INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ……….…….1
Chapter
1. THE BECKONING CALL OF DESTINY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...8
2. DEFINING THE PROBLEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …..........33
3. THE DIXONIAN SOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ………..60
4. FACE TO FACE WITH THE BEAST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ……111
5. AN HISTORICAL APPEAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …………132
6. CONDEMNATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …………….146
7. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ………………..172
SOURCES CONSULTED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ………176
INTRODUCTION
In the midst of the death throes of a defeated South too proud to concede defeat to a superior force, a child was born in a rural town in North Carolina's Piedmont, a soul who would take up the tattered Confederate flag and carry its banner into the twentieth century. Long after the surrender of Robert E. Lee, this man, "the last of the Romans,"(1) as labeled by a biographer, began a personal crusade in defense of racial purity, preaching a message of doom to an America that continued to disobey God's commandments concerning race relations and sexual morality. His name would come to be a household name in both the North and South because of his tireless effort to gain an ever wider audience for his message, which came to be a plea for national unity in spirit as well as name and with it a strong warning against granting social equality to the Negro. He feared race mixing was merely a precursor to the defilement of the Anglo-Saxon race in the heinous sin of amalgamation. Considering himself ordained by God to spread this message, he devoted all his energy toward defining a solution to "the Negro problem" and convincing the white race that such a plan must be enacted immediately if American Democracy were to survive. His progression from an anonymous Southern boy to a popular spokesman for a reactionary racial mentality to forgotten fanatic reveals much concerning the patterns of thought governing race relations in the nation from the days immediately following the end of the Civil War to the start of World War II.
By any assessment, Thomas Dixon, Jr., was an extraordinary man, one of the rare breed of Southerners to achieve national fame and influence in the early part of the twentieth century. Seemingly, a natural success at whatever career he chose to pursue at the moment, Dixon used each such position to propel himself to an ever higher plane, one from which he could gain increasing access to the American mind. Self-confidence spurred him to work diligently in pursuit of greatness for both himself and his country. By 1902, Dixon was consumed by a desire to solve "the Negro question." The cornerstone of his message--or warning--was that amalgamation would bring down the power of the United States; this would come about as a result of the poisoning of Anglo-Saxon blood with that of the Negro. Dixon fully believed that the Negro was genetically as well as culturally inferior to the white man. