through the establishment of Jim Crow laws. Congress, which during Reconstruction had been quick to enact measures of legal, social, and economic freedom for blacks, just as quickly began to roll them back. The federal government agreed to withdraw its oc- cupation troops from the South, allowing the restoration of white rule. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to full-scale racial segregation. The Ku Klux Klan lay largely dormant until 1915, when D. W. Griffiths film The Birth of a Nation-originally titled The Clansman- helped spark its rebirth. Griffith presented the Klan as crusaders for white civilization itself, and as one of the noblest forces in American history. The film quoted a line from A History of the American People, written by a renowned historian: "At last there had sprung into exis- tence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." The books author was U.S. president Wood- row Wilson, onetime scholar and president of Princeton University. By the 1920s, a revived Klan claimed eight million members, in- cluding President Warren G. Harding, who reportedly took his Klan oath in the Green Room of the White House. This time around, the Klan was not confined to the South but ranged throughout the coun-     try; this time, it concerned itself not only with blacks but also with Catholics, Jews, communists, unionists, immigrants, agitators, and other disrupters of the status quo. In 1933, with Hitler ascendant in Germany, Will Rogers was the first to draw a line between the new Klan and the new threat in Europe: "Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini," he wrote. "Looks to me like its the Ku Klux that he is copying." The onset of World War II and a number of internal scandals once again laid the Klan low. Public sentiment turned against the Klan as the unity of a country at war trumped its message of separatism. But within a few years, there were already signs of a massive revival.