It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.

Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice

In the 1890s memoir A Boy's Town, William Dean Howells recalls a rather singular occurrence of his childhood in Hamilton, Ohio:

One night, out of pure zeal for the common good, … [a group of white boys] wished to mob the negro quarter of the town, because the “Dumb Negro” (a deaf-mute of color who was a very prominent personage in their eyes) was said to have hit a white boy. I believe the mob never came to anything. I only know that my boy ran a long way with the other fellows, and, when he gave out, had to come home alone through the dark, and was so afraid of ghosts that he would have been glad of the company of the lowest-down black boy in town.

Looking back some forty years after this incident, Howells could afford to urge compassion rather than condemnation for youthful missteps: after all he had been born into a family of staunch abolitionists; as an influential editor and man of letters, he encouraged the careers of black writers Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar; in 1909 he would participate in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But while Howells the child sensed intuitively “the impassible gulf” between races established by custom even in the obscure reaches of an antebellum small midwestern town, he would have to wait for the adult writer to imagine other possibilities for racial intercourse.¹

In his 1891 novel An Imperative Duty, Howells fancied he could make more palatable through the mediating figure of the passing mulatto the blackness that marked the “Dumb Negro” of early memory. But the white hero Dr. Olney is drawn to the octoroon-in-hiding Rhoda Algate precisely because of the threat of her submerged Africanity; the more she is camouflaged in white society, the more he longs for her hidden racial markers:

[Rhoda's] splendor dazzled him from the sable cloud of her attire, and in Mrs. Atherton's blond presence, … he felt the tameness of the Northern type. It was the elder world, the beauty of antiquity, which appealed to him in the lustre and sparkle of this girl; and the remote tint of her servile and savage origin gave her a kind of fascination which refuses to let itself be put in words: it was like the grace of a limp, the occult, indefinable lovableness of a deformity, but transcending these by its allurement in infinite degree, and going for the reason of its effect deep into mysterious places of being where the spirit and the animal meet and part in us.²

In this very different scene of arousal, blackness becomes an alluring “deformity” instead of the mark of Cain; though “the elder world” of slavery and the interracial sexual economy of the plantation have been distilled to the point of historical and physical erasure in the beautiful octoroon body of Rhoda, the knowledge of her imperceptible “otherness” generates a sexual excitement that at once defies and affirms the laws of American racial custom. Thus, as the accounts of his own childhood bloodlust and of Olney's aching desire for the exotic Rhoda demonstrate, Howells never “lose[s] sight of the fact that boys and men respond with their pulses to the matter of race.”³

Both the animal nature of Howells's autobiographical persona in A Boy's Town and Olney's equally visceral appreciation of American race relations in An Imperative Duty reference a simultaneous white loathing of and appetite for blackness, inevitably translated into a fascination with and a fear of racial mixing, which have been represented primarily as white male prerogatives in American culture. The notion of the black body as the uneasy subject of patriarchal discipline and desire was of course embedded in both Northern antebellum abolitionist rhetoric and Southern plantation ideology. In abolitionist literature especially, the visibly scarred and morally violated slave was feminized as the “erotic sign of servitude” under the power of a masculine plantocracy which raped and tortured with impunity.⁴

But after Emancipation, once the polemics of abolition and pro-slavery were no longer needed, how were narratives of white male desire for the black structured?⁵ As with American writers before and after the Civil War, Howells's Imperative Duty drew on the stock figure of the tragic mulatto, especially in its female expression, as a figure who, according to Hortense J. Spillers, allowed “the dominant culture to say without parting its lips that ‘we have willed to sin,’ the puritan recoil at the sight and site of the genitals.”⁶ Yet the mulatto's mediation of this “recoil” was only partial: by its side the stereotype of the black rapist, the black-as-beast, functioned for decades after Reconstruction and into the twentieth century as yet another referent for the impact of race on evolving representations of gender, desire, and citizenship.⁷

By the time Howells published A Boy's Town and An Imperative Duty, American whites had already foisted onto blacks the age's most famous negative abstract: the “Negro Problem” referred to the dilemma of imagining a race apparently socially and biologically unfit for Americanization after slavery; indeed, this conceptualization of blacks as a problem, rather than as social individuals, was guaranteed to distance whites from their national duty to fulfill the social and political promises of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. And of equal importance, in light of the traditional merger of the political, the social, and the sexual within American culture, the concept of the “Negro Problem” manifested itself as a white concern that blacks in search of citizenship must also desire to invade all other aspects of white life, including the white home. As one man in Reconstruction Georgia put it, speaking of his fellow whites, “if you talk about equality they at once conclude that you must take the negro into your parlor or into your bed—everywhere that you would take your wife.”⁸ Thus, the interracial male struggle over the terrain of the public would always be figured finally within the terms of the domestic—the privatized expression of the nation's political anxieties.

White Americans' conflation of the public and the private as the twin targets of black designs meant that the figure of the black as beast threatened to become a totalizing symbol of a race war many felt was already in progress.⁹ In his 1889 study The Plantation Negro as Freeman, historian Philip A. Bruce alleged a dangerous moral (and by later implications, physical) regression among postemancipation African Americans, evidenced in what he saw as a sharp increase in the number of white women raped by black men. According to Bruce, “rape. … is marked, in the instance of its perpetration by the negro, by a diabolical persistence and a malignant atrocity of detail that have no reflection in the whole extent of the natural history of the most bestial and ferocious animals.” For Bruce, black rape was not simply an act of masculine aggression; it was the freedman's brutal attempt to annihilate a superior civilization:

He is not content merely with the consummation of his purpose, but takes that fiendish delight in the degradation of his victim which he always shows when he can reek revenge upon one whom he has hitherto been compelled to fear; and here, the white woman in his power is, for the time being, the representative of that race which has always over-awed him.¹⁰

By arguing that the assault of white women was a new feature of black activity after slavery, Bruce and others could argue that black emancipation was tantamount to an initial breach of white national defenses. Not surprisingly, the institutionalization of such images served both to justify the disenfranchisement of blacks and to inaugurate a particularly barbarous period of widespread lynching and race rioting.

One way of coming to terms with the cultural power behind the stereotype of the black as beast is to analyze its deployment as a metaphor in the construction of racial identities in literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My concern here is primarily with how the stereotype mediated representations of white masculinity in the triple arenas of the domestic, the political, and the national. Because so many cultural producers (those for and against white supremacy) were compelled to reinvent the South after Reconstruction by re-visioning race relations for a new era, they engaged fully with the figure of the black rapist in order to delineate the post-Civil War identities of blacks and whites. Late-nineteenth-century American writers did not create the stereotype of the rapist, but their work became a forum for the playing out of what was virtually a national obsession with the black male body.

The stereotype of the black rapist—or at least the stereotype of a potent black masculinity—was evoked with all its multiple significations whenever American writers tried to imagine a black entrance into something like equality. Thus the dominating figure in George Washington Cable's pro-black historical novel The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) is the immensely virile, but enslaved African prince Bras-Coupé. Importantly the story begins some years after Bras-Coupé's death, so the slave is safely contained within the novel's temporal framework, surfacing as a memory that haunts primarily Cable's male characters; in fact, we actually only hear his story when it is performed by the novel's men as a merged narrative, a group recitation of interracial masculine envy, admiration, and terror.

When the newly enslaved African's refusal to work precipitates a confrontation between himself and the white master Don José, the result is a meeting of equals: “The dauntless captive and fearless master stood looking into each other's eyes until each recognized in the other his peer in physical courage, and each was struck with an admiration for the other which no after difference was sufficient entirely to destroy” (G [The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life], 172-73).¹¹ Bras-Coupé, the personification of a fallen African race, is named for a black patriarchal diminishment enacted under Western slavery: “his tribe, in losing him, had lost its strong right arm close off at the shoulder” (G, 171). But a more overtly sexualized vision of black manhood is destined to appear, ironically at the merged moments of naked dispossession and abjection, precisely when Bras-Coupé encounters white womanhood:

his attire … [was] a single gaudy garment tightly enveloping the waist and thighs. As his eyes fell upon the beautiful white lady, he prostrated himself upon the ground, his arms outstretched before him. He would not move till she was gone. Then he arose like a hermit who has seen a vision. “Bras-Coupé 'n pas oulé oir zombis (Bras-Coupé dares not look upon a spirit).” From that hour he worshipped. He saw her often; every time, after one glance at her countenance, he would prostrate his gigantic length with his face in the dirt.

(G, 176-77)

Echoing Harriet Beecher Stowe's sanitized coupling of black male/white female in Tom and Eva of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Cable tantalizes us with images of Bras-Coupé's dangerously “gigantic length” waiting passively for the command of white female desire, a desire Cable feels compelled to imagine at the moment of its denied possibility. But Bras-Coupé has no desire for white womanhood; rather, his danger lies in an aggressive assertion of his equality and free will. Though his ultimate refusal to submit to white male rule results in the savage mutilation of his body, the final legacy of Bras-Coupé's enslavement is the white anxiety and guilt produced by that punishment and the anger his death inspires in the blacks who survive him.

While allegedly pro-black novels such as Cable's The Grandissimes only subtextually registered anxiety over disciplining black male sexuality, the merged discourse of race, rights, and domestic survival made manifest in the figure of endangered white womanhood was exemplified in such popular novels as Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (1898). Red Rock's elaborate narrative features dispossessed white men who struggle to regain control of their homes, a struggle symbolized by the novel's very title: the “red rock” is in fact a blood-stained crag on which the white hero's colonial ancestor established his claim on American soil, by killing the American Indian who had murdered (after presumably raping) his wife. Thus the imagined assault on white women expands to become a figuration of the struggles of white nation-building in the face of an uncivilized Other's racial threat; as a result, violent white male retaliation can be writ manageably as the protective concern for domestic spaces. This theme of white communal/white domestic recovery through violence is replayed throughout the novel, as when, wounded, disarmed, swindled by Reconstruction governments, the novel's Southern white heroes return as an organized Ku Klux Klan just in time to prevent the inevitable effects of Emancipation:

It was well for Mrs. Deals that the young men arrived when they did, for the [black] troopers were tired of merely destroying property, and just as the white men rode up they had seized her. Her scream hastened the rescuing party. No one knew for a long time who composed the party; for in five minutes every one of the raiders were stretched on the ground.¹²

Incorporated into the very myths of the white hero's conquest of the Other, the black rapist would become a staple metaphor for social disorder and injustice, even for many white writers dedicated to changing the status quo. Whereas the conservative Page employed the rapist to recuperate the fallen South, the muckraker novelist Upton Sinclair later employed the same figure to epitomize the corruption of company bosses. In a particularly arresting moment in Sinclair's socialist novel The Jungle (1906), racist discourse around the figure of corrupting black male presence is made to validate class protest when striking white workers at the Chicago stock yards find themselves replaced by a frightening Southern import:

[A]nd any night, in the big open space in front of Brown's, one might see brawny Negroes stripped to the waist and pounding each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck Negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of wooly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories. The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free—free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves. … They lodged men and women on the same floor; and with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery—scenes such as never before had been witnessed in America.

The Jungle's outraged narrator concludes this description by reminding readers that all this occurred “where food was being handled which was sent out to every corner of the civilized world.”¹³ In this (for modern readers, almost comical) collapsing of the contamination of food with the contamination of innocent white womanhood, Sinclair echoes Page's totalizing evocation of black Emancipation as a complete threat to all aspects of white life. In this passage the identity of post-Civil War blacks as themselves wage workers, gives way to the image of Emancipation as simply the release of barbaric Africans in a permanent state of arrested development. As racially and morally foreign after the Civil War as they were at the moment they were brought to American shores, Sinclair's black strikebreakers are presented as doubly unfit to participate in any social reconfiguration of the United States, however radical that reconfiguration might be in terms of class politics.¹⁴

The anxieties expressed in Sinclair's novel demonstrate that even white Americans who did not consider themselves to be radical white supremacists had become used to translating black post-Civil War freedom into a synonym for widespread criminality, debauchery, and contagion that could prove just as threatening as the evils of capitalism. Thus, to talk “rationally” of black and white social and political integration in the face of what blacks had come to represent was indeed to talk about effecting an annihilation of the basic tenets of civilizations the white race presumably signified.

In his 1908 collection of essays, Following the Color Line, white journalist Ray Stannard Baker seemed to proclaim this dangerous incompatibility when, in attempting to describe the African American “as a plain human being,” he nevertheless suggests at one point that

[m]any of the crimes committed by Negroes are marked with almost animal-like ferocity. Once roused to a murderous rage, the Negro does not stop with mere killing; he bruises and batters his victim out of all semblance to humanity. For the moment, under the stress of passion, he seems to revert wholly to savagery.¹⁵

Baker's collection of essays was meant to address “objectively” the problem of race division; yet not surprisingly, the journalist merely seemed to reproduce the very anxieties about blacks' alleged alien nature that he set out to interrogate.

It is crucial to recognize that such validations of the stereotype of the black as beast reveal more than merely the success of turn-of-the-century white supremacy's influence on public thought. White supremacist fabrication of the black beast served to resolve tensions over the racialization of power, but simultaneously it animated just as many debates over the state and progress of white civilization itself. Challenging the notion of white superiority in her militant anti-lynching pamphlets Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (1900), Ida B. Wells could defend herself against charges that she was exaggerating the complete collapse of white self-control during lynching, because she drew so many accounts of violence from the white press itself.¹⁶ For instance, using “a white man's description … published in the white journals of this country,” Wells relates a particularly horrifying execution in Paris, Texas, of Henry Smith in 1893, who was accused of raping a white child:

The negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne, and, followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster known in current history. … [Then] Smith was placed upon a scaffold, six feet square and ten feet high, securely bound, within the view of all beholders. Here the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him, cottonseed hulls placed beneath him and set on fire. …

Curiosity seekers have carried away already all that was left of the memorable event, even to pieces of charcoal.¹⁷

Even for Americans who supported lynching, such accounts were deeply shocking precisely because they presented to an international community white men barely distinguishable from their supposed foes, white men who were “coarse, … beastly, and drunk, mad with the terrible blood lust that wild beasts know, … hunting a human prey.”¹⁸

Matters were further compounded by the ways in which, as white supremacist violence seemed to present whites of all classes as united around a common cause, the maintenance of class distinctions became threatened by the very rituals of violence. Thus in “Nigger Jeff” (1901), a story that never questions the occurrence of black rape, Theodore Dreiser exemplifies a popular white disgust with the act of lynching itself partly because, in its enactment of vengeful aggression, it presaged a breakdown of white moral and class order. Thus the middle-class journalist who witnesses a lynching in a small country town is subsequently challenged with the fact of his own presence in the mob that defied the efforts of the local sheriff and brutally murdered the accused rapist. The ritual of lynching, then, seemed to create even firmer ties between “civilized” whites and their class, as well as racial, inferiors.¹⁹

The threat of the black rapist also figured into white American responses to changing gender roles. The fear of uncontrollable white womanhood was already a point of contention for intellectuals and politicians of the period. In his 1890 article “Two Perils of the Indo-European,” the distinguished scientist E. D. Cope identified “the masculinization of women” as a major threat to America's survival:

Should the nation have an attack of this kind, like a disease, it would leave its traces in many after-generations. During its time “a man's foes would be those of his own household.” How many such households have been already created by the woman's-suffrage movement, and its attendant discussions cannot be well determined. … Woman's stronghold is the sex character of her mind. With that she is the mistress of the world; but if she once abdicates it, she becomes the slave of the man, who will then regard her for her body only.

In a pattern reminiscent of black men who attempted to remake themselves from slaves to freedmen and were suddenly afflicted with the “disease” of sexual passion, turn-of-the-century white women who asserted identities beyond the domestic space were figured both as race traitors and as diseased bodies, perhaps equally capable of spreading infection in their midst; as such, they threatened to transform the site of white domesticity into the very definition of instability.²⁰

This figuration of the independent-minded white woman as traitor was echoed by Theodore Roosevelt in a 1908 speech: “the woman who, whether from cowardice or selfishness, from having a false and vacuous ideal shirks her duty as wife and mother, earns the right of our contempt, just as does the man who, from any motive, fears to do his duty in battle when the country calls him.”²¹ Thus the advent of the New Woman and its attendant discourse on birth control and female independence proved the need for greater surveillance of white women, especially in the context of sexual desire. As Ida B. Wells reported in Southern Horrors, many so-called “rapes” were really interracial love affairs that had been detected by whites in the community, or when “poor blind Afro-American Sampsons … suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.”²² Consequently, a white belief in black male desire for these women was in part also a response to the idea of white female lust, especially with regard to miscegenation; the figure of the black rapist therefore supported “the comforting fiction that at least in relation to black men, white women were always objects and never agents of sexual desire.”²³

The anxiety generated by the stereotype of the black rapist also distracted attention from white men's dual horror and excitement over their own acts of race betrayal, embodied through the tradition of miscegenation. In An Imperative Duty Howells sought to mitigate the impropriety of Olney's eventual marriage to Rhoda by having the couple emigrate to Italy, but extramarital interracial coupling was still standard practice among many young white men in the post-Reconstruction era. Louisiana writer Lafcadio Hearn was both terrified and excited by his interracial love affair with a New Orleans quadroon: “I have suffered the tortures of a thousand damned souls. I went too near the flame and got cruelly burned. … I got caught in a terrible net. … I became passionately in love before I knew it.”²⁴ But while Hearn identified himself as the victim rather than the willing participant in an interracial love affair, such readings of white male passivity denied the fact that black women were regularly raped by white men as part of a larger attempt to assert social control over African American communities. Under slavery, the master's management of the slave body had always included the use of rape. After the Civil War, the early Ku Klux Klan borrowed this practice to serve new political conditions: when dealing with black and white foes alike, “Klansmen routinely raped and sexually tortured women, especially black women, during ‘kluxing’ raids on their households.”²⁵ Conveniently, the stereotype of the black rapist, coupled with the general assumption of black women's “natural” capacity for sexual promiscuity, helped to distance white men from their own sexual transgressions. Still, white supremacists continued to be uneasy about a tradition of interracial sex that remained virtually unabated, despite the arguments in favor of racial separation.

