Extra Credit Questions

[L Verge]

(08-08-2019 07:50 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  Given that I'm as obsessed with him as I am with Lincoln, I know the answer is Woodrow Wilson, who is alleged to have said it after screening "Birth of a Nation." I say allegedly, because there are some historians who don't believe he said it.

Best
Rob

Wow - another A+, Rob! I think Wilson was sort of tricked into that White House screening by his college associate, Thomas Dixon, who wrote The Clansman novel on which the movie was based, and also by D.W. Griffith who was looking for some good publicity. He got it, but at Wilson's expense perhaps during a period where the NAACP was rising to power, lynchings were increasing, and Wilson was known to have tendencies towards white supremacy.

The little bit that I found digging deeper is that the "lightning" phrase appears several places decades before the 1915 incident. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (remember The Rime of the Ancient Mariner from 10th grade English?) used something quite similar in critiquing the acting of the famed British actor of the early 1800s, Edmund Kean -- "To see Kean act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." Another critic, Frances Jeffrey (who died in 1850) praised Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution as, "...like reading history by flashes of lightning."

And that is the sum total of my research on this.