How the Work of Thomas Dixon Shaped White America’s Racist Fantasies

In 1883, Thomas Dixon graduated from Wake Forest College with more honors than any student had ever received. Dixon then attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and would go on to enter politics and practice law, and would eventually make his way to New York and become one of the most famous liberal Social Gospel preachers in the nation.

But his true fame did not come until he exchanged the power of his pulpit for the power of his pen. Dixon would become a novelist authoring The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman. The latter of which become a cinema blockbuster under the title The Birth of a Nation that enraptured audiences around the nation, becoming the highest grossing movie in American history.

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, a new genre of novels emerged that romanticized the Southern way of life as a way to reinvigorate Southern identity and self-confidence. Writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris blazed new literary paths for reconciliation by inviting readers from across the nation to reimagine the South as a place of pastoral peace and virtue.

In this land, the enslaved were happy in bondage, the South was the embodiment of Christian civilization, and all the turmoil of the present moment was forgotten. These novels acted as the tip of the spear in the fight to redeem white supremacy, and in this fight, Thomas Dixon was the fiercest of warriors.

Thomas Dixon wrote his novels to set a torch to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as part of his effort to redirect the nation’s sympathy from the plight of the enslaved to the propaganda of the Ku Klux Klan. “It may shock the prejudice of those who have idealized or worshipped the negro as canonized in ‘Uncle Tom,’” Dixon said in 1903, following the release of his first novel, The Leopard’s Spots. “Is it not time they heard the whole truth?”

Dixon’s stories both narrated the white violence of the South and reinvigorated that violence in the new century. Both the violence Dixon narrated and the violence he inspired testify to the reality that any serious consideration of reparations must include the white terrorism that defined slavery’s afterlife.

The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865–1900 and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan are the first two installments of Dixon’s trilogy on Reconstruction. This trilogy attempted to enable the nation to see the post-Civil War world through Southern eyes and to create a national solidarity behind white Christianity, chivalry, and civilization. Buttressed by both academic histories and the racial sciences, the repeated theme of the trilogy is that without the positive influence and beneficent care of slave masters, Black Americans started to degenerate following emancipation. As freed people devolved, they came to pose an existential threat to America’s democracy and racial purity, forcing the pious South to arise and protect their way of life through virtuous acts of violence.

As political propaganda, Dixon’s novels operated on multiple levels. At the level of national reconciliation, they attempted to hasten the longing for reconciliation by turning the nation’s remembrances of the Civil War from the issues of slavery and treason toward empathy for Southern suffering and respect for Southern sincerity. By persistently eroding the memories of how slavery and treason combined to ignite the Civil War and fostering empathy and respect for the South, Dixon labored to position national reconciliation to take place on Southern terms.

At the level of securing white supremacy, Dixon’s propaganda provided the apologetics for the South’s emerging twin customs: segregation and lynching. In terms of the former, his novels framed segregation in the South as a necessary protection from the depraved behavior of Black people during Reconstruction rather than a perpetuation of slavery’s rabid racism. In terms of the latter, according to Dixon’s own words, his trilogy aimed to provide “the best apology for lynching,” to instill “a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women,” and to make the fear of miscegenation a national obsession.

Just as Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia decisively shaped America’s racial imagination following the Revolutionary War, Dixon’s fiction—and the movies it inspired—became the preeminent shaper of America’s racial imagination at the turn of the century and for the next sixty years. In his writings, lynchings transform into a symbol of a heroic counterrevolution aimed at redeeming civilization from the realization of one of America’s deepest fears: an interracial democracy.

The Leopard’s Spots stands in a long line of American white supremacist writings. The caricature of the criminal beast broke no new ground. Ever since the loophole in the 13^th Amendment opened the door to the proliferation of convict leasing schemes throughout the South, such caricatures were commonplace in racist thinking from everyday citizens to social elites like Charles R. Carroll, who published The Negro a Beast in 1900. Yet, for as much as Dixon looked to the past for racial guidance, The Leopard’s Spots was more than a recycler of racial stereotypes of slavery. Dixon sought to bring to life the new and emerging racial caricature that painted Black men as criminal beasts driven by a perpetual desire to rape white women. And the vivid and vicious nature of his caricature broke the mold.

For all its failures with historical facts, Dixon’s writing certainly succeeds in introducing its readers to the state of white Southern self-understanding. Of course, the deeper impact was not in simply revealing the Southern state of mind but in fostering the terroristic racial practices and racist public policies that aligned with Southern insanity. The defeat of antilynching laws, the radicalization of antimiscegenation laws, and the achievement of voter suppression are all interlinked with legacies of Dixon and The Leopard’s Spots.

The Leopard’s Spots spread like wildfire. One of the most revolting romances ever written sold nearly a million copies, making Dixon a very wealthy man. Perhaps Dixon’s initial success failed to lift him to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s status, but he was already gaining ground.

With his words in demand, Dixon quickly put together more novels. In 1905, Dixon provided the sequel to The Leopard’s Spots with the release of The Clansman. The Clansman went on to sell millions of copies as it became, in the words of journalist Douglas Blackmon, “the first true blockbuster in modern U.S. publishing.” The popularity of the novel was bolstered by the endorsement of Abraham Lincoln’s son. For Robert Lincoln, The Clansman was a “work that cannot be laid down.”

Though Dixon’s novels operate on multiple levels, their significance was never their sophistication. Instead, according to the Black preacher and novelist Sutton Griggs, it was in how their violent images could “grasp upon the emotions of men,…[could] arouse and sway their feelings.” Griggs was well positioned to understand Dixon’s power. “In the long line of men of letters of the Anglo-Saxon race,” Griggs reflected, “we find no counterpart of Mr. Dixon.” Through simple stories communicated in poignant but uncomplicated prose, Dixon repurposed the myths of white supremacy and the racialized research of his own era and positioned them to thrive for commercial audiences. In works like Dixon’s, no longer were Black people harmless children needing white paternalism. Without the shackles of slavery, harmless children had degenerated into dangerous beasts.

Highbrowed literary critics berated Dixon’s simplistic style. “His pile of wood,” wrote one such reviewer, “is cut often with a dull axe and never sawed with a sharp sword.” But Black writers and activists understood that Dixon’s simplicity was never a liability in his mission to replace Harriet Beecher Stowe as the molder of America’s racial imagination. Rather, it proved his strongest asset, for it made the racist ideas germinating across the American landscape available for mass consumption.

The novels were only the beginning of Dixon’s commercial success and influence, as they led Dixon to seek new media for his ideas. In 1915, film director D. W. Griffith brought The Clansman to life on the silver screen. Dixon, who worked closely with Griffith on the film’s production, was so moved by his first viewing that he insisted the title be changed to The Birth of a Nation. America knew no shame concerning her fascination with Dixon’s work. Dixon’s Johns Hopkins classmate Woodrow Wilson used the release of the film to make history. For the very first time, the White House would host a movie screening, and The Birth of a Nation received the honored viewing. “It’s like writing history with lightning,” President Wilson remembered after viewing it with his cabinet and their families. “My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Soon, special viewings would be provided for members of Congress and justices of the US Supreme Court.

In time, the movie acted as a Hollywood pep rally for the Klan, and Americans crammed theaters to join the celebration. Since the film resonated so completely with the convictions of white audiences, few reviews felt the need to question the film’s historical accuracy. In New York, the film attracted over three million viewers. The celebration would be long-lived. By 1930, approximately 90 percent of white Southerners had viewed the film, and The Birth of a Nation remained the best-selling movie for two decades. The official box office take topped $18 million, though in 1960, Vanity Fair estimated that a more accurate number was closer to $50 million, making it the highest-grossing film in history.

Dixon the idea man had found his medium. “The motion picture is the finest vehicle of historical exposition ever devised,” he exclaimed. “I can teach more history in fifteen minutes of motion pictures than in six months of the library or the classroom.” Dixon’s lesson in history had power in the present. With the overwhelming popularity of the film, the Klan, which had been dormant for decades, resurrected, sinking its claws into Northern and Southern communities. Following The Birth of a Nation, the Klan’s membership grew nationwide, inhabiting every state of the Union. The Klan would be dubbed “the Invisible Empire,” whose two to six million members provided not only a nationwide presence but also national power. Its membership included governors, Supreme Court justices, senators, scores of congressional members, and titans of industry. Not to be completely outdone, the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) reawakened, and their membership grew to 1.5 million white women. Auxiliaries arose like Junior Ku Klux Klan, the Tri-K Klub, and the Ku Klux Kiddies to train children in the way they should go.

“There was fed to the youth of the nation and to the unthinking masses,” W. E. B. Du Bois lamented, “a story which twisted emancipation and enfranchisement of the slave in a great effort toward universal democracy, into an orgy of theft and degradation and wide rape of white women.” And as Du Bois repeatedly pointed out, the mythology of Black pathology never segregated itself along either class or regional lines. No segment of white society was immune to the contagion. Decades later, Du Bois’s preeminent biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning Black historian David Levering Lewis would write that The Birth of a Nation “was uniquely responsible for encoding the white South’s version of Reconstruction on the DNA of several generations of Americans.” And through that accomplishment, it became clear that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin no longer held sway over the nation’s racial sympathies. Dixon had burned her cabin to the ground.

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Excerpted from Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America by Joel Edward Goza. Copyright © 2024. Available from William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.