These anxieties over racial contamination, black citizenship, a threatened revision in traditional class and gender roles, and white barbarism surface repeatedly in any number of late-nineteenth-century texts; but the literary figure most closely associated with the stereotype of the black rapist is probably Thomas Dixon, Jr., a prolific novelist alternately celebrated and vilified by his contemporaries as the ultimate literary spokesperson for white supremacy. Dixon's figurations of black men as lustful Negro beasts propelled his novels to instant notoriety. In estimating the power of Dixon's white supremacist fiction, historian Joel Williamson suggests that “his work said in a total way what his audience had been thinking in fragments. His grand themes educed precisely what a vast number of people were instinctively and passionately certain was true.”²⁶ But Dixon's work did more than simply codify racist images of African Americans; his primary concern increasingly became the very problem of successful white self-management in an interracial context. In its articulation of the horror of lynching and of white class and gender conflicts, Dixon's fiction is less a register of popular white supremacy's triumph over African Americans, than an expression of a profound anxiety over the maintenance of a stable white identity. Thus, more than any other writer, Dixon becomes a register for both the complexity and internal contradictions of radical white supremacist thought.

Dixon's role in the shaping of post-Reconstruction American racist discourse has often been overshadowed by that of D. W. Griffith and Griffith's landmark film The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dixon in fact predates Griffith on the very subject of transferring the black rapist from the page to the stage: after the success in 1905 of his third novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, he formed two production companies to tour the country simultaneously performing a play version of the novel, complete with fiery crosses and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen bounding across the stage on horseback, to the delight of national audiences.²⁷ In part, the very image of heroic Klansmen in Dixon's fiction inspired Griffith to conceive of a historical film about white American racial “liberation”; and he recruited the novelist to write the movie's screenplay. Dixon obliged by merging his two most successful race novels, The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman to create the movie's plot, and reportedly he also provided The Birth of a Nation with its title.²⁸ By depicting race war and by celebrating the early Ku Klux Klan as a heroic organization, The Birth of a Nation reintroduced the image of the black rapist to national and international audiences. During its eleven-month run, the movie was seen by 5 million Americans, and its opening in Atlanta marked the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan in the twentieth century.²⁹ The film was the first ever to be screened at the White House; after reviewing it, President Woodrow Wilson declared: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”³⁰

As a transitional figure in terms of his links to popular fiction, theater, and film, Dixon has much in common with another early icon of American popular culture, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a cultural producer with seemingly a very different characterization of American race relations. Dixon's race novels functioned in much the same way as Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in the history of America's racial culture: the work of both writers galvanized whites around severely limiting but ultimately enduring myths concerning the nature of race. And since Dixon's The Leopard's Spots was written especially as an aggressive anti-black response to Stowe's novel, it is ironic, and yet not so, that exactly fifty years after the introduction of the saintly, effeminate Uncle Tom waiting for a white God's salvation, Dixon would counter with an equally powerful vision of the black man as monster. Just as in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the black male in Dixon's work becomes a crucial figure of multiple gender, racial, and class signification that binds as much as it distances black and white.

THOMAS DIXON AND THE CHALLENGE OF WHITE MASCULINE RESCUE

Thomas Dixon, Jr. was born in 1864 near Shelby, North Carolina, to a family of humble farmers. At twenty he was one of the youngest men to be elected to his state's legislature. Two years later Dixon left the South for Boston and then New York to pursue a highly successful career in the Baptist ministry; by 1889 his reputation as an electrifying speaker gained him the largest Protestant congregation in the nation. Forever restless, the Reverend Dixon then doubled his visibility with an exhausting but highly profitable six-year stint on the national lecture circuit. Maxwell Bloomfield reads Dixon in these early years as a social activist “aligned … with the liberal reformers of the Social Gospel Movement in demanding justice for the immigrant, the slum-dweller, the ‘weak and helpless.’” According to Bloomfield, Dixon's vision of progress was “traced to the development of character in man.” Says Bloomfield: “Every man had the power to choose between good and evil, because every man was endowed with free will. Thus, in Dixon's hands, the theory of evolution took on a broadly democratic form, implying the preservation and uplift of the masses.”³¹ But while Dixon's philosophy challenged the notion of class as a determination of biology, his liberalism would ultimately not be extended to include African Americans. When Dixon finally left the ministry in 1899, his vision of America's democratic destiny included a message of absolute incompatibility between races and thus of the final inevitability of a racial war for territory and resources.

In 1902 he published the best-selling The Leopard's Spots, which sold 100,000 copies in its first few months of publication. Eventually 1 million copies were sold, with foreign translations appearing within the first year.³² Conceived as a direct response to Stowe's ever-popular Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Leopard's Spots appealed to Americans who had always regarded Reconstruction as a process of economic and political victimization aimed at white Southerners. And for radical white supremacists who argued that the white South had to defend itself in the post-Reconstruction era against a savage black population on the rampage, Dixon's novel dramatized in lurid detail the acts of violence allegedly committed by freedmen. Claiming that “the North as a class is totally ignorant … [of] the negro in his relation to the white population of the South,” Saturday Evening Post reviewer Lilian Lida Bell praised the novel as a truthful, historically accurate account of atrocities committed during Reconstruction: “I, for one, from absolute knowledge of my facts, do not hesitate to say that the book is moderate in tone considering what might have been written.”³³ In 1905 Dixon repeated the successful race formula he used in The Leopard's Spots, presenting to the public what he claimed to be a carefully researched historical novel entitled The Clansman. His third novel, but the second in what was to become a trilogy of novels on the Ku Klux Klan, The Clansman easily surpassed The Leopard's Spots in sales.

Ironically, the years of Dixon's greatest success as a writer also saw the rise of the New York-based NAACP; meanwhile, the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, and black schools, notably Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, were securing benefits from wealthy Northern white philanthropists.³⁴ In the face of these African American efforts toward self-improvement, Dixon continually waged war on the belief in the possibility of Negro progress. In a 1905 Saturday Evening Post article on “Booker T. Washington and the Negro,” he echoed Frederick Jackson Turner's description of the white American national character:

Our Republic is great not by reason of the amount of dirt we possess, or the size of our census roll, but because of the genius of the race of pioneer white freemen who settled this continent, dared the might of kings, and blazed the way through our wilderness for the trembling feet of liberty.

American blacks on the other hand, no matter how well they trained, were no originators of ideas; they were not and could not be the spearhead of progress:

Education is the development of that which is. The Negro has held the Continent of Africa since the dawn of history, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its light.³⁵

The duty of white America, then, was to guard against social and political unit with this inferior human species that could not be assimilated or “Americanized.”

In its location of an anti-black message in the context of what many felt should be an exclusively white American destiny, Dixon's work, especially The Leopard's Spots, capitalized on the hostility expressed by many white Americans toward nonwhites who, after the annexation of Hawaii and the imperialistic gains of Cuba and the Philippines in Spanish-American War, had recently become part of the American “democratic” empire. By 1899 Theodore Roosevelt was referring to the Filipino patriot Emilio Aquinaldo as “the typical representative of savagery, the typical foe of civilization of the American people.”³⁶ Against the backdrop of this perceived international struggle with the “darker races,” Dixon's The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman packaged the South as the producer of a successful formula for race control (Southern race extremists argued that lynching was the only way to keep blacks in line), reintroducing Americans not only to a living example of what to expect from “lesser races” but also to neglected methodologies for their subjugation. As Michael Rogin has commented, Dixon's subtitle for The Leopard's Spots, A Romance of the White Man's Burden, “tied the racial question at home to America's world mission abroad.” Thus, as “the [S]outhern race problem became national, the national problem was displaced back onto the South in a way that made the South not a defeated part of the American past but a prophecy of its future.”³⁷

Not surprisingly, then, in September 1905 during the intermission of his play The Clansman in Norfolk, Virginia, Dixon walked out on stage and declared that the play's objective was to situate the South's experience within the context of national destiny. After all, the South had previously been the national site of racial conflict and white suffering; logically then, it would be the site of national white healing and (especially) white unification, regardless of class or section: “I believe that Almighty God anointed the white men of the [S]outh by their suffering during that time immediately after the Civil [W]ar to demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme.”³⁸

But this almost hysterical confidence in the white American's ability to survive against all odds underscored Dixon's complex definition of what he perceived to be the racial dangers facing his nation: “If allowed to remain here the Negro race in the United States will number 60,000,000 at the end of this century by their present rate of increase. Think of what this means for a moment and you face the gravest problem.” The meaning of these figures translated into the certainty of the black freedman exercising his rights as citizen and capitalist:

And then the real tragedy will begin. Does any sane man believe that when the Negro ceases to work under the direction of the Southern white man, this … race will allow the Negro to master his industrial system, take the bread from his mouth, crowd him to the wall and place a mortgage on his house? Competition is war—the most fierce and brutal of all its forms. Could fatuity reach a sublimer height than the idea that the white man will stand idly by and see this performance? What will he do when put to the test? He will do exactly what his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his bread—kill him!³⁹

A battle-cry for race war, Dixon's warning of a general black economic invasion is expressed in terms of domesticity and reproduction. Moving back and forth between white control of capital production and uncontrollable black reproduction, Dixon's rhetoric acknowledges the new signification of the black body after slavery. Before the Civil War, “black women gave birth to property and, directly to capital itself in the form of slaves”; after Emancipation, however, blackness metamorphosed into a sign of white poverty and political disenfranchisement.⁴⁰ Importantly, this threat of white alienation from traditional bases of political and economic (but not sexual) power is acknowledged only to be displaced later and then mystified in Dixon's race novels, through the metaphor of black male/white female sex. Thus, Dixon's white heroes can evade their anxiety over the seemingly unresolvable presence of 60 million blacks in American economic and communal life by focusing instead on the (apparently) more containable problem of miscegenation. In The Leopard's Spots one of Dixon's characters obsessively poses the question about the social/sexual violation of the white nation/family with the slogan “the future American must be either an Anglo-Saxon or Mulatto” (LS [The Leopard's Spots], 336).⁴¹ Thus the threat of blacks' voting, working, buying property, and thereby inevitably achieving full American citizenship must be reimagined as, and thus contained by, the threat of black rape.

In Dixon's novels, the resulting struggle to achieve the rescue of the endangered white nation, now refigured as the white home, in turn masks the white supremacist preoccupation with control of the white female body. In his anti-socialist novel The One Woman (1904), Dixon attacked the notion of the independent female intellectual, styling her as part of a socialist plot that if left unchecked, would eventually ruin the very institutions of marriage and the patriarchal family. Dixon's own particular preoccupation with the dangers of white femininity is evident in a 1905 interview with the Atlanta Constitution that he gave while touring with the stage adaptation of The Clansman. (The interview appears side-by-side in the Constitution with an article on the local search for a black railroad worker turned rapist.) In relating a scene he witnessed in New York, Dixon evokes the familiar fragmented image of the white woman as either sexual aggressor or passive sexual object:

I have lived in New York sixteen years. It is only within the past twelve months that I have se[e]n big buck negroes parading up and down Broadway with white girls hanging on their arms. The day before I left for Atlanta I saw a coal black negro of about thirty years of age walking on Broadway with a white girl of sixteen, clinging to him—a girl of radiant beauty, a perfect blond with golden hair and soft childlike blue eyes. Twenty years from today such a thing will not be permitted in New York if our race is preserved from the degradation of mulatto mongrelism.⁴²

Dixon's vague reference to “such a thing as this” suggests both black men's impudence in seeking out white women, but also white women's disorderliness in choosing black paramours. While the notion of aggressive women (especially sexually aggressive women who prefer black men) is undercut by the vision of the fragile, clinging young blond “with childlike blue eyes” whom Dixon casts ambivalently as a victim unable to protect herself from the older black man, both stereotypes of white women—the whore and the frail child—represent them as being ultimately treacherous in either their state of sexual assertiveness or their state of sexual helplessness.

On the question of white male/black female miscegenation in The Leopard's Spots, Dixon suggested that “[t]his mixture … has no social significance [at all]” and is merely “the surviving polygamous and lawless instincts of the white male” (LS, 336). However, as one of the only moments in The Leopard's Spots when Dixon considers black women, this statement seems strangely at odds with the widely held belief that the black woman was essentially a sexual being who enticed the white male away from his better self. Dixon's rationalizations regarding white men's waning “lawless instinct” not only emphasize white male control over sexual relations with black women, but seem to confirm white attraction to degenerate sexuality—a suggestion that had dangerous potential for what it might reveal about the falsity of the racial distinctions on which Dixon's philosophy depended. Given that an acknowledgment of the presence of black women would automatically alter the racial construction of white masculinity, it is not surprising that black women are, in large measure, absent from Dixon's fiction. If they were referenced in too much detail, the reader would have to confront white male desire for the black within the plot of rescuing the domestic, and as such reveal the white man to be the foe of his own household.

Dixon did in fact feel compelled to confront the problem of white male/black female miscegenation, briefly in The Clansman but more centrally in his 1912 novel The Sins of the Father. But in The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman, the engagement with black sexuality resurfaces ironically as what Dixon would certainly have styled “monstrous” homoerotic desire for black men.⁴³ Leslie A. Fiedler long ago contrasted narratives where “the concept of the white man's sexual envy of the Negro male … [is produced by] the ambivalent horror of miscegenation,” with narratives articulating white male refuge from the domestic in the form of “the ennobling love of a white man and a colored one.”⁴⁴ Dixon voices this desire as an ennobling race hatred, since his heroes achieve deification through their violent punishment of the alleged black rapist.⁴⁵

The continual attempt to escape from and return to the black male body is played out whenever Dixon's narratives dramatize the detection, capture, and dismemberment of a black rapist, and even in his general descriptions of offending black male bodies. In The Leopard's Spots Dixon is fascinated with the effluvia of black males (the dangerous blood/semen of the deceptively white mulatto, one drop of which “will suddenly breed … a pure Negro child, thick-lipped, kinky-headed, flat-nosed, black-skinned”) and with “the unmistakable odour of perspiring Negroes” (LS, 398, 139). His account of a bloody lynching in The Leopard's Spots styles the white hero's success as a mutilation of the black male body when the offender's “thick lips” are “split with a sharp knife” (LS, 151). In one scene in The Clansman, white men are mesmerized by the abnormally large footprints left at the scene of a rape. The elongated print lacks evidence of an arch; this monstrous sign of primitive physical development fixes the rapist as a black man. But one monstrous limb denotes another, so that Dixon can suggest the mark of black lust—the (apparently) abnormally large black genitalia—as the unmistakable symbol of the primitive black body at the scene of the crime.

When his white heroes face an invasion of the domestic space made vulnerable by unreliable white femininity, Dixon's men are doubly constructed as the true victims of black male penetration, emasculated by the more “potent” rapist. As a result, the masculine space of ritualized white violence (lynching) in which the black body becomes the object of “desire” must logically become the site on which to construct a powerful ideal of white manhood. The method of white regeneration worked through in Dixon's novels finds resonance in The Birth of a Nation when Griffith “displaces sexuality from white men to women to blacks in order, by subjugation and dismemberment of blacks, to reempower white men.”⁴⁶ The conquest of the so-called renegade black beast through lynching also affirms white male communal power, since it is often a group action.

In the following discussion of selected scenes in The Leopard's Spots and The Clansmen, I hope to demonstrate how Dixon's use of the black rapist, together with the necessity of lynching that the stereotype's existence inspires, works in precarious and contradictory ways to contain the threat of white female vulnerability, to structure white male desire for the black, and to construct the myth of white male unity. Dixon's acknowledgment of and terror over aberrant white-authored miscegenation will be the subject of my closing discussion of his 1912 novel, The Sins of the Father in which the entire white supremacist schema founded on the myth of the black rapist threatens to disintegrate when the latter is feminized as the quadroon seductress.

CLASS, RACE, AND SEXUALITY IN THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS AND THE CLANSMAN

Dixon's popular race novels achieve their success because they explore a fantasy of white male rescue enacted through the subordination of black men and white women. The Leopard's Spots follows the fate of Charles Gaston of North Carolina. A fatherless boy of eleven at the end of the Civil War, Gaston reaches manhood during the “Negro Domination” of Reconstruction; but together with the Ku Klux Klan and enterprising white citizens, he reclaims power for a white South and a white America. The Clansman traces the “education” of Ben and Elsie Stoneman, the children of a powerful pro-black Northern politician. When they move South after the war, their association with Margaret and Phil Cameron helps them recognize the folly of the North's support of Negro rule, and they develop a growing appreciation of the early Ku Klux Klan as the last line of defense for white civilization.

As historical romances of Reconstruction, The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman emphasize black gains during this period as short-lived, and they insist on the rise of a renegade black male sexuality representing the distillation of early attempts in the 1870s by African Americans to achieve citizenship into a single desire to rape. As Ben Cameron prophesies, when black men get the vote and economic opportunity, the next step “will be a black hand on a white woman's throat” (C [The Clansman], 262).⁴⁷ Thus, both novels present Southern whites in the popular heroic mode of disenfranchised freedom fighters struggling for economic freedom and the safety of wives and families.⁴⁸ Indeed The Leopard's Spots' chapter headings (“How Civilization was Saved,” “The New America,” “Another Declaration of Independence”) point to a white supremacist project of national salvation. Dixon undoubtedly drew on the memory of economic suffering endured by his own family after the war; but in the 1900s—a time when the most acute victims of poverty and disenfranchisement were African American—Dixon shifted public attention away from the contemporary reality of black persecution and economic oppression.

In The Leopard's Spots, Dixon explicitly figures blacks past and present as the national plague that would spread through time and space if left unchecked:

this towering figure of the freed Negro had been growing more and more ominous, until its menace overshadowed the poverty, the hunger, the sorrow and the devastation of the South, throwing the blight of its shadow over future generations, a veritable Black Death for the land and its people.

(LS, 33)

Dixon further buttresses this image of the postwar black as disease(d) by drawing on the plantation fiction darky stereotype to suggest a deceptive duality in the character of the black population. Literally the last of their kind, the “good” blacks are those faithful to pre-emancipation race relations. For example, old Nelse, the Gastons' servant is a “giant negro” whose potential for terror is erased by his complete devotion to slavery's status quo. Nelse forgoes his freedom and its potential empowerment; instead, he returns from the battlefield with his late master's sword, to pass on the symbol of phallic strength to young Charles Gaston, Jr. (LS, 6-11). As a surrogate “mammy” to the young Gaston, Nelse's feminized submission helps perpetuate a Southern patriarchal power structure that the Civil War was fought in part to destroy.

