SOURCE: Clark, Thomas D. Introduction to The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, by Thomas Dixon, Jr., pp. v-xviii. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970.

The first thing to be said in discussing Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s novel The Clansman is that no person of critical judgment thinks of it as having artistic conception or literary craftsmanship. One can readily agree with the opinion of the reviewer for the Bookman in February 1905, when he wrote, “The Clansman may be summed up as a very poor novel, a very ridiculous novel, not a novel at all, yet a novel with a great deal to it; a novel that very properly is going to interest many thousands of readers, of all degrees of taste and education, a book which will be discussed from all points of view, voted superlatively good and superlatively bad, but which will be read.”

Other reviewers felt that Dixon had lost his sense of perspective. The reviewer for Outlook thought he had used such talent as he had only to arouse the worst passions in his readers, and that his novel would kindle unworthy feelings in the nation at a time when harmony between North and South was most vital. There can be no doubt that these and other reviewers were correct in their appraisals. But what they did not say was that the novel opened wider a vein of racial hatred which was to poison further an age already in a social and political upheaval.

The Clansman was published by Doubleday and Page early in 1905, three years after the appearance of Dixon's The Leopard's Spots and perhaps partly as a reaction to the praise and condemnation of the earlier book, which some critics found crude. Between the publication of these two books, Dixon refined his writing craftsmanship somewhat, smoothing crudities and softening angers.

Southerners at this time had almost completed the second phase of their political redemption. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890 and finishing with Oklahoma in 1910, all of the Southern states redrafted their constitutions.

Mississippians had set the pattern for throwing off the yoke of radicalism and thwarting the reconstruction amendments to the United States Constitution. They wrote into their new charter the so-called “Mississippi Plan” for disfranchising the Negro. This clause prescribed educational qualifications for voting which large numbers of whites and few Negroes could meet. Even those Negroes who did qualify were disfranchised either by intimidation or by arbitrary voter registrars. In Louisiana, constitution makers went a step further in disfranchisement by adopting a “grandfather clause” which denied registration to persons whose grandfathers could not vote prior to 1867.

The pattern was set. As constitutional revisions took place across the South it became clear that a major objective was barring Negro voters from the polls. In 1901, white Alabama delegates to a constitutional convention copied their Mississippi neighbors and created even more publicity by their actions. Rural editors published a stream of stories about the convention's activities, chortling over the fact that the Negro was being denied access to the polls. In ringing pronouncements these editors declared that Alabama was white man's country and that the Negro had no social or political claim on the state. White supremacy as an official policy was firmly planted in the South.

The United States Supreme Court established the principle of political discrimination based on race when in 1898 it upheld the Mississippi Plan in Williams v. Mississippi, although in 1915 the court struck down the grandfather clause in state constitutions in Guinn and Beal v. U.S.

In a much broader spectrum, Jim Crowism developed in other ways. In 1896 the Supreme Court enunciated the principle of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case arising out of discriminatory practices by a public carrier. At the Atlanta Cotton Exposition on September 19, 1895, Booker T. Washington, addressing a large white audience, reviewed the place of the Negro in Southern economics and society. In a dramatic gesture with his hand he too enunciated a philosophy of “separate and equal.”

All of these incidents were in fact a culmination of the white supremacy struggle begun in 1865. Since 1876 Southern editors had carried on an active campaign against Negro participation in politics. From the publisher of the most insignificant little “patent sides” country weekly to Henry W. Grady of the Atlanta Constitution there was a rising crescendo of editorial clamor against political equality for Negroes. In a stirring speech in Dallas at the Texas State Fair in October 1887, Grady stated as forcibly as anyone could the position of Southern whites on racial matters: “I deliver to the young men of the South, I declare that the truth above all others to be worn unsullied and sacred in your hearts, to be surrendered to no force, sold for no price, compromised in no necessity, but cherished and defended as the convenant of your prosperity, and the pledge of peace to your children, is that the white race must dominate forever in the South, because it is the white race, and superior to that race by which its supremacy is threatened.”

