"It's like writing history with lightning."
He's right: it's like writing history with two lightning bolts placed directly beside one another.
I should actually watch this thing at some point. Also Gone with the Wind. Gotta see to believe. First learned about Birth of a Nation in Blackkklansman.
too lazy to look it up right now, but I am pretty sure Woodrow Wilson balked at some international treaty over some official language that would have undermined white supremacy by equating the "Asian race" to the level of Europeans.
pretty sure it was in A People's History, where the story about that film's white house screening also can be found.
prior to that, all I learned in school was that Wilson was the WW1 president. but apparently he is also regarded as one of the more overtly racist as fuck ones of the 1900s.
Wilson was long rumored to have been in the Klan while he was governor of New Jersey, or at least having attended rallies.
He absolutely fucked up the US joining the League of Nations and giving it legitimacy. The LoN's inability to deal with Nazi Germany was the result. To be fair, the LoN was too liberal of an institution for it to stop fascism. Even if the US backed it from the get go, it would have flopped around like it did during the Spanish Civil War.
Anywho I hate Wilson and how he is sometimes counted as being one of America's greatest presidents. Even by lib standards, he was a fuck.