But blacks like Nelse are scarce, and they are destined to be replaced by young black boys such as Gaston's childhood friend Dick. Born into violence, Dick narrowly escapes being decapitated by his father, and bears a scar on his neck that will mark him as a lynch victim later in the novel. Ironically, Dixon introduces Dick (who is supposedly based on his own real-life boyhood playmate) as a male version of Stowe's Topsy, although Dixon's character grows up to be a rapist, not a black missionary to Africa.⁴⁹ Gaston's friendship with Dick is figured almost as a seduction that dulls the white boy's better senses. More knowing adults recognize Dick's inherent imperfectibility (“the very rudimentary foundations of morals seem lacking. I believe you could take a young ape and teach him quicker”), but Gaston is enamored with the black child whose “rolling, mischievous eyes, his cunning fingers and his wayward imagination [are] … unfailing fountains of life” (LS, 179). When Dick's violent antics anger even black adults, he runs off, leaving a heartbroken Gaston.

Though styled as a desexualized boyhood friendship, this homosexual/homosocial union of black and white is desired but conveniently rendered impossible precisely because of the black male's inevitable “development” toward criminality—a development that, when cast in terms of a failed interracial male relationship, suggests the inevitability of black betrayal of white trust. As the novel progresses, Dick returns to the boyhood haunt he shared with Gaston (and where Dixon tells us Gaston returns as a child to pine and cry for his lost friend). But instead of finding Gaston, he finds—and rapes—a little white girl. The homosexual contact gestured to in the boyhood friendship is fulfilled at last, though in the containable context of the white female body. And as a rape, this sexual contact is given appropriate meaning as a sign of betrayal produced by aberrant black sexual desire for the white (wo)man.

Though useful on the one hand as a means of distancing white men's own imagined rape, on the other, white women's bodies provoke their own misogynous discourse in Dixon's narratives. As with the violence of lynching in the case of black men, rape in Dixon's texts functions as a punishment for white womanhood that by its nature seems to put the patriarchal family at risk. When the corrupt authorities dominated by “Negro rule” swindle the widow Gaston and young Charles out of their home, Mrs. Gaston immediately succumbs to her misfortunes. The very act of black appraisers entering the house is figured as a fatal violation of the submissive white maternal body:

When she saw a great herd of Negroes trampling down her flowers … and swarming over the porches, she sank feebly into her chair, buried her face in her hands and gave way to a passionate flood of tears. She was roused by the thumping of heavy feet in the hall and the unmistakable odour of perspiring Negroes. They had begun to ransack the house on tours of inspection. The poor woman's head drooped and she fell to the floor in a dead swoon. … Her heart fluttered on for awhile, but she never spoke again.

(LS, 139-141)

No errant woman, Mrs. Gaston is condemned anyway: mental and physical fragility mark her as unfit to be the mother of her race. Indeed, the trademark vulnerability of the Southern belle is represented in the context of a degenerative disease when, on learning of her husband's death in battle she immediately falls into “a violent delirium,” leaving her son virtually an orphan, betrayed by her dependency: “It seemed to him [Charles Gaston] some one was strangling him to death, and a great stone was piled on his little prostrate body” (LS, 14, 31).⁵⁰ In this context, Mrs. Gaston's own bodily torture now becomes her son's, as he is feminized and raped figuratively in her place.

All white women, simply by virtue of their being women, put their men in danger. It is precisely in their rape and their death that white women can redeem themselves because their vulnerability enables their refiguration as icons in a white male culture of violence. For example, when the old Confederate veteran Tom Camp witnesses the kidnapping of his older daughter Annie on her wedding night by a band of armed black soldiers, the men of the bridal party shoot the bride as well as her abductors. Camp responds with gratitude: “You've saved my little gal. … My God, I can't think of what would'a' happened! Now it's all right. She's safe in God's hands” (LS, 127). As the vulnerable virgin, Annie's fate is either to be deflowered by a Negro rapist or be killed by her menfolk. In either situation she can only be truly made “safe” when penetrated and reclaimed through male violence:

They laid her [dead body] across the bed in the room that had been made sweet and tidy for the bride and groom. The mother bent over her quickly with a light. Just where the blue veins crossed in her delicate temple there was a round hole from which a scarlet stream was running down her white throat.

(LS, 127)

Besides making them safe, the rape and death of white women in Dixon's novels facilitate a ritual of purification and white male triumph over black rivals, thereby redressing the racial balance of power. This is made clear in the case of the novel's principal rape victim, Camp's second daughter Flora, whom Dixon fashions in the image of Stowe's blond, blue-eyed child, angelic little Eva.⁵¹ Ever fearful of another rape attempt, Camp arrives at the spring where Flora has been playing just in time to see “the form of a negro man passing over the opposite hill, going along the spring path that led in that direction” (LS, 369). In her own response to Camp's upbraiding, Flora's innocence gives way to impudence: “‘Yes, I said “Howdy!” when he stopped to get a drink of water, and he gave me a whistle,’ she replied, with a pout of her pretty lips and a frown” (LS, 369). Flora's naiveté translates into an immodesty that shocks her father: “She don't seem any more afraid of 'em than she is of a cat” (LS, 370). The female upstart Flora is of course the stand-in for young Gaston. The physical landscape of her childish play is identical to that inhabited by Gaston and Dick, although Gaston's potentially dangerous desire for Dick's presence is now contained as white female immodesty in the face the threat of the black rapist. Predictably the black figure spotted by Camp is indeed Dick, who returns to commit the dreaded deed.

Apart from resolving the discomfort over the homoerotic, Flora's assault has several other functions. First, as mentioned before, simply because she is an exposed female in need of protection, the victim herself is already to blame; so the rape becomes a method of imagining the removal of the unstable feminine. Second, the assault provides the needed catalyst to call to action the heretofore generally impotent white male community; thus the union of black male and white female bodies becomes a mediating structure through which white masculinity can simultaneously punish transgressions and regenerate itself. Third, because the rape victim and her family are lower class, Dixon can acknowledge and at the same time insulate his middle-class readers from closer association with the larger problem of desire for and violence against the black.

Some critics have suggested that Dixon identified himself with “the new forces in Southern life: the rising industrialist, the reform-minded lawyer, the poor white farmer of the back country,” and that Dixon appealed to Americans because he was “a democrat par excellence.”⁵² I would suggest just the opposite. Dixon's popularity rests not on his support of egalitarianism, but precisely on his ability to generate images of white violence that bring about racial unity, while at the same time respecting and sustaining class divisions that had existed before the war. Dixon does not dwell on the crop lien system that oppressed both blacks and whites of the so-called New South, so Camp's poverty is not treated as the product of his status as a poor white. Rather Camp blames the ambiguously sketched black “presence” for his economic troubles: “I always hated a nigger since I was knee high. … Somehow, we always felt like they was crowdin' us to death on them big plantations, and the little ones, too” (LS, 28). Interestingly, Flora's rape in The Leopard's Spots, which is supposedly brought on by her lack of judgment (that is, her lack of a middle-class morality) enforces the traditional distinction between lower- and middle-class women: for all their faults as belles, the latter are nevertheless “impelled by some resistless instinct” that warns them of approaching trouble from black men (LS, 150). In contrast, as a lower-class figure, Flora Camp has a less developed feminine sense, and so most obviously presents herself as the appropriate sacrificial rape victim in the novel.

But it is in the idealized yeoman figure of Tom Camp that Dixon finally cordons off the image of white male impotence, white male savagery, and desire for the black. An aging amputee unable to move to a safer community (Dixon's dephallicization of the white male is hardly subtle here), Camp epitomizes the disempowered white male at a loss to control either the blacks or the women around him. Eventually the rape of his daughter propels him to join a lynch mob, but since the transformation into potent white manhood involves a process of feminization (as the white man occupies the space of the rape victim) and reincarnation before masculine empowerment can be achieved, the process is comfortably distanced in the bodily experience of a poor white.

When Flora is first declared missing, the frantic Camp waits at home where grief transforms him into a helpless maternal figure akin to Mrs. Gaston: “Through every hour of this awful night Tom Camp was in his room praying—his face now streaming with tears, now dry and white with the unspoken terror that could stop the beat of his heart” (LS, 373). As anguish over Flora's disappearance aggravates his old war wound, Camp's own body mirrors both the offstage deflowering of his daughter and her eventual death: “From the pain of his wound and the exhaustion of soul and body he fainted once with his lips still moving in prayer. For more than an hour he lay as one dead.” (LS, 373). When Flora is finally brought home, her body has already been displaced by that of her powerless father/protector, her wounds are manifested on his form, ending with his melodramatic collapse (also like Mrs. Gaston) into hysteria and temporary madness to signify his complete feminization.

Dixon uses the lower-class Tom Camp similarly to acknowledge and then contain the horror of white violence; thus Camp prefigures the eventual character of a white mob—the “thousand-legged beast” as Dixon calls it: “Oh! if I only had him [the black rapist] here before me now, and God Almighty would give me strength with these hands to tear his breast open and rip his heart out! I—could—eat—it—like—a—wolf!” (LS, 380). At this point Camp achieves his wish: he rushes out to join in Dick's lynching, and he and the mob burn the black rapist.

While Dixon may be disturbed enough by the transformation of his law-abiding white heroes into violent men to suggest, as other Southerners did, that mob violence was a lower-class phenomenon, he nevertheless flashes before the reader scenes of classless racial solidarity inspired by Flora's assault:

In a moment the white race had fused into a homogeneous mass of love, sympathy, hate and revenge. The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the banker and the blacksmith, the great and the small, they were all one now. The sorrow of that old one-legged soldier was the sorrow of all; every heart beat with his, and his life was their life, and his child their child.

(LS, 372)

Yet even the supposedly righteous violence unleashed by the crowd threatens to move toward savagery, expressed in the text as a physical transformation, an erasure of the identifiably racial characteristics belying the purer character, intellect, and compassion that allegedly distinguish white from black:

the crowd seemed to melt into a great crawling, swaying creature, half reptile, half beast, half dragon, half man, with a thousand legs, and a thousand eyes, and ten thousand gleaming teeth, and with no ear to hear and no heart to pity!

(LS, 384)

Imaged as a demonic (albeit retributive) presence, the white mob comes closest here to resembling the equally demonic freedmen who manifest themselves like a “black cloud … on the horizon” (LS, 63). Like the threat of both miscegenation and interracial male contact, then, regenerative violence against blacks not only threatens to taint white morality and humanity, but also resembles the very bodily distortions threatened by black rape as the white avengers merge with the beast they originally set out to destroy.

As a register of this ambivalence (and to support the mythology that ennobling leadership in the eradication of blacks is ultimately a middle-class duty), the novel's hero Charles Gaston appeals to the mob, not to consider the possibility of Dick's innocence (even blacks know “him guilty of the crime charged against him”), but to reconsider the method of execution: “Don't disgrace our town, our country, our state and our claims to humanity by this insane brutality. A beast wouldn't do this. … If you will kill him, shoot him or knock him in the head with a rock—don't burn him alive!” (LS, 383) As it turns out, Gaston's appeal is unsuccessful, and in fact he himself falls victim to the crowd's uncontrollable fury, further signifying the potential for white self-destruction embodied by mob violence:

“Knock the fool in the head!” one shouted. “Pin his arms behind him!” said another. Some one quickly pinioned his [Gaston's] arms with a cord. He stood in helpless rage and pity, and as he saw the match applied [to Dick], bowed his head and burst into tears.

(LS, 383-84)

Whereas The Leopard's Spots evinces a conflicted search for an appropriate stance in the face of the imagined black peril, Dixon uses the The Clansman to work out a clearer vision of racial control that is less problematic than mob violence—namely, the organization of the early Ku Klux Klan. Dixon's boyhood memories of his adored uncle Colonel Leroy McAfee, Grand Titan of the Cleveland County Klan of North Carolina, shaped his presentation of the early Klansmen as the Anglo-American link with a European past of chivalric glory. Only in the highly ritualized, controlled executions performed by the Ku Klux Klan does white male violence become a fully liberating, purifying experience that absolves whites of guilt and restores the “natural” order. Equally important, Dixon represents the violence of the Klan as the chosen mode of resistance specifically for middle-class white men, feeding the myth of the Klan's original 1865 birth as a brotherhood of well-to-do white youths.⁵³

The Klansmen make a brief appearance in The Leopard's Spots (“On those horses sat two hundred white-robed silent men whose close-fitting hood disguises looked like the mail helmets of ancient knights”), but they ride in full force into the pages of The Clansman (LS, 151).⁵⁴ Major Dameron in The Leopard's Spots and Phil Cameron in The Clansman are united with Camp in their natural instincts as white men to hate blacks; yet as leaders of the community, they are responsible for channeling male fury into honorable, chivalric modes as a solution to the horror of their own bloodletting. The Clansman seeks to present an idealized image of the early Klan as the institution of white male violence perpetrated by the middle-class; and while the method of corralling white womanhood and avenging white (fe)male violation is consistent with that of The Leopard's Spots, the assault against blacks finally rises to the level of a holy crusade.

As in The Leopard's Spots, the catalyst for male intervention in The Clansman is black rape. Dixon's contention that “the young Southern woman was the divinity that claimed and received the chief worship of man” (C, 210) is once more an ironic statement at best, since his female characters achieve apotheosis only after either literal death or the symbolic “death” of rape, when they function to inspire white violence. Dixon's handling of the symbolic significance of rape changes dramatically when the victims are middle class, however, as in the case of the assault on genteel Marion Lenoir. When black Gus and his henchmen break in on the defenseless Marion and her widowed mother, Mrs. Lenoir is forced to watch her daughter's violation, underscoring the helplessness of Southern white women. But unlike Flora in The Leopard's Spots, these women are self-policing. When Marion regains consciousness hours later, she knows instinctively the route of the fallen woman:

“No one must ever know. We will hide quickly every trace of the crime. They will think we strolled to Lover's Leap and fell over the cliff, and my name will always be sweet and clean. … Only those who hate me could wish that I live.”

(C, 305-6)

Finally, in a double suicide, mother and daughter jump from Lover's Leap.

White supremacy once more puts the white woman in an impossible dilemma: alive, her own proscribed physical and emotional weakness renders her indefensible and so a liability to her man in his battle against blacks; dead, she can finally epitomize a racial purity and chastity unencumbered by the physical. As such, in death she safely approximates the ideal of the desexualized belle and can thus achieve apotheosis. Also, although Marion and her mother have destroyed all evidence to link Gus with the assault, Dr. Cameron is able to identify the marks of rape on Marion's body and “the fire-etched record of the crime” literally burned for all time on the surface of Mrs. Lenoir's retina (C, 313). Alive, both women are the constant care of their neighbors, the Cameron men; dead, their bodies become tangible evidence of black criminality, the necessary sacred text required to validate white supremacist violence.

When the Klansmen capture Gus, in contrast to the undisciplined mob's execution of Dick in The Leopard's Spots, these whites formally interrogate their prisoner and investigate the crime in the context of solemn ritual. As in the case of yeoman Camp, the white protectors are associated with the body of the white female victim. But the middle-class Klansmen share a more stylized, less basely physical relationship to Marion's body: Dixon stresses that they are all elaborately robed in white, with phallic spikes on their helmets, and on the breast of their garments is a circle of red enclosing a white cross. According to descriptions of early Klan robes, the white of the uniforms signified “purity for the preservation of the home and for the protection of women and children” while the red emblem stood for “the blood which Klansmen were ready to shed in defense of the helpless.”⁵⁵ For much of the novel, Marion herself has been robed in white. She wears white when she commits suicide and her death posture is emblematic of the Klan's breast patch. When she is found at the bottom of the cliff, her “fair blonde head” lies “in a crimson circle sharply defined in the white sand” (C, 311). Thus, as an uncompromisingly masculine reincarnation of the dead girl, the robed Klansmen occupy the space of the rape victim, whose bodily violation is strategically concealed to leave only the aura of violated purity.

When Dr. Cameron uses hypnosis to force Gus to relive his assault on Marion, the Klansmen relive the rape in the girl's place, appropriating the space of female victim, as Tom Camp does after Flora's assault, but with a significant difference:

The negro began to live the crime with fearful realism. … Gus rose to his feet and started across the cave as if to spring on the shivering figure of the girl, the clansmen with muttered groans, sobs and curses falling back as he advanced. … Strong men began to cry like children.

“Stop him! Stop him!” screamed a clansman, springing on the negro and grinding his heel into his big thick neck. A dozen more were on him in a moment, kicking, stamping, cursing, and crying like madmen.

Dr. Cameron leaped forward and beat them off:

“Men! Men! You must not kill him in this condition!”

Some of the white figures had fallen prostrate on the ground, sobbing in a frenzy of uncontrollable emotion. Some were leaning against the walls, their faces buried in their arms.

(C, 322-24)

The Klansmen are feminized in the posture of both Marion and the helpless witness Mrs. Lenoir; yet even as they live Marion's violation as their own, the demand to have the assault rehearsed puts them in the category of rapists because they directly violate Marion's wish for secrecy. In seeking to place themselves in the space of her victimization, the voyeuristic Klansmen enact a second trespass on Marion's imagined body; but in the context of ritual, the merging of black and white identities is denied and subverted. Thus Marion's death, originally an act of ironic self-preservation, is recharged with new ideological meaning as the image of her rape is exhibited repeatedly to awaken white manhood to vengeance, not female protection.

The rape revitalizes the Klansmen with a drive toward violence in much the same way as it does Tom Camp, but again, “[r]itual murder averts a sacrificial crisis of indiscriminate violence. It ushers in the distinction between culture and nature.”⁵⁶ Following Dr. Cameron's caution for restraint, they undertake a complex series of rituals before finally throwing Gus's dead body onto the front yard of the corrupt mulatto lieutenant governor, Silas Lynch. Gus's lynching takes place offstage, so as not to taint the meaning of Klan's act of vengeance. Thus any relationships between the middle-class lynchers and their victim are masked: they have destroyed his body and appropriated his power; but unlike the mob in The Leopard's Spots, the Klansmen have also purified, not polluted themselves with violence.

THE PROBLEM OF BLACK WOMEN IN THE SINS OF THE FATHER

Both The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman designate male lust as a black disease, a mark of black bestiality. But as I have suggested earlier, since the black woman had been associated with the slaveholder's sexuality in the antebellum South, her apparent absence in Dixon's representation of postwar America speaks to denial of the tradition of white-authored miscegenation in a postemancipation context. In The Clansman Dixon does present the interracial relationship between Austin Stoneman, the Northern pro-black politician, and Lydia, the sinister mulatto housekeeper; their affair epitomizes the misguided Northern attachment to the ex-slave, and the novel's plot works to alert the Stoneman family (and white readers of the North) to the grave mistake made by the Yankees. In The Sins of the Father (1912), Dixon finally makes the problem of white male desire for the black woman his central focus. This novel never achieved the popular success enjoyed by The Leopard's Spots or The Clansman, perhaps in part because of its dismal prediction of white racial self-destruction.

The Sins of the Father follows the fortunes of Daniel Norton, Confederate veteran, Klan leader, editor, politician. And like Dixon's previous novels about race war, The Sins of the Father rehearses the familiar struggle to regain control and defeat a corrupt Yankee-installed black government. On the public front, Norton is at the height of his success: he is feared and respected as an editor; he controls the Ku Klux Klan with an iron fist, keeping the rougher elements among the Klansmen in place; in politics, he is marked for success as the great white supremacist hope for the White House: “I'll start a fire that can't be put out until it has swept the state—the South— … and then the Nation!” (S [The Sins of the Father], 216).⁵⁷ But while Norton's public persona represents the national success of white supremacy, his personal life threatens its defeat: Norton must choose between Cleo, the fair-skinned, oversexed quadroon, and his white wife, Jean, the direct descendent of aristocratic plantation stock, and the traditionally pure, desexualized white belle.

As the descendent of slaves and as Jean's half-sister, Cleo embodies an incestuous racial heritage (her father slept with his black half-sister Lucy) that speaks Dixon's fears of a white patriarchy unable to control its own impulses or to delineate its own social boundaries. Dixon obviously intends Cleo to function as a retributive figure in the life of one white family, as a way of pointing to the need for complete racial separation. But as a link between the political contexts of slavery and post-Reconstruction, the sexual domination of the black body once thought to be the sign of the white slaveholder's complete power as master is now revealed to be the very evidence of his weakness, as the triumphs of the past become the liabilities of the present. The white ability to shape and control the national racial destiny, then, might be proved to be completely arbitrary.

Though his work was dedicated to a belief in white superiority and in the possibility of separating the races, in The Sins of the Father Dixon is fascinated with imaging white masculinity in a state of complete, self-generated powerlessness. In contrast to the “delicate[,] … petted invalid” (S, 20) Jean Norton, Cleo is presented as the seductress, precluding the possibility of rape and at the same time absolving Norton of responsibility for his actions of adultery and miscegenation: “she felt … that the mad desires that burned a living fire in every nerve of her young body had scorched the man she had marked her own from the moment she had first laid eyes on his serious, aristocratic face” (S, 42). Yet simultaneously with presenting Norton as Cleo's sexual victim, The Sins of the Father grapples with the problem of potentially erasing the white hero's own idealized will to resist the invasion of an inferior race. When Norton's family physician upbraids Norton for his transgression (“We spend our time and energy fighting the negro race in front and leave our back doors open for their women and children to enter and master our life” [S, 121]), he is in effect attempting to restore a white male agency to Norton that seems to have been relinquished through the tradition of miscegenation.

Predictably Dixon flirts with the idea of white culpability, signified by Norton's failure as husband and race leader, by distancing it through the figure of Jean. As the novel begins to enact a series of avoidances, Jean Norton is portrayed as the overly perfect Southern belle who poses the chief impediment in Norton's battle against sexual desire for the black:

[Naively, Jean] believed in the innocence of her husband. The fact that the negro race had for two hundred years been stirring the baser passions of her men—that this degradation of the higher race had been bred into the bone and sinew of succeeding generations—had never occurred to her child-like mind.

(S, 124)

She refuses to “realize that this thing is … a living fact which the white woman of the South must face” (S, 122). Consequently, her own adherence to Southern ideals of female virtue—the quality that makes her most faithful to the Southern patriarchy—makes her the source of the racial Other's triumph over Norton, and therefore makes her a traitor to her white society. And finally her own self-willed death becomes the ultimate betrayal, because the maternal absence thus created gives Cleo an opportunity to fill the void as housekeeper/mother/wife.

Following in the footsteps of other Dixonian heroines, Jean's real usefulness to her community only comes with her death. Her suicide marks her as the traditional fallen white woman, now cast as a fallen white race, her hearing and sensibility contaminated by her knowledge of her husband's adultery. That Jean is of more value dead than alive is underscored by Norton's erection of “an altar” beneath her portrait, before which “he kneels in the twilight and prays”: “The picture and frame seemed a living flame in its dark setting. The portrait was an idealized study of the little mother. The artist had put into his canvas the spirit of the tenderest brooding motherhood” (S, 243). In her death Norton achieves an empowering purification: vowing to raise his legitimate son away from the contaminating influences of blackness, he breaks with Cleo and sends their octoroon daughter to live in an orphanage.

Yet Dixon's usual rituals seem superfluous in this context because the problem at hand is not the management of black male and white female bodies, but rather the management of a fatally dangerous white male desire. Despite Norton's best efforts, his son eventually marries a young woman whom Cleo later implies is her daughter by Norton. In the face of this repetition of antebellum white traditions of breaking sexual and familial taboos, father and son attempt a double suicide, a strange plot twist that appears to be Dixon's prediction of white race suicide unless trends are reversed. Yet after dangling this possible fate before his audience, Dixon redeems his heroes in a clumsy ending: Norton is fatally wounded, thereby paying the price for his indiscretion, but Tom Norton is discovered to be only slightly hurt. At this point a guilty Cleo reveals that, after all, Tom's young wife is really a white orphan she had claimed as her own, the child by Daniel Norton having died in infancy. With family and racial purity apparently intact, Tom vows never again to allow a negro to enter the Norton home.

But despite such measures, the security of white families like the Nortons is based on coincidences of racial histories, not on a white ability to control racial knowledge or navigate national destinies. As a quadroon the sexual partner and surrogate parent to white men and children, Cleo symbolizes, for Dixon at least, a threatening white dependence on African Americans, enforced by whites themselves. The end of The Sins of the Father enforces an erasure of the white male hero—a fate reserved in Dixon's other novels for African Americans. As a mulatto designed to reference specifically white male sexual excess and not black male sexual transgression, Cleo allows Dixon to imagine, but not distance the possibility of a white destiny of self-destruction. In The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman, white political power is reaffirmed and exercised through the identification and execution of the black rapist. With its subplot of political agitation for the South, The Sins of the Father must confront the possibility that the white supremacist political platform of white domestic defense is infeasible, not because of the presence of African Americans, but because of a tradition of white failure. Dixon saves the day at the end of The Sins of the Father, but just barely. Mistakes are righted, and undesirables are expelled; but the real potential, if not the reality, of white male defeat cannot be unvoiced.

We cannot consider Thomas Dixon's fiction as merely a successful attempt to codify and broadcast white supremacist propaganda, without exploring at the same time the ways in which that fiction's war against an American multiracial destiny was uneasy and deeply conflicted. Dixon's novels provide a useful example of how white supremacist discourse hinged on a denial of alternate black and white voices, and a figuration of anxieties through the bodies of racial and sexual others. Precisely because in The Sins of the Father the lascivious Cleo becomes finally an undeniable reference for Norton's bodily desire Dixon is forced to kill his hero to cleanse the novel's idealized white world. Thus, because they provided a more palatable fantasy of a white male rescue based on disciplining of unruly bodies, Dixon's The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman achieved considerably greater popularity.

In the turn-of-the-century context of American white supremacy, Dixon's fiction underscores how the struggle to resolve questions of race and political agency was structured through contemporary debates about masculinity. This discourse of race and masculinity in turn structured the ways in which writers working to counter the effects of white supremacist fiction would articulate their opposition. In their work, black writers such as Charles Chesnutt or Sutton E. Griggs sought to reinvent African American masculinity and validate black male claims to political entitlement. Part of their strategy included a decriminalization of both black male sexuality and black male aggression; they would also have to challenge white supremacist definitions of the victim, in order to prove that lynching itself was a criminal act and that the black rapist was an imaginary threat. At the same time, might the recuperation of black manhood result in an appropriation of the kinds of class and gender discourses exemplified in Dixon's fiction? Writers in opposition to the forces represented by Dixon also drew on the idea of the endangered space of the domestic (in this case black, not white) to underscore white supremacy's threat to an orderly progress of African American life from slavery to freedom, and they especially emphasized the hypocrisy of white male traditions of miscegenation. But what were the nature and the effect of their usage of black women as emblems of a besieged race? And in their refocusing of attention from the white to the black family, what happened to the figure of white womanhood? Since American literary responses to white supremacy included black and white women, how did their particular figurations contribute to the ongoing debates on race and rights occurring in their respective communities?

