This is another quote from Sarah Churchwell's wondrously well-written "Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream". This happened a little longer than one hundred years ago, and—to paraphrase David Lynch—it's happening again:

A delegation from the National Independence Equal Rights League came to the White House in 1914 to express their dismay at federalising segregation. Wilson insisted that it was ‘enforced for the comfort and the best interests of both races in order to overcome friction’. Told that his support for segregation would likely result in the united opposition of African-American voters in the 1916 election, Wilson took umbrage, ‘saying that if the colored people had made a mistake in voting for him they ought to correct it, but that he would insist that politics should not be brought into the question because it was not a political problem’, but ‘a human problem’. The delegation left, informing reporters that Wilson’s ‘statement that segregation was intended to prevent racial friction is not supported by the facts’.

In 1915 Wilson became the first president to show a movie in the White House: The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, who was himself the son of a Confederate colonel. The now notoriously racist film was based on an even more racist novel called The Clansman, by Thomas W. Dixon – with whom Woodrow Wilson had become acquainted at Johns Hopkins University. Dixon was himself a staunch upholder of the one-drop rule, as he had explained to a local reporter in North Carolina. ‘There is no reconciling the essential difference between the negro and the Anglo-Saxon,’ Dixon announced, because ‘one drop of negro blood makes a negro’. Dixon wrote a series of books mythologising the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, part of the ‘moonlight and magnolia’ school of plantation fiction, of which another member was the writer Thomas Nelson Page – whom Woodrow Wilson appointed his ambassador to Italy.

Nelson’s novels, such as In Ole Virginia (1887) and Red Rock (1898), helped establish the formula: devoted former slaves recount (in dialect) their memories of a halcyon plantation culture wantonly destroyed by militant Northern abolitionists and power-crazed federalists. A small band of honourable soldiers fought bravely on the battlefield and lost; the vindictive North installed incompetent or corrupt black people to subjugate the innocent whites; Southern scalawags and Northern carpetbaggers descended to exploit the battle-ravaged towns. Pushed to the limits of forbearance, the Confederate army rose again to defend honour and decency – in the noble form of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a pernicious fiction turning the armed defence of institutional slavery into a beau geste.

The Birth of a Nation outlines this myth in fulsome, false detail, telling a story in which ‘the former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright’, as an intertitle declared. Dixon reportedly said that his purpose ‘was to revolutionize Northern audiences’, writing a story ‘that would transform every man into a Southern partisan for life’, while Griffith said that one of his hopes for the film was that it would ‘create a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women, against colored men’.

It worked. The Birth of a Nation was a national phenomenon. Northern white audiences cheered; black audiences were horrified. The film prompted riots and racist vigilante mobs in cities across America, as well as at least one homicide, when a white man killed a black teenager – in Indiana, not in the Deep South. The Birth of a Nation was single-handedly responsible for rekindling interest in the Ku Klux Klan, resuscitated by ‘Colonel’ William Joseph Simmons after viewing The Birth of a Nation and its depiction of Klansmen as heroes. Before long, slogans like Wilson’s ‘America First’ and Roosevelt’s ‘100 per cent Americanism’ would give the resurgent Klan its own codes. For all the Klan’s divisiveness, its extension across the country also worked perversely to reconcile North and South just as The Birth of a Nation imagined, as ‘Anglo-Saxons’ united against perceived threats from groups they sought to subordinate; the election of the Southern segregationist Wilson functioned in the same way, helping to reunite the nation in the wake of Reconstruction.

And in the meantime, even without the help of the Klan, white people had continued to brutalise black people across the country. Between 1889 and 1922, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 3,436 people were lynched in America – and that’s just the official records. No one knows how many more victims went unidentified, and unaccounted for. Although the vast majority of victims were African-American, Catholics and Jews were also lynched, as were women. The Mexican government sued the United States for failing to prosecute those responsible for the lynching of Mexican nationals; Italian nationals were lynched as well, including eleven suspected of a murder in 1891.

Lynching was not always, or even primarily, a furtive outbreak of violence in the dead of night. By the turn of the century, in many parts of America lynching had turned into entertainment, a blood sport. Public lynchings took place in the cold light of day, with plenty of advance warning, so people could travel from outlying areas for the fun. There were flyers and notices letting spectators know when and where the lynching would take place; local newspapers ran headlines announcing impending plans; reporters were sent to cover it; families brought children, and had picnics. Victims were frequently tortured and mutilated first; pregnant women were burned to death in front of a peanut-crunching crowd.

A Jewish man named Leo Frank was lynched in Georgia in October 1915, scapegoated for the death of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. Two months later, ‘Colonel’ Simmons lit his vicious fire on Stone Mountain, Georgia, and proclaimed the Ku Klux Klan reborn.

In Texas in May 1916, a black farm worker named Jesse Washington, accused of murdering the white woman he worked for, was lynched in front of the Waco city hall. Washington was not hanged. First he was castrated, then his fingers were cut off, then he was raised and lowered over a bonfire for two hours, until he finally died. His charred body was then dismembered, the torso dragged through the streets, and other parts of his body sold as souvenirs.

It happened in broad daylight, in the middle of the day, as some 10,000 spectators watched, including local officials, police officers and children on their school lunch break. Photographs were taken of Washington’s carbonised body hanging above grinning white people and turned into postcards.

That’s the reality of what being ‘one hundred per cent American’ and for ‘America first’ meant to a great many citizens of the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.