certainly found themselves in some of the same white supremacist circles, but did Wilson endorse the most famous white supremacist film of all time? After the White House screening, Wilson reportedly said, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Nine different variations of the infamous quote have appeared since 1915. Griffith told the New York American that Washington had praised the film, and “a man we all revere”—implicitly Wilson—said that it “teaches history by lightning.” In December 1915 the Atlanta Constitution used the phrase “history written with lightning” twice in promoting the movie. Other publications hinted that the quote was from Wilson. The “terribly true” portion of the quote did not appear until journalist Milton MacKaye’s 1937 piece in Scribner’s Magazine. Mark Benbow speculated that Wilson, as a professor and president interested is using film as an educational and propaganda tool, spoke of the movie in terms of teaching, which quickly morphed into writing for advertising purposes.²⁴

Twice the exhibit directly addressed the inauthentic quote, but some volunteer docents felt Legacy left visitors with the impression Wilson endorsed Birth. A panel included the quote but noted that it was “probably not authentic,” because a journalist made the claim “much later.” The exhibit film introduces it as an alleged quote. Yet a small number of docents viewed the presence of the quote itself as an indictment of Wilson. Scholars have done much to perpetuate the misquote, but it also endures because Wilson was vague in his public thoughts about the film. He never condemned Birth of a Nation, its message, or its use of his historical scholarship, possibly because he was engaged in a battle over segregation with William Trotter, a protestor of the film. Nor did Wilson cut off communication with Dixon, offering to consult on future historical or political films if time permitted. He once wrote, however, that the film was “a very unfortunate production” and that he wished it was not played, especially in communities with large Black populations. His administration publicly claimed that he was ignorant of the film’s character before watching it. His screening was nothing more than a courtesy to an old college friend and certainly not an endorsement. Granted, Dixon was a notorious promoter of the movie, but that Wilson was unaware of the themes and mood of the film based on Dixon’s well-known novels and plays is highly unlikely. In fact, Birth had originally been called The Clansman, after the novel that inspired the second half of the film, until Dixon convinced Griffith to change the title. The quote also persists because Griffith gave greater historical weight to his film by quoting Wilson’s work Page 198 →as a scholar on various title cards, the narrative text that accompanies a silent film. Griffith misled his audiences by framing Wilson’s interpretation of the Klan as a needed force to administer vigilante justice rather than a violent political reaction to the two-party and biracial system emerging during Reconstruction. A still of a title card quoting Wilson is included on a MoRE panel.²⁵

Given the nuance required to explain the circumstantial evidence surrounding Wilson’s endorsement, the revision to Legacy opted for simplicity. Wilson historians Arthur Link and Kendrick Clements (the latter was a MoRE exhibit team member) agreed that Dixon and the new medium of film duped the president. This was also the position of one member of the interpretive team and John Clark, the docent most vocally opposed to Legacy’s depiction of the quote. Prompted by his reading of John Milton Cooper’s biography of Wilson, Clark expressed strong objections to the executive director and to the interpretive team when revisions and year-end reviews were announced. Clark viewed Wilson as “a naïve victim of his opportunistic college friend” rather than “a proactive host.” He thought the exhibit film “a bit unfair” given that Wilson seemed “more guilty of incompetence than malice,” and he considered it unwise to spread the popular misquote any further in light of the speculative evidence. He and the team remained in contact with updates on how the revision would interpret the controversy.²⁶ The team determined that the most definitive statement that could be made was that Wilson did not say what he thought of the film. That the “movie’s producers capitalized on the White House connection” gave room for visitors to think about the various ways this process might work.²⁷ The team also decided to use the title cards quoting Wilson as a visual example of his implied endorsement of the film. By not crediting where he pulled the quote, Griffith implied that the president offered his historical assessment for the film. The caption text to the title card used in Legacy revealed it was “an excerpt from Wilson’s 1902 monograph A History of the American People.”²⁸ Additionally, one approach offered to docents was framing the “lightning” statement as a manufactured celebrity endorsement made possible by the screening and lack of public condemnation that appeared to sanction the message of the film.²⁹

While the MoRE directly confronted Wilson’s endorsement of Birth, Historic Columbia refused to let the endorsement question drive the entire exhibit film’s interpretation. Rather the organization relocated the discussion of Wilson and the film back to Columbia and Reconstruction. Honing this interpretation resulted in fleeting suggestions that Birth be dropped entirely. Two interpretive team members began to wonder if Wilson’s relationship with Birth, the whole purpose of the exhibit film, was reaching its goals. Page 199 →Did visitors even care? Docents reported that some visitors had no frame of reference for Griffith’s film, and those that did had rarely seen it. Scholars might associate Wilson with the film, but visitors thought of world war, the Nineteenth Amendment, the Federal Reserve, and segregation. An exhibit about Birth met the museum’s goal to present new and challenging information, but the never-ending revisions suggested that the material was being forced. One team member feared Historic Columbia risked “overwhelmingly placing all our eggs in The Birth of a Nation basket.” Maybe less of the film was the answer.³⁰ In the end looking at Birth of a Nation through a localized lens offered a new approach.