Notes

1. William Dean Howells, A Boy's Town, Described For “Harper's Young People” (New York: Harper, 1890), pp. 129-30, 230.

2. William Dean Howells, The Shadow of a Dream and An Imperative Duty, ed. Martha Banta (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1970), pp. 89-90.

3. I have borrowed this very apt phrase from Martha Banta's introduction to An Imperative Duty, p. iv.

4. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 13. See especially Baker's discussion of the display on the slave body before Northern abolitionist audiences.

5. I am using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's definition of desire as “the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship.” See her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), p. 2.

6. Hortense J. Spillers, “Notes on an Alternative Model—Neither/Nor,” in The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, ed. Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1989), p. 168.

7. The black beast was of course the flip side of figure of the illiterate, often comical plantation black popularized by local color and plantation fiction writers.

8. Quoted in Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction [1971] (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), p. xx.

9. For a study of the earlier moments in the development of such an attitude, see Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970). See also George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 [1971] (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1987); and Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984).

10. Quoted in Williamson, The Crucible of Race, pp. 121-22.

11. George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life [1880] (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988). References to this text are indicated by the abbreviation G.

12. Thomas Nelson Page, Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (New York: Charles Scribner, 1898), p. 193.

13. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle [1906] (New York: Signet, 1960), pp. 270-71.

14. Though some of his contemporaries must clearly have disagreed with his reading of African Americans, Howells's study of race relations in An Imperative Duty suggests that after Emancipation the black presence within the white world could be regulated through the black's traditional role as servant; the pleasure in the continuance of a “natural” black subordination is articulated in Olney's association of comfort with the image of “the white linen jacket and apron of a black waiter” (An Imperative Duty, 5).

15. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era [1908] (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. xiii, 180.

16. See Gail Bederman's argument in her article “‘Civilization,’ the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells's Antilynching Campaign (1892-94),” Radical History Review 52 (Winter 1992): 5-30.

17. Ida B. Wells, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894, reprinted in Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, comp. Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 166-67.

18. Andrew Sledd, “The Negro: Another View,” Atlantic Monthly 90 (July 1902): 70-71.

19. Theodore Dreiser, “Nigger Jeff,” reprinted in Free and Other Stories (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1918).

20. E. D. Cope, “Two Perils of the Indo-European,” Open Court 3(127) (1890): 2071.

21. Quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), p. 190.

    Clyde Griffen's recent assertion that the frequently argued “crisis” of late nineteenth-century (white) masculinity can lead to oversimplifications and misleading generalizations about the variety of masculine self-definitions worked out by American white men in this period is important. However, without trying to argue that Cope or Roosevelt spoke for all white men, I do want to point out that in particular the ideology of race management justified by the “existence” of the black rapist is partly produced by an anxiety over changing definitions of white femininity. See Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 183-204, 265-71.

22. Wells, Selected Works, p. 14.

23. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 337.

24. Quoted in Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 19.

25. Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991), p. 13. See also Martha Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993): 409.

26. Williamson, The Crucible of Race, p. 141.

27. For information on Griffith and Dixon, I am relying on Raymond Allen Cook, Fire from the Flint: The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1968), chapters 7 and 8.

    After The Birth of a Nation, Dixon was convinced that motion pictures would “shape the destiny of humanity,” and for a time he tried his hand at filmmaking. He established the short-lived Dixon Studios in Los Angeles and tried unsuccessfully to produce movie versions of his other novels, including a sequel to Griffith's saga, called The Fall of a Nation, which was a complete failure.

28. Cook, Fire from the Flint, p. 168.

29. Russell Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” Cinema Journal 12 (1972): 27 n.2. On The Birth of a Nation and the rebirth of the Klan, see John Hope Franklin, “‘Birth of a Nation’—Propaganda as History,” Massachusetts Review 20 (1979): 430-31.

30. Quoted in Cook, Fire from the Flint, p. 170.

31. Maxwell Bloomfield, “Dixon's The Leopard's Spots: A Study in Popular Racism,” American Quarterly 16 (1964): 390-91. See also Cook, Fire from the Flint.

32. Cook, Fire from the Flint, p. 112.

33. Lilian Lida Bell, “The Leopard's Spots,” Saturday Evening Post (12 April 1902): 15.

34. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), pp. 268-80; Gilbert Osofsky, “Progressivism and the Negro: New York, 1900-1915,” American Quarterly 16 (1964): 155.

35. Thomas Dixon, Jr., “Booker T. Washington and the Negro,” Saturday Evening Post (19 August 1905): 2, 1.

36. Quoted in Thomas Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980), p. 140.

37. Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,” Representations 9 (1985): 153, 153-54. Some aspects of my argument about Dixon's novels are complemented by Rogin's discussion of Griffith's film.

38. Quoted in Durant Da Ponte, “The Greatest Play of the South,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 2 (1957): 17.

39. Dixon, “Booker T. Washington,” pp. 1, 2.

40. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 25.

41. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865-1900 [1902] (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg, 1967). References to this text are indicated by the abbreviation LS.

42. “Thomas Dixon Talks of The Clansman,” Atlanta Constitution (29 October 1905). As for the New York scene, years later Dixon would incorporate this anecdote in his novel The Root of Evil (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1911). Here the young Southern hero James Stuart, adrift in the urban North, encounters the same pair. This time doing what Dixon perhaps wanted to do, Stuart assaults the black man and beats him unconscious. The girl, properly penitent and grateful for her release, is then cloistered within a fallen women's shelter. See also F. Garvin Davenport, Jr., “Thomas Dixon's Mythology of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 36 (1970): 359-60, for another view of the novelistic incident.

43. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell [Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983-84] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 148-86, proves useful here. Sedgwick suggests that, since nineteenth-century “paths of male entitlement … required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state … [of] male homosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement” (151). If, as Sedgwick suggests,

    such compulsory relationships as male friendships, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and heterosexual rivalry all involve forms of investment that force men into the arbitrarily mapped, self-contradictory, and anathema-riddled quicksands of the middle distance of male homosocial desire, then … men enter into adult masculine entitlement only through acceding to the permanent threat that the small space they have cleared for themselves on this terrain may always, just as arbitrarily and with just as much justification, be punitively and retroactively foreclosed.

    (152)

    One result of the fearful but inevitably produced “arbitrariness” says Sedgwick is “a reservoir of potential for violence” (152), which, in a racially homogeneous situation, can fuel homophobia as a means of regulating “compulsory” male bonds. Sedgwick's argument might be extended to the interracial fantasy of the white hero and the black beast, since violence does function in this context to define a white heterosexual masculinity put in jeopardy by the “rivalry” (to put it mildly) between black and white men.

44. Leslie A. Fielder, “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!” in An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics [1948] (New York: Stein & Day, 1972), p. 147.

45. The threat of the homosocial triangle's transformation into a homosexual pairing between black and white men is also fueled by the iconography of race, since, according to Robert K. Martin, to “embrace … the Dark African, [is] to accept, symbolically at least, anal penetration (entry into the darkness within), and thus to make oneself over as female, a commodity to be exchanged.” See his “Knights-Errant and Gothic Seducers: The Representation of Male Friendship in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), p. 178.

46. Rogin, “The Sword Becomes a Flashing Vision”: pp. 170-71.

47. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan [1905] (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1970). References to this text are indicated by the abbreviation C.

48. For an excellent recent discussion of the theme of heroic manhood in turn-of-the-century fiction, see Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2 (Winter 1990): 659-90.

49. For an account of the real-life Dick, see Cook, Fire in the Flint, pp. 18-19. Dixon's biographer seems delighted by Dixon's love of his black friend but does not speculate as to the meaning of Dixon's decision to transform the beloved Dick into the rapist in The Leopard's Spots.

50. For a reading of Dixon's childhood reaction to his own mother's illness, see Williamson, The Crucible of Race, chapter 5.

51. Dixon in fact does reincarnate Little Eva in the dramatic version of The Clansman. In the play, little Eva is raped by Gus.

52. Bloomfield, “Dixon's The Leopard's Spots,” p. 393; see also Davenport, “Thomas Dixon's Mythology,” pp. 355, 360-61.

53. Dixon's distinction is of course idealized. While many whites, including Ray Stannard Baker, assumed that lynch mobs were composed of poor whites, most riots, as in the case of the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, were composed of a cross-section of the community and often were led by important men of the town. For discussion of the Wilmington Riot, see H. Leon Prather, Sr., We Have Taken a City: Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1984); Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988); and Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), chapter 4.

54. Dixon claimed that he owed allegiance only to the early Klan and that its subsequent revivals were never in touch with the original goal of white self-protection. Strangely, both Raymond Allen Cook, Dixon's biographer, and Maxwell Bloomfield seem to see this as a positive attribute in Dixon, as if the original Klan were not itself a white terrorist organization. See Cook, Fire in the Flint; and Bloomfield, “Dixon's The Leopard's Spots,” p. 395.

55. Quoted in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 455.

56. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” p. 180.

57. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1912). References to this text are indicated by the abbreviation S.