<\/p>\n
On February 18, 1915, D.W. Griffith<\/a> unspooled his three-hour \u201cThe Birth of a Nation\u201d in the East Room of the White House to a rhapsodic response. The then-president, Woodrow Wilson<\/a>, was a defender of the Confederacy and peddled \u201cLost Cause\u201d propaganda, and he was literally quoted three times in the film itself, including a remark in which he praised the Ku Klux Klan.<\/p>\n It\u2019s generally accepted that after that screening Wilson said of Griffith<\/a>\u2019s film, immediately controversial upon release as it has been ever since, that it was \u201clike writing history with lightning.\u201d If this choice as the first movie ever projected inside the White House is lamentable, take heart in knowing that there was a previous screening outside on the lawn of the 1914 Italian silent masterpiece \u201cCabiria<\/a>\u201d that was the very first movie shown on the grounds full-stop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.imdb.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The history of movie screenings in the White House did not begin auspiciously. On February 18, 1915, D.W. Griffith unspooled his three-hour \u201cThe Birth of a Nation\u201d in the East Room of the White House to a rhapsodic response. The then-president, Woodrow Wilson, was a defender of the Confederacy and peddled \u201cLost Cause\u201d propaganda, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2111554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[25538,31714,21751,22556,21993,22860,21912,21738,24141,22205,21913],"class_list":["post-2111553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-actors","tag-actresses","tag-celebrities","tag-directors","tag-films","tag-hollywood","tag-movies","tag-news","tag-stars","tag-television","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/A-Tribute-to-the-White-House-Movie-Theater-Now-Demolished.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2111553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2111555,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111553\/revisions\/2111555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2111554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2111553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2111553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2111553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}