In 1977 Marjorie Brown King told Wilson expert Arthur Link that she witnessed the president lost in thought during the screening of Birth. King, who was in attendance and married to one of Wilson’s friends, also said that the president left without commenting. His wandering mind could have been caused by the recent death of his wife, Ellen, the stress of World War I, or the potential problems the film might cause. Or it may have been a fabrication to protect a long-deceased president in the post–civil rights era. Similarly, friend and physician Cary Grayson, who took excellent care of Wilson memorabilia, donated a crumpled program of the screening to Wilson’s presidential library. The memory and artifact, if true, suggests two scenarios: either Wilson disapproved of the film, or he overidentified with it.³¹ Either way, did he think of his teenage home in Columbia? And did his fellow Columbians have the same reaction? Griffith set Birth in the fictional South Carolina community of Piedmont. But once the viewer disregards the mythical South Carolina, the film not only presents Columbia but also nationalizes South Carolina’s white memory of Reconstruction.³² Evidence of historical South Carolina emerges, most clearly in the scene within Columbia’s State House. Rather than solely focus on the Wilson endorsement, Legacy used the State House scene to ask visitors to consider if, while watching Birth, Wilson would have recalled his years in Columbia. This scene was one of the localized and regional connections binding Wilson, South Carolina, the nation, and Reconstruction together that the first interpretation of Legacy underplayed.³³ Griffith’s derogatory representations of Black State House representatives eating chicken, not wearing shoes, and drinking alcohol were in the original version but not placed in the context of Wilson’s memory of Reconstruction and place. In fact a team member suggested cutting some of the negative imagery, but the majority of the team wanted to keep the local representations.³⁴ The State House scene opened with Griffith’s “historical Page 200 →facsimile” title card that informs the audience they are witnessing an authentic representation of the legislature based on a picture from Columbia’s State newspaper. Griffith’s depiction was contrasted with a Frank Leslie’s Illustrated image of the dignified, newspaper-reading legislature awaiting results during the disputed 1876 election, used in the MoRE exhibit to demonstrate the director’s inclination to misinterpret the past. Docents could choose to highlight this effective contrasting tool on the tour.³⁵

Dixon did indeed strive for historical accuracy in the construction of the State House set, if not in the depiction of its legislators. Dixon wrote to the State publisher Ambrose Gonzales in Columbia asking for a local contact who could provide photographs of the House of Representatives chamber and serve as a fact-checker for the set. Gonzales, who had a decade-long feud with Dixon over the stage version of The Clansman, pushed the request off on a young journalist, Sam Latimer. Latimer hailed from York County, a community that inspired Dixon’s novels and the fictional Piedmont setting of Birth of a Nation. Dixon visited family there frequently. In her WPA state guide, DuBose promoted the connection between York and The Clansman and also claimed that Dixon drew on the history of the Columbia Klan trials. Supposedly Klansman Dr. Rufus Bratton, whom federal officials “kidnapped” from Canada to stand trial, was the prototype for a character in The Clansman. Set designers in Los Angeles erected the chamber using Columbia photographer George V. Hennies’s shots from thirteen angles. Although researchers in Columbia verified the authenticity, only the 1871 speaker stand was authentic. The chamber was contemporary. In 1871 the State House was just a year old and remained unfinished with a cheap tin roof. The Leslie’s image with its granite walls, curtains, and gaslight fixtures, offers evidence of the mistake.³⁶

Other manifestations of Columbia surface in Birth, even if these clips were too numerous and required too much context to include in the exhibit’s truncated film clips.³⁷ Griffith dislocates the Cameron family plantation, the location of much of the action of the film, to an urban space. The front of the Cameron “big house” is accessible by a sidewalk decorated with a streetlamp and leading toward a church. A community bonfire is held on this same street. Behind the facade of the front porch and parlor, the audience catches glimpses of a cotton field and slave quarters; but otherwise the setting suggests an urban space.³⁸ This mise-en-scène likely invited residents of Columbia, and perhaps the entire state, to envision the city in their reading of the film. When watching Gen. William T. Sherman’s fiery destruction of the city and the sacking of the Cameron home, South Carolinians most likely recalled the burning of Columbia on February 17, 1865. Griffith blamed guerrillas. Columbians condemned Sherman, even though burning cotton stores, drunken, incapacitated soldiers, and wind provided fuel for fires that ultimately destroyed a third of the city.³⁹ A more subtle allusion to Columbia, the center of state and federal power for South Carolina, is Griffith’s incorporation of a strong federal presence in Piedmont. Troops declined significantly after the passage of the 1868 state constitution. By late summer the army maintained only three posts in the state, in Columbia, Charleston, and Aiken. The frequent reoccurrence of federal troops, which could represent the Eighth Infantry stationed in Columbia, hails from one of these three cities. Additionally the short-lived Freedmen’s Bureau, also featured in Birth, had its last headquarters in Columbia before it was abolished in 1869.⁴⁰

Page 201 →

Page 202 →

Page 203 →The local connection to Birth that likely created the most emotional response from white audiences would have come from reading the Klan as the Red Shirts. Griffith’s film offered a widely understood white supremacist narrative that would resonate with audiences and be easily understood. Given the Klan’s spread across the South and into popular media of the Reconstruction era, the group offered a straightforward symbol recognizable to millions of Americans as the nation attempted to negotiate whiteness and middle-class values during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the film Black children frightened by two young white pranksters inspire Ben Cameron to create the Reconstruction-era terrorist group. Historically the Klan first appeared in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. By 1868 the group infiltrated South Carolina, most notably in the upstate and York region. In the early 1870s, the group disbanded after federal legislation and trials, which rarely rendered convictions, made an example of the state.⁴¹ In Birth’s closing scene, the Klan protects the ballot box. But anyone who knew local Reconstruction history, certainly Dixon, would be aware that while the Ku Klux Klan was the military arm of the Democratic Party in the early 1870s, by 1876 the party was supported by the terror of Red Shirts and rifle clubs.⁴² The strategy led to the toppling of Republican-ruled Reconstruction by using intimidation and fraud at the ballot box. The Klan narrative in Birth would have made more sense to South Carolinians as a symbolic homage to the Red Shirts. To tell an authentic history of Reconstruction’s end in South Carolina and establish who the Red Shirts were and their significance proved too complex for audiences outside of the state and thus unfit for national consumption.

