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What fascinated me so much about this film was how much of the childhood that I grew up with in the 1950s seemed to buy into the stereotypes.  This film was released exactly 50 years after the war, so there were still a lot of old people around who had lived through it.  I can see why it was such a breakthrough film in terms of cinematography and innovation.  It was still just the beginning of the film era, but the cliff-hanger scenes that were later to occur in movie serials were all there.  In my early history classes, I remember hearing all of those old cliches about how the Blacks were put in charge during reconstruction and they weren't competent or even literate enough to pass laws.   The fact is that they actually pioneered universal education in the post-Civil War South and a lot of other good "liberal" ideas.  Anyway, it was a jaw-droppingly racist film. 

Roger Ebert had good things to say about the film as a work of art.  He saw it as a kind of epic battle between Good and Evil.  It's just that you have to understand how differently people can perceive what is good and what is evil.  This was a morality play for the white majority--a way to reconcile the North and the South 50 years after an internecine war by blaming the whole thing on a third party--the poor Blacks led astray radical Abolitionist Republicans.  The Klan rode in (as the cavalry in later Westerns) to save the day when all seemed to be lost. 

The film was at pains to portray some of the "good Negroes" in the South, who took a more nuanced view of their former slave masters.  The majority of blacks were hopeless drunks who felt an aggressive desire for white women, but there were still some good ones who sided with their former masters and the Klan.  Viewers of the film watched in despair as helpless whites were disenfranchised at the polls and had to watch the illiterate blacks stuff the ballot boxes.  In the final scenes, the "next election" showed a line of armed Klansmen on horses staring down blacks who approached the polls but skulked away in fear as the whites were once again allowed to elect their own representatives.  Watching this film, I could understand  what was in the minds of Southern whites when they passed their Jim Crow laws.  They were seeking to prevent just the kinds of abuses and atrocities that were portrayed in this film.  It was a smashing box office success across America, although there were bitter protests from "liberal" elements.