Two years before, Grady had engaged in an angry exchange of views on the Southern race problem with the novelist and short-story writer George W. Cable of New Orleans. Cable had published an article in the Century Magazine entitled “The Freedman's Case in Equity.” He had expressed the opinion that Southerners had been unfair to the Negro and needed to revise both their attitudes and their approaches. The Negro deserved a fairer deal at the polls, equal access to transportation facilities and schools, and greater economic opportunity. This article came as a thunderclap to most Southerners. While it did not advocate social equality, it implied, however vaguely, that such would become the case.

Grady prepared an immediate reply in which he set forth the white Southerners' position, and questioned both the attitudes of Negroes toward the issues Cable had raised and the capability of the Negro in many areas. Pettishly, he questioned whether or not Cable was a true Southerner, expressing doubt that any other white Southerner could be found who subscribed to such contentions. He introduced his essay “Plain Black and White” by asserting, “Let it be understood in the beginning, then, that the South will never adopt Mr. Cable's suggestion of intermingling of the races. It can never be driven into accepting it. So far from there being a growing sentiment in the South in favor of the indiscriminate mixing of the races, the intelligence of both races is moving farther from that proposition day by day.” In an eloquent peroration he concluded, “And with the South the matter may be left. There it can be left with the fullest confidence that the honor of the Republic will be maintained, the rights of humanity guarded, and the problem worked out in such exact justice as the finite mind can measure or finite agencies administer.”

Two major regional issues stirred both Cable and Grady in the 1880s. The first was the rising number of lynchings committed yearly. Again, the columns of weekly and daily newspapers carried literally hundreds of stories about either impending racial uprisings or lynchings. From 1880 until late 1904, when Dixon submitted the manuscript of The Clansman for publication, the stain of communal murder by lynching spread across the South, and continued to do so for many years. Even the most illiterate Southerner realized his region's honor was being sullied by the practice. So prevalent was the crime, however, and so bitter was criticism of the practice from outside the region that Southerners all but developed an obsession with the subject. In 1902, the year in which The Leopard's Spots was published, the Reverend John Carlisle Kilgo of Trinity College published an essay on lynching in the South Atlantic Quarterly. Kilgo suggested that the crime might be eliminated if Southerners were made less socially sensitive. He acknowledged, “A tedious task it is, but it is the cure. In proposing this solution it is not intended to criticise the standards of southern society. These standards of home life, purity, and liberty, are not too high, nor are they poetic dreams. But sensitiveness in social dispositions is no requisite to high ideals. It does not necessarily represent a moral fidelity to high ideals. A standard of conduct and the type of attitude toward it are different things. Poise is the surest mark of strength; excitability is the mark of weakness.”

The second issue of the age in which Thomas Dixon, Jr., came to maturity was the economic plight of the South and especially of the Piedmont. It was clear by 1900 that the region's long devotion to staple agriculture had been a serious mistake. Since 1870 the cotton planting industry had suffered a gradual decline. The dream that cotton would finally be enthroned as economic king of Southern farming was the one idea Southerners had brought out of the Civil War virtually untarnished. Competition from abroad, a shifting of regional economies, overproduction, failure to diversify farming practices, and failure to balance agriculture with industry all played havoc with the rural Southern economy.

Both Negro and white farmers had become the victims of a ruinous system of credit and production. The dream of “forty acres and a mule,” if in fact it had ever had any foundation, vanished quickly for the Negro after 1870. So did freedom in the classical sense as he and his friends had conceived it at the dawn of emancipation from slavery. A worse form of economic enslavement awaited both races in the sun-scorched cotton fields. Built into postwar tenant farming were elements of certain economic self-destruction.

By the mid-1880s newspaper editors, travelers, and other commentators actively criticized Southern agricultural failures. Even Southern farmers themselves, made desperate by their poverty, were stimulated to revolt against the system. They sought out “whipping boys” in merchants, bankers, railroad managers, state legislators, and congressmen. The resulting populist revolt was a rebellion against an economic system, which became also a conflict within Southern social and political ranks. It fostered the advent of political progressivism in the region, and at the same time denoted a sharp reaction in racial relations. It drove more deeply the wedge of separation between embattled white yeoman farmers and Negroes, and to a lesser extent, between white yeoman farmers and privileged Southern oligarchical leadership. Reflected in the revisionary constitutional conventions was the desire of the poor Southern white to snatch political control from the remaining pockets of plantation dominance and to vest it in the hands of the red-necked farmer and his demagogic leaders.

This was the South which was emerging at the time Thomas Dixon, Jr., graduated from Wake Forest College in 1883. Both Wake County and the area around Dixon's birthplace in Shelby, North Carolina, were disturbed by the changes which were coming to the South. In fact, since his birth on January 11, 1864, Dixon had known little else than crisis. For the most part his people had failed to make a success of farming on the thin soils of the great pine-covered crescent. The economic struggles of the farmers in this area had far deeper implications than those in the lower Southern cotton belt, deeper than the race problem itself. Farmers of the Piedmont were dependent upon the production of cotton, tobacco, and grains. Their farms were too small ever to permit expansion or the development of an efficient agricultural system of credit. Only one avenue for economic betterment was open to them—development of some kind of industrial employment which would relieve them of their dependence upon the land.

The years of Thomas Dixon's youth were a period in which the piedmont South sought with an almost religious fervor to cure its economic ills by developing a textile industry. In The Clansman Dixon reflects this idée fixe of his age by having the hero, Phil Stoneman, busy himself with the building of a cotton mill at the falls of Broad River. Here Dixon reveals his consciousness of the plight of the modern South.

Young Dixon realized that the people whom he had been taught by his Presbyterian family from infancy to regard as the chosen people of God, were now sinking hopelessly into economic chaos. To his shame and sense of outrage, he realized that it took more than blood and pride in old-world origins to cope with the realities of the late nineteenth century; even so, he could never fully accept the blow of poverty and economic defeat for his people. Thus it was that he wrote into his novels an almost fierce pride in Scotch ancestry and Calvinistic religion. He dedicated The Clansman to the memory of “A Scotch-Irish leader of the South, My Uncle, Colonel Leroy McAtee, Grand Titan of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Despite his stout Presbyterian background, Dixon enrolled in the Baptist college of Wake Forest. When he left this institution in 1883 with an A.B. degree he went directly to the graduate seminar in history at Johns Hopkins University. On September 16 of that year, Woodrow Wilson went from Asheville, North Carolina, to enter that same university. The two young Southerners quickly became friends. In Herbert Baxter Adams's classroom they were introduced to the processes of scientific historical research and to the literature of history. Unlike Wilson, however, Dixon remained only one year at The Hopkins. In the fall of 1884 he returned to North Carolina and entered a private law school at Greensboro from which he was graduated the following spring with a bachelor's degree in law. That same year he was elected a member of the North Carolina legislature. On February 15, 1886, he wrote Wilson that he had just read a favorable review of Wilson's book Congressional Government and wished he were nearby to shake his hand. He himself, however, was now actively participating in the process of making government work.

He informed his Hopkins classmate that he was trying to get through the legislature a bill to revise the North Carolina assessment laws so as to increase the valuation on real property from ＄200,000,000 to ＄400,000,000 and at the same time to reduce the tax rate by 50 percent. Clearly he had his sights set on a more exciting future than a mere legislative career. He was also endeavoring, he told Wilson, to get a department of history and political science organized at the University of North Carolina, and hoped that it would be made “a most attractive feature of the University in a short time—you know the temper of our boys.” He assured Wilson that the legislature was going “to make a large increase in the annual appropriation to the University, which is now on a genuine boom.” Dixon not only envisioned his former classmate in the role of professor of history in the University of North Carolina, but helped secure for him the adornment of an honorary degree from Wake Forest College. On June 7, 1887, he wrote Wilson, “I today proposed your name to the Trustees of this institution for the degree of LL.D & I'm sure you will get it. And you will be the only one too though several have been proposed I understand & some of them backed by the Gov. of N.C. too. …” The degree was conferred on Wilson in absentia.

If the eager young legislator had a dream of moving into an academic career himself, it was indeed of short duration. In that year, 1886, he entered the Baptist ministry as pastor of a Raleigh church. He preached in Boston from 1888 to 1889, and then for a decade, 1889-1899, in New York City, where he attracted the attention of John D. Rockefeller. While serving the northern pastorates he also lectured around the lyceum circuit, and between 1899 and 1903 lecturing and writing were his chief occupations. It was during these years that he wrote The Leopard's Spots (1902), and The One Woman (1903), and no doubt made a beginning on The Clansman.

The turn of the century brought reassessment of the Reconstruction era. In these years, there began to appear the special state studies on radical rule: James W. Garner published his Reconstruction in Mississippi in 1901; William A. Dunning's Essays on Civil War and Reconstruction appeared in 1904; and Walter Lynwood Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, in 1905. Numerous articles on the subject were being published by the periodical press, and young college professors just out of the classrooms of Dunning and Adams were organizing departments of history and initiating new courses in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Thus it was that Dixon, writing between lyceum engagements, turned to the story of radical Reconstruction as a source for his third novel. The Leopard's Spots had treated the political redemption of the South from the viewpoint of white radicals, and now Dixon turned to the fount of the evil. His new novel, dealing with radicals and Negroes, reflected at least a cursory knowledge of a fairly wide range of historical sources. Dixon revealed a familiarity with the biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Edwin Stanton, and Charles Sumner. He was so informed on the legislative history of Reconstruction that, as one reviewer stated, Dixon's novel seemed almost to consist of strung-together sections of the Congressional Record. Clearly he relied on J. S. Pike's The Prostrate State for information on Reconstruction in South Carolina. Possibly he had read the annual essays which appeared in the American Annual Encyclopedia and he also may have seen the voluminous reports of the special congressional committees which went south to investigate the activities of the Klan. It is doubtful, however, that he had read J. C. Lester's and D. L. Wilson's Ku Klux Klan (1905). His dedication of The Clansman to his uncle, grand titan of the Klan for the Shelby area, indicated his firsthand knowledge of that organization from childhood.

Certainly, Dixon knew at firsthand of the intense prejudice of Southern whites against the Negro. Grassroots Southerners were being swayed by the demogogic and racist harangues of Benjamin R. Tillman, Tom Watson, James Kimball Vardaman, and scores of their lesser imitators. Every incident involving racial relations was exaggerated out of all proportion to the actual facts. In 1901 Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute called at the White House to see President Theodore Roosevelt. While he was in the president's office a waiter brought in a luncheon tray for the president, and Roosevelt invited his visitor to share it with him, as any decent Southerner would have. But Vardaman and Tillman and their newspaper supporters raised a great hullabaloo. Not stopping to get the facts nor really wanting to know them, they exaggerated the story into a formal affair where Negroes and whites danced together in the Executive Mansion. When Roosevelt did later entertain Booker T. Washington at a White House dinner the hullabaloo over race-mixing grew even louder. Vardaman in all of his racy transilliteration described the incident as if it were some horrendous affair drawn out of the depths of a Miltonian catastrophe. He described the mixed dancing of Negroes and whites, and made much of the fact that Booker T. Washington's daughter had come down from an Eastern college to grace the occasion as belle of the ball. Hardly had the shouting over these affairs subsided when Mississippians raised a hue and cry over Roosevelt's appointment of Effie Cox, a Negro, as postmistress at Indianola, Mississippi. Actually, she had originally been appointed to the office by Benjamin Harrison and no one had objected.

While Mississippians were storming over the Indianola postmistress, the president appointed Dr. William D. Crum, a Negro physician, to be collector of customs in the port of Charleston, an act which prompted a similar reaction. Thus between 1900 and 1909 the race issue was continually raised in the South and in Congress. It was in this feverish moment in American social history that The Clansman was written and published.

There is no way of determining with any degree of accuracy the influence Dixon's novel exerted on public opinion. The book was popular and apparently had a wide readership in the South. It renewed in bruising, raw fiction the old hurts and animosities suffered after the war by a generation of Southerners then disappearing.

The Clansman is a novel in three parts: the first, an appraisal of the role of Abraham Lincoln in the war; then the grasp for power, after Andrew Johnson's succession to the presidency, by the radicals led by Thaddeus Stevens; and finally the Ku Klux Klan's redemption of the South from Negro and carpetbagger domination.

Dixon wrote of the South and its whites in the most pronounced “moonlight and roses” vein. Every Southerner who had worn the Confederate gray was a knight wrapped in the armor of virtue, and every Southern woman was the epitome of gentility, humanitarianism, and feminine charm. He set his main stage in Piedmont, South Carolina. The precise place he had in mind can be located only by guess—perhaps the towns of Gaffney, York, or Lockhart—but clearly it was somewhere on the upper reaches of the Broad River and close to the North Carolina state line, just south of Dixon's own birthplace of Shelby.

Although it is not my purpose here to deal with the romantic aspects of this book nor to discuss its literary value as a work of fiction, certain features are too tempting to pass over without comment. One is that Dixon warped his facts, or rather fabricated them, to suit his purpose. He gave Thaddeus Stevens a chivalrous son and daughter of unspecified maternal ancestry, and moved the dying old reprobate to South Carolina to recuperate from a nearfatal illness. In Piedmont, and virtually from his deathbed, the Pennsylvania radical took an active hand in organizing the local freedmen under the binding oath of the Union League. He was determined to the end to throttle the white South with black hands.

Dixon came near turning himself into a writer of comic fiction at the point when Stevens's mythical son Phil has been saved from the radicals and the horrors of the Columbia torture chambers and maybe the wall. “Old Thad” shouts, “The Klan!—The Klan! No? Yes! It's true—glory to God, they've saved my boy! Phil! Phil!”

There is no comedy, however, in Dixon's characterizations of the Negro. He recited every scurrilous thing that had been said about the race. In one passage after another he portrayed the Negro as a sensuous brute whose every physical feature was the mark of the jungle and the untamed animal. He gave wide publicity to the images which the contemporary country editors, Tillman and Vardaman, and even the Mississippi author Harris Dickson had created. Howling mobs of lynchers were doubtless placated by these same images when they attempted to rationalize their bloody acts. Dixon does not even suggest that white Southerners themselves had made serious mistakes in the Reconstruction era or later in their history. Nor is there any recognition of the constructive aspects of Reconstruction.

The Clansman might have fallen by the wayside as another third-rate novel, even though it was for a while widely read, had it not been for its subsequent history. In 1915 Dixon helped to convert the novel into a motion picture script for The Birth of a Nation. This was not only one of the first great motion picture spectaculars; it was one of the earliest attempts by the motion picture industry to deal with a social issue. The Birth of a Nation was popular and had a long run in both the North and South. In fact, it is still being shown on occasion. Again, no one can assess with accuracy the film's influence on the public mind. It is clear that the picture presented a dramatic visual image to hundreds of thousands of people who knew nothing of the book. The film version not only included some of the drama of The Leopard's Sports and all that of The Clansman, but added some of its own. No scholarly historian of Reconstruction was ever able to reach so wide or impressionable an audience as did Thomas Dixon. For every one person who knew of Pike's Prostrate State, or the books and articles which were then appearing on the subject, thousands got the message of the movie.

Between 1902 and 1939, Dixon wrote twenty-two novels none of which enjoyed success. During most of this period he also lectured throughout the country. In the late 1920s and 1930s he sought lecture engagements on his own. He interested himself in politics as an ardent Democrat, and in 1938 was rewarded by Franklin D. Roosevelt with an appointment as clerk of the United States Court, Eastern District of North Carolina. Three years after he retired from this office he died at his home in Raleigh on April 3, 1946.

Already the South he had known and presented in his novels was crumbling. Once again the race problem was a pressing one. In nearby Durham a group of Negro leaders had drafted the “Durham Manifesto” which sought a liberalization of Southern white attitudes toward their Negro neighbors. In Chapel Hill, site of the University where Dixon had hoped to establish an outstanding history and political science department, Howard W. Odum published his “Racial Credo” which rejected and refuted almost every prejudice that Dixon had exhibited in The Clansman. Even more damaging to the old prejudices, a new generation of historians was industriously and dispassionately revising the whole story of Reconstruction. Pike's Prostrate State had been completely invalidated by a more searching and objective study of South Carolina during Reconstruction.

Time, however, was not to end with the publication of The Clansman and the production of The Birth of a Nation. The sentiments expressed by Dixon were the universal ones of the white supremacists, and were to be voiced in hundreds of different forms within the first half of the twentieth century. In the Southern irritation with the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and especially with those of Harry S. Truman, the spirit of The Clansman was renewed. It was not until the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, however, that the full force of racial hatred and unrest was unleashed in the extremist newspapers, pamphlets, and orations of the white citizens councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and other racist organizations. Thomas Dixon, Jr., had in fact given voice in his novel to one of the most powerful latent forces in the social and political mind of the South.