White southerners, who at times rejected the stage version of The Clansman because it did not speak as effectively to Lost Cause ideology or have a documentary feel, embraced Birth of a Nation. Columbians so hated both Dixon and the play when it premiered in 1905 that locals attempted to mob a cast member and hissed at the author. The Clansman, and Dixon’s Page 204 →presumption that he spoke for the South, was at the root of Gonzales’s telegraph and press war with Dixon, part of a larger attack by the state’s press. Gonzales called the play a “fairy tale.” It glorified reprehensible acts of Klan violence, but most egregious, the group had disappeared five years before “the men who wore red shirts in broad light of day and the women who blessed them redeemed South Carolina from Negro rule.” Gonzales cautioned against surrendering this legacy “for a tinsel setting to a sensational drama!”⁴³

Despite objections to the play, white southern audiences had an intense connection to Griffith’s melodrama. It better represented their manufactured historical version of the past and anxieties about the Black vote, crime, and sexuality than The Clansman had. The State’s review cited the State House scene as evidence of the film’s authenticity and praised Griffith’s work for tempering Dixon’s racism. White South Carolina approved of Birth, many without reservation. Some saw it repeatedly. Others kept their viewing quiet, understanding the film’s racial implications. For those of Dixon and Griffith’s generation who did not remember or live through Reconstruction but had followed the white supremacy campaign of Governor Tillman, as historian John Hammond Moore notes, seeing Birth was “an unparalleled emotional experience. It was Christmas morning, circus day, and victory for the home team over its arch rival all rolled into one.” Audiences at times suffered from “overidentification” with the characters. In Spartanburg, the first showing of the film in South Carolina, former Confederates and men who once donned “gray uniforms, white sheets, and red shirts wept, yelled, whooped, cheered,” and shot the screen to protect white, virginal Flora Cameron from the Black rapist Gus.⁴⁴ In the first six months of 1916, Birth played in seven more cities across the state. Its popularity prompted railroads to offer reduced ticket prices for rural residents. Local papers heavily promoted the film, its accuracy, and its community connections. Rock Hill extended the film’s engagement there by two days. The film returned to the state in 1921, and two years later it finally came “home” to York. Those residents, so drawn to Birth and their sometimes visitor Dixon, skipped a night of sleep to take the train to Charlotte in 1915.⁴⁵

South Carolinians likely read the spectacle of Griffith’s Klan as a glorification of the Red Shirts’ role in overturning Reconstruction in 1876. Did Wilson also think of South Carolina when he watched Birth of a Nation? These questions, though unanswerable, gave MoRE visitors a way to consider the complicated and interwoven history of Wilson, South Carolina, and Reconstruction. As such the docent script’s last revision acknowledged that Birth’s South Carolina setting had been downplayed in evaluations of the film and may “be just as important to why we show it in the house as Page 205 →Wilson’s connection to the film.” The film was important not just for its artistic merits, which helped perpetuate an inaccurate history of Reconstruction, but also because it “captures the state’s Reconstruction memory and nationalizes it.”⁴⁶

A new interview with DJ Spooky helped resolve issues with clarity and corrected an imbalance in Black representation that emerged during the revision process of Legacy. The original version of the exhibit film featured DJ Spooky and clips from his Rebirth of a Nation, but the hip-hop-infused reedit of Birth confused audiences or failed to engage them. Without the scene the new version reduced Black representation to Griffith’s negative depictions of corrupt and inept politicians in the State House. The team grappled with modifying DJ Spooky’s portion or cutting it and focusing on a new subject, such as the Black community’s fight against the film, against segregating federal offices, or against Wilson himself. The length of Legacy was a serious concern, but Black representation was not optional. I had worked with USC Media Arts faculty on projects related to Black representation and volunteered to explore options related to the themes of community resistance during the Wilson era. Fortunately an opportunity for an interview with DJ Spooky to elucidate his work emerged. It saved the material that was almost excised for its complexity.⁴⁷

Given that his mother was a feminist historian and his father a lawyer who worked with Angela Davis, Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, expected to have a career in the Foreign Service. In the 1990s the teenager’s love of music merged with a love of history. A good DJ scours music and thrift stores for “rare, cool stuff” to be different, and good sampling requires research. He eventually expanded his search from musical archives to repositories of history and film. He wanted artists to see a “living archive” rather than a “dead space.” Although he sounded like a historian suffering from what Carolyn Steedman described as “archival fever,” he understood his work to be different. An academic’s archive, which required citation, differed from the DJ’s archive of quoting by sampling.⁴⁸

DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, traveled the United States and the world showing Rebirth for a decade. In January 2015 the film brought him to the Nickelodeon theater in Columbia for a screening and director talkback with the audience. It was the first of six films in the theater’s month-long “Burn to Shine” program, part of the city’s larger Burning of Columbia commemoration of the 150th anniversary of General Sherman’s occupation. The event and Historic Columbia’s interview with DJ Spooky offered much-needed context for Legacy’s revision. Historic Columbia gleaned valuable Page 206 →insight into Rebirth’s origin and significance and DJ Spooky’s methodology. He found Birth of a Nation after developing an interest in visual sampling, using historical films as basic building blocks for visuals during his club shows. When he put images of the KKK on screen, the audience stopped dancing to stare. He was partly inspired by the disputed 2000 presidential election and the correlation between modern-day blue and red states with the Union and Confederacy. Birth provided a fantasy of Reconstruction, where Black people oppressed white, accepted as fact by white Americans. Believing that the art of sampling is “open-ended,” DJ Spooky reimagined the fixed, white supremacist fantasy for modern audiences, who he hoped rejected the racist tropes and Civil War memory as their predecessors failed to a century ago. His added music and geometric shapes around various characters allowed him to highlight white supremacy, power, and class dynamics. He created electronic and ambient sounds based on blues riffs, writing music out note for note, sampling it, and reediting it back into the film. Editing was both thematic and practical. As a silent film a little more than three hours in length, Birth quickly generates fatigue for twenty-first-century viewers. Watching the entire film is “hell,” DJ Spooky recalled. As he would with a song, he sampled the hook of the film, reducing it to one hour. Fond of the combat scenes, he kept those and cut much of Griffith’s romanticism. Like early showings of Birth, Rebirth frequently played with live musical accompaniment, in the more recent case from DJ Spooky’s laptop and sometimes a small orchestra. He placed the relevance of his work in the past and the present—recognizing he was screening his remix at the centennial of Birth and the sesquicentennial of the burning of Columbia but also on Martin Luther King Jr. Day as police brutality and Black incarceration debates were increasing. At that time #BlackLivesMatter was in its infancy.⁴⁹

The interpretive team was pleased with the DJ Spooky edits, as were several docents. Two volunteers praised the artist’s inclusion. One thought it one of the best and most important changes. Another appreciated placing Wilson and Birth “in the context of the time,” in which Wilson was “moderate in his racial views.” But this was not actually a point the artist made. In his interview excerpt, DJ Spooky argued Birth was a racist film that used fear to generate a “no holds bar indictment of the idea of Black political progress.” But he encouraged understanding the context of time and place, saying, “Wilson at the time would have been facing the suffragist movement … agitation from people returning from WWI … economic upheaval.” Rebirth was “holding up a mirror to society and showing them some things still need to change.” Two public historians who gave tours thought DJ Spooky was giving context to the dilemmas facing Wilson, which was not the defense Wilson optimists posit.⁵⁰ DJ Spooky’s interpretation of the Wilsonian era Page 207 →during his audience talkback at the Nickelodeon supported this interpretation. He understood the film peaked during a “series of upheavals”—those listed in the Legacy clip but also Prohibition, organized crime, suppression of Black rights, and the “appropriation of Black culture.” He pointed to jazz’s popularity and the use of blackface, commonplace in the stage performances and early film, as evidence of this appropriation. One hundred years later, DJ Spooky appropriated white supremacy from its loudest proponent. And his historical memory of Reconstruction, Woodrow Wilson, and Birth provides a strong counterpoint to the white memory of these same subjects. The president who screened Birth at the White House was the son of Confederate sympathizers. The Supreme Court viewed and essentially sanctioned the film. DJ Spooky speculated that there were “different Americas.”⁵¹

The history of film and activism required to discuss Birth of a Nation, Rebirth of a Nation, and Black representation effectively guaranteed that a pithy exhibit film would suffer from issues of continuity and clarity. A longstanding debate existed between critics who valued the cinematic and technical importance of Birth and the detractors who opposed its racist message. Birth was the visual culmination of Dixon’s literary attacks on Black people, augmenting white supremacy and assailing Black morale. With a greater fervor than ever, activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP contested the film. They joined forces with the Black press to coordinate and promote protests and encourage critical thinking about the film. The press proved vigilant in its decades-long protests at home and abroad, building on its campaigns against the derogatory roles Black actors were forced to play when not pushed out by white actors in blackface.⁵²

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth was a contemporary cinematic response that began with directors such as Oscar Micheaux and his 1920 film Within our Gates. Micheaux too promoted national reconciliation via a northern-southern marriage; but unlike Griffith, who matched a former Confederate soldier with a northern politician’s daughter, Micheaux illuminated an urban Black courtship between a southern migrant, heroine Sylvia Landry, and Dr. Vivian, a cosmopolitan northern veteran. Within Our Gates made a case for full citizenship in light of the violent Black American experience while presenting a multitude of Black characters that were diverse, complex, and shaped by region. This included positive images of Black people, including Sylvia, a teacher raising funds for educating students, which mirrored a reoccurring theme at the MoRE of Black women’s role in supporting education. Micheaux’s films corrected Black misrepresentation that caused emotional trauma, violence, and political exclusion, but that did not always translate into box office success.⁵³ To dispel the myth of the Black rapist, Micheaux, through a flashback to the Reconstruction era, depicts Sylvia being attacked Page 208 →by her white father.⁵⁴ Mirroring the media and a segregated nation’s propensity for double narratives, the director segregated the same event, juxtaposing an imagined white encounter with a more truthful Black rendition of the event. Dixon created and Griffith perpetuated a fantasy to conceal the unspoken truth, by whites at least, that biracial children where the product of white exploitation of Black women. Micheaux shattered this illusion via the incestuous attack on Sylvia in the Reconstruction South, the site of suffering for her and other Black characters.⁵⁵ Consultants suggested including Black cinematic responses to Birth such as Micheaux’s in both versions of Legacy.⁵⁶ An attempt to reference generally through narration that “Black filmmakers and actors also created their own films to challenge Griffith’s interpretation, although they never captured white America’s interest as Griffith’s film did,” resulted in even greater confusion.⁵⁷ Micheaux’s portrait and a newspaper advertising the film that accompanied the narration had no context. Another effort to resolve Black representational issues in Legacy failed.

DJ Spooky alone would serve as the counternarrative to Birth in the final Legacy film, but when combined with other edits, his inclusion dramatically improved the clarity and quality. Docents enthusiastically approved of the new interviews, B-roll (supplemental footage) of visitors in the home, design elements to showcase archival moving images, and helpful text and captions that allowed visitors to digest more information. The film gave visitors space to process important rhetorical questions, such as whether Wilson thought about Columbia when screening Griffith’s film.⁵⁸ The substantial revisions warranted an introduction to prepare the guides and discuss the new interpretation centered more on Wilson’s career and Birth of a Nation, its history, its critics, and its connections to South Carolina. Fourteen months after opening, Historic Columbia debuted the second version of Legacy for staff and docents in April 2015 during a demonstration of the tour’s evolution.⁵⁹

The concerns that docents had with Legacy illuminate that the interpretation’s limit for them was the implicit claim that Wilson was a white supremacist. Cognizant that Wilson’s racial views and discriminatory policies would need to be addressed up front, early script versions noted that Wilson was a product of his time and place. The script presented him as a complicated figure who was “considered moderate on race at the time but would be viewed as racist today,” yet he won a Nobel Prize and “eventually endorsed suffrage for women.”⁶⁰ Racial conservatives, like Wilson and Griffith, assumed that white supremacy was permanent and built on the Dunning School’s concepts of racial superiority and Black inferiority, the key reason Reconstruction failed. Historian Joel Williamson identified three southern views toward Page 209 →race: liberal, conservative, and radical. The most optimistic about Reconstruction and Black progress was the southern white liberal intellectual, a rarity during Wilson’s academic era because of the less-developed college system in the South. Wilson believed Black progress was possible in the unforeseeable future. Dixon was a radical white supremacist who believed emancipation was a step backward.⁶¹

Docents could admit that Wilson had a “mixed” record of successes and failures. Docents admired his progressivism, success in fighting World War I, and advocacy for the League of Nations.⁶² When biographer A. Scott Berg came to Columbia, he said that “the Columbia years were definitely a turning point in Woodrow Wilson’s life” and were “extremely formative intellectually, socially, spiritually.”⁶³ Nonetheless docents disagreed about how much living in the South in his youth shaped Wilson, particularly his racial views. Most docents embraced that Augusta and Columbia made an impact on Tommy but resisted correlating this upbringing as the foundation for indicting Wilson as a white supremacist. Wilson expert Ken Clements asked docents to consider how, despite living in a community largely governed by African Americans, Wilson came to consider Black people “an ignorant and inferior race.” How did his experiences in Columbia shape those racist opinions and his policies? Why did Wilson never reach the levels of racism displayed by his political contemporaries? Many volunteers were well-versed in South Carolina history and could use figures like Ben Tillman or Cotton Ed Smith to substantiate their claim that Wilson was a moderate product of the time.⁶⁴ Historian and exhibit consultant Thomas Brown, speaking to the fluidity of memory in his training lecture, unintentionally reinforced this idea when he noted that Smith, who had opposed federal anti-lynching legislation, celebrated his senatorial primary victory in a red shirt in front of Hampton’s State House statue declaring that “we conquered in ’76, and we conquered in ’38.”⁶⁵

Living in Reconstruction era Columbia, most docents argued, would influence Wilson’s life and his views on race. However, several docents had not known or thought of Wilson as a southerner or how his upbringing influenced his racial ideology before their training process. Clark thought people in general did not recognize Wilson as southern, but the MoRE made him a southerner. The exhibit illuminated those Wilsons that continued to live in Columbia and that the home was the only one the President’s father owned. Until giving tours, two docents who knew he lived in the South still associated Wilson with New Jersey. Not until training did another begin to think about Wilson’s “racial opinions” being shaped by that experience. He was “not a saint on a pedestal, which I think a lot of southerners have thought that he was.” One volunteer disputed Wilson’s southerness because Page 210 →his parents were not born in the South. Before moving to Columbia and conducting tours, another guide knew nothing of Wilson’s upbringing or the segregating of federal offices. One docent suggested he used the experience to rationalize segregation as being good. Maria Schneider thought there was no debate that “he was prejudiced and that African American advancement economically and in civil rights was not his priority.”⁶⁶

Docents turned the ambiguity of Wilson’s Southern upbringing and racism into an invitation for visitors to join them in thinking critically about these issues. When Kathy Hogan asked visitors their thoughts, they had no problem making the leap. Although she believed “we are the product of our upbringing, the product of our experiences,” she, along with another docent, “had some reservations” about assuming how time and place might have impacted a young Tommy since he “left no memoir or other indication of what this time may have meant to him.” That Historic Columbia avoided assumptions in favor of “asking visitors to come to their own conclusions” alleviated these concerns. Three volunteers believed the South had to influence Wilson because he was “an impressionable teenager.” Two of them incorporated this into their tours. Pris Stickney accepted Reconstruction “certainly didn’t make” Wilson “a more enlightened person” and had “a feeling he was a little bit more of a racist for that period than maybe others were.” But rather than say his parents, the people of his time and his environment were racist, she encouraged visitors to explore these connections on their own. Volunteer Cyndy Storm framed the idea with how small Tommy’s Presbyterian world was. She imagined family dinners, discussion about the seminary with a serious Presbyterian father, and local news. Volunteer docent Doe envisioned this world differently. While uncomfortable with attributing Wilson’s racial views to his upbringing on the tour, Doe personally wondered what “things he might have heard at home” given the Confederate leanings of his father. It was “so disconcerting. And of course, he greatly admired his father.”⁶⁷

Another question which was tied to the larger issues of Wilson’s racism and which docents expressed a range of responses was how much blame Wilson deserved for increased federal segregation during his administration. Three docents pointed to the power of southern Democrats, who Wilson appointed to cabinet positions and worked with in Congress. Southern cabinet members were the chief architects of segregation: Secretary of the Treasury and Wilson’s son-in-law William McAdoo, Postmaster-General Albert Burleson, and Josephus Daniels. Conceding many Black workers lost their positions, Storm argued these southern congressmen wanted these individuals out of management positions and “pushing brooms.” Clark viewed McAdoo and Burleson segregating their departments as a byproduct of Wilson delegating decision making to federal departments and agencies so that he could Page 211 →focus on macro issues. Similar to his “passive” support of Birth, Wilson’s capitulation to segregationists was one of “active omission” or “inaction.”⁶⁸ But Wilson, believing segregation a moderate position to avoid racial friction in these departments, knew about his cabinet head’s policies. Segregation in the nation’s capital where the Black community had made unparalleled gains united Black activists and white allies. They vigorously protested via public meetings, letter writing, petitions, and the press. One docent called it “difficult” to apologize, explain, or perform a good deed that can “make up for” Wilson allowing segregation in integrated federal offices. The docent had only recently come to terms with Wilson’s racial views because of the tour. The docent confessed, “I suppose I should have assumed that.” Given the docents’ interpretation of the role of southern politicians, the script contextualized the flaws of Wilson’s administration alongside his majority southern cabinet.⁶⁹ But one public historian sensed that explicit claims made Historic Columbia somewhat uncomfortable, a conservatism that stemmed from a lack of “definitive evidence.” Weekend docent Casey Lee wanted the site to own the ties between Wilson’s scholarship, presidential actions, and time in Columbia during Reconstruction and just go for explicit claims. Similar to new, more radical currents in HHM interpretation, Lee argued that historians are often required to craft interpretations without definitive evidence. The MoRE joins a growing list of museums that explore the importance of place and ask a variety of questions without providing clear answers. Guests understand ambiguity more than HHMs will concede, but the debate continues over how much conjecture is appropriate.⁷⁰

Clark, a retired political scientist, was the most vocal about the danger of diminishing Wilson’s achievements to overemphasize his racist ideology. Clark could not reduce Wilson to the second version of Legacy’s “insufficient” and “fairly modest list” of policies: the League of Nations, Federal Reserve System, signing the Nineteenth Amendment, and increased segregation. Clark argued people missed the nuances in the rush to portray presidents as “perfect or scoundrels.” Clark likened the interpretation to how slaveholding had tarnished the image of the early Republic’s Virginian presidents. Even Franklin Roosevelt commanded a segregated military and interred Japanese Americans. Wilson did “not move the country forward in better race relations,” Clark acknowledged. But with “a good heart in many ways,” Wilson attempted to “move the world forward” through self-determination and his peace plans. All white leaders were racist, but Wilson the progressive “was nowhere near” those “horrible right-wing racists” and “rabid” segregationists like Tillman or Smith who defended lynching. Clark wanted Wilson’s actions placed in context with previous and subsequent presidents of the era and national trends among white Americans. He refused to buy into the Page 212 →myth of southern exceptionalism, exclaiming: “American society was horribly racist. Not just the South. It was worst.” Clark wished Wilson had been more progressive and proactive, but Wilson did entertain Booker T. Washington while leading Princeton, a move that earned him derision. There are “valid reasons why people think he was a good president.” Wilson was a “mixed bag,” like other notable presidents.⁷¹

The interpretive problem for most volunteer docents was one of intention. Legacy was never envisioned as a highlight reel of Wilson’s accomplishments but rather was meant to explain the public perception of his endorsement of Birth and “the film’s role in the popular myth making of Reconstruction.” There were fears among the interpretive team that Legacy’s revision could revert to the “presidential shrine interpretation.” In addition to wanting Wilson’s successes presented as part of Legacy, volunteer docents requested a biographical time line or other physical representation to trace Wilson’s academic and political career. Jean Morgan thought this would help connect Wilson to Dixon and to those visitors who do not benefit from aural learning or think chronologically. Holly Westcott understood the MoRE was a museum of Reconstruction but thought the period got far more coverage than the “life and career of the President whom it represents.”⁷²

Docents may have been reluctant to delve too deeply into Wilson’s white supremacy on their tours, but they had much to contemplate and plenty to say after a controversy in November 2015 at Princeton surrounding Wilson’s memory. The campus’s Black Justice League led a campaign that culminated with a walkout of two hundred students and a list of demands. It drew national attention to the complexity of national figures and racism in America, reminding the country that the way institutions simultaneously remember white men and forget white supremacy is open to scrutiny. At Princeton students took what historians have long known about Wilson and the contradictions of his progressivism out of the classroom and placed it directly into their protest. Only months prior, Randy Newman, professor of legal history at Harvard, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post making a similar call to “expunge” Wilson’s name in the wake of the Charleston massacre that led to the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House in Columbia. In calls like that of the Black Justice League to rename buildings and awards that honor Wilson, questions emerged as to whether these campaigns risked erasing the memory, both positive and negative, of important yet controversial figures.⁷³ Morgan attributed the “intersection of attacks” on Wilson to his being “caught in the cross-hairs” of the Black community, who indict him as a racist for screening Birth of a Nation, and members of the political right, who condemn politicians affiliated with any progressive ideology. Another docent equated the Princeton debate with Page 213 →those objecting to Clemson University’s close ties to Benjamin Tillman. The docent worried about an “overreaction to change everything” but understood the complaint. Wilson had an opportunity to make changes but “went a little backwards.” Black voters supported him and expected change.⁷⁴

Historic Columbia continued to explore the complexity of the Wilson family’s time in the South within the context of the national debate about Wilson himself. Docents rarely addressed the controversy because visitors did not bring the subject up, although guides were prepared for the discussion. A workshop addressed current events and the Democratic and Confederate leanings of Tommy’s father, Joseph Wilson. A few guests referenced the controversy as an aside after seeing Legacy.⁷⁵ One docent avoided the subject because she felt the students’ requests were immature but did not discourage visitor conversation if it came up. But two docents exploited the controversy on their tours. They believed museums were designed for conversations about relevant current events, one calling the MoRE a “great opportunity to talk about flaws” of historical figures. Docents hosted a few visitors who knew about the controversy but primarily dismissed Wilson and his actions as a product of his times. Other guests wanted more information. Bacon-Rogers pulled up a Washington Post article on her phone for engaged nurses who were surprised they knew nothing about the controversy. The women launched a great conversation about public perception of historical figures and left with a passion to find out more about trends in museum communities and public arenas concerning famous figures.⁷⁶

MoRE docents who favored a direct approach to the Wilson controversy attempted to meet more recent calls by public historians to confront contentious history. The more radical HHM can embrace the value of conjecture, which opens an opportunity to discuss events and stories about historical figures that illuminate human flaws. By challenging traditional heroic narratives, HHMs can make men like Wilson more relatable to visitors, who also make mistakes and are intellectually capable of discussing human complexity.⁷⁷ But several MoRE volunteer docents dismissed or warned against using contemporary values to evaluate people of the past and failing to contextualize the attitudes of the time period. Hogan broached the Princeton students’ protest on her tours, thinking they had a valid concern worthy of discussion, but cautioned there was no white name on a building not stained by slavery or segregation. Stickney firmly opposed “trying to rewrite history” to the point “we’re going to lose all of our history.”⁷⁸ But this exclusive attitude is an ideological product of a century of interpretations produced by white public-history institutions and white-centered historical narratives. The rush to exempt Wilson by contextualizing his racism compared to his contemporaries misses that Wilson was protested in his time and that his memory continues Page 214 →to be contested. Still, the interpretive approach Historic Columbia has taken with Reconstruction and Wilson’s memory marks its uniqueness given that many organizations were reticent in initiating or joining these kinds of conversations until Black Lives Matter and social equity protests reignited similar debates in 2020. Public historian Modupe Labode argued in the wake of the Charleston massacre that controversial monuments and memorials to flawed historical figures have to be evaluated on an individual basis and with the input of local and state history institutions. Only then can institutions consider common strategies for dealing with problematic history: “alteration, reinterpretation, creating new monuments, removal, and doing nothing.”⁷⁹

But What about Gone with the Wind? Conclusions and the Act of Letting Go

The second version of Legacy did not debut until April 2015. As such, for over a year the tour’s conclusion remained a conundrum for the both the interpretive team and docents.⁸⁰ The key issue was succinctly conveying the big themes or ideas to audiences who were too fatigued from the tour and exhibit film to respond to engagement questions or interpreted them as rhetorical. Because of this fatigue that I and other docents witnessed, the revised docent tour script removed references to the abstract concepts of the Lost Cause and national reconciliation, although docents could broach the subjects at their discretion. The script also converted a “big theme” engagement question into a definitive concluding statement on memory that ended the tour positively. It reminded visitors that the MoRE was a site of healing, initially dedicated to the “first strong Southern president since Reconstruction at a time when the South was viewed as having a negative impact on the nation in the 1930s. Today the home helps heal old wounds and address the myths of Reconstruction that became accepted as truth.”⁸¹ The MoRE sparked historical questions that had no easy, definitive answers: Did Wilson look to his post–Civil War experience in framing his understanding of World War I and the League of Nations? Did the equality brought by Reconstruction influence Wilson’s decision to allow federal offices to be segregated? Did Wilson and his European counterparts’ racial attitudes determine which peoples deserved national sovereignty in the wake of the Great War?⁸² The challenge for tour and program coordinator Heather Bacon-Rogers was that there were a “lot of conclusions you’re asking people to draw on their own.” To leave a lasting impression on tired visitors, Lee chose two big ideas: that Reconstruction was not a southern phenomenon and that people are afraid to confront Reconstruction.⁸³

After the opening, Samuel L. Schaffer’s 2017 essay confirmed some of the answers that docents had drawn from the expertise they had regarding the teenage Wilson’s world. Wilson’s presidential goals had been domestic, Page 215 →so when World War I ignited, he drew upon his Civil War experiences and domestic agenda to help frame his neutrality policy. Schaffer argues that Reconstruction influenced the president’s postwar philosophy, though he never explicitly stated so. The idealism of his League of Nations aside, Wilson hoped for a stalemate or “peace without victory” to avoid dividing the postwar world into victors and losers. He feared that harsh treaty terms, when combined with a toppled political and social order, would yield disastrous results. This argument and his “emotional language of ‘humiliation’ and ‘resentment’” could have been lifted from his and others’ Reconstruction scholarship during the time. Schaffer notes that Wilson left few recollections of Columbia or reflections about how much his real experiences and the “manufactured memory of Reconstruction” inspired his foreign policy. The MoRE cannot definitively quantify that influence, either, but it can make Wilson’s time in Columbia clearer and deepen our understanding of Reconstruction’s impact. Schaffer juxtaposes Wilson’s “absorbing the myths of Negro Reconstruction in Georgia and South Carolina” with Georges Clemenceau, who spent the first four years of Reconstruction in New York City writing positively about it. But Wilson’s few short years in Columbia directly contradicted these myths. This moment, when the family’s district was represented by businessman and state senator W. B. Nash, who had been enslaved by Wade Hampton III’s in-laws mere blocks away, was the pinnacle of his father’s financial and professional success. Schaffer argues that the League of Nations brought order “rooted in racial hierarchy” and southern-style white democracy to a global stage, offering former colonies paternalistic self-determination “with restrictions.” How countries within the League’s established mandate system were assessed in terms of stage of development, with nation-states of the old Ottoman Empire being fast-tracked but Brown or Black colonies, especially in Africa, receiving only the promise of eventual freedom, “derived in part from Wilson’s graduate training in Germanic racial theories.” Similarly, Wilson recoiled at a Japanese representative’s call at Versailles for a racial equality amendment.⁸⁴

The difficulty in ending the tour represented the struggle in discussing contentious issues surrounding Reconstruction and memory in general. Above the mantel in the final bedroom, a partial quote from Wilson’s essay on Reconstruction encapsulated this problem: “Reconstruction is still revolutionary matter. Those who delve in it find it like a banked fire, still hot and fiery within, for all it has lain under the ashes a whole generation.”⁸⁵ Hogan best explained why the narrative of the home felt unresolved. She wanted more on how the return of a southerner to the executive branch helped bridge the divide created by the Civil War and promote nationalism. Given that Reconstruction was a civil rights revolution that failed with Jim Crow, she Page 216 →asked, “Who was it a reconciliation for? It certainly wasn’t a reconciliation for African Americans. Because then they wound up moving to the North, the Great Migration. You can’t tell that whole story.” She even saw the possibility of linking World War I with the Great Migration. “It’s such a big complicated story. You have to stop it somewhere.” Just where to stop was difficult for some docents who saw this much larger picture. One, in fact took, their conclusion all the way to the 1963 March on Washington during an early evaluation.⁸⁶

Truly, the tour could speak to many moments in twentieth-century US history. Cinematic, presidential, Reconstruction, and Great Migration history were woven together in a complicated tapestry. Birth sparked controversy and challenges, but an even more popular film, Gone with the Wind, succeeded it in the interpretation of Reconstruction memory. If the South was a “media colony, an elsewhere for the American majority’s amusement or negative example,” Gone with the Wind and its nostalgic Old South fascinated the colonizers most.⁸⁷ This white fantasy and its “idealized race relations” not only stalled racial progress in the nation but also bred a segregated tourist industry where visitors hoped “to see the Dixie they witnessed on film,” with “blacks working in the cotton fields next to grand, white-columned mansions.”⁸⁸ Storm believed that HHM narratives about rich people and the notion that “this is how people in Gone with the Wind lived” still drive much of the tourism of northerners and a large number of tourists who do not want to see or be reminded of slave labor.⁸⁹ The familiarity of visitors with Gone with the Wind convinced several docents that it should be included as part of the discussion on Reconstruction memory. Jennifer Gunter, who has nostalgic but conflicting attitudes toward the book and film, gave a tour to a woman who professed her love for it and defended its realism. Because Gone with the Wind was a “part of that genre that lives on,” Gunter thought it warranted inclusion in the exhibit film. It revived “all of those same tropes,” such as the “scary black man,” and had a global impact that surpassed Birth of a Nation. People in Japan reenact the film.⁹⁰ Halie Brazier, who until recently watched Gone with the Wind annually, agreed that visitor familiarity with themes or plots made it a useful interpretive tool, especially given Birth was less known. Docents even disagreed on whether Birth or Gone with the Wind was worse. Brazier found the latter’s “detrimental” Lost Cause narrative “quite cringe worthy” and “bad enough”; but it was moderate compared to Birth, which was “way more overtly racist and awful” and “much more visceral.”⁹¹ But Morgan and an artist on her tour disagreed that Birth was the most racist of the two films. Gone with the Wind was “so offensive,” Morgan argued, yet Birth was “singled out as being the most prejudiced piece of filmmaking ever committed to celluloid.”⁹² Gone with the Wind is an example of Page 217 →how complicated interpretations veer down important rabbit holes, not all of which can be included in the narrative.

The memory of Reconstruction and Woodrow Wilson created long-term problems for the MoRE. Contextualizing it precisely and concisely for the conclusion of the tour was a major interpretive issue. But Wilson’s presidency, both its successes and flaws, also proved difficult material for docents. Despite its strengths, the exhibit film The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson and Reconstruction was the most controversial element of the tour, culminating in a revision within the first year of the reopening. The chief complaint among docents was that it misrepresented Wilson’s opinion of Birth of a Nation and diminished his accomplishments while emphasizing the failings of his racial ideology. This issue was not unique to MoRE docents. A docent at Wilson’s DC home also confessed upon my provocation that Wilson was a product of the South but the term racist was misleading.⁹³ No exhibit film or scripted conclusion could ever address everyone’s concerns. But the multiple revisions and debates in service to achieving the best interpretation possible and answering contemporary questions about Wilson’s racist legacy proved instrumental in demonstrating to docents how to have conversations with visitors about the legacy of Wilson and Reconstruction. Page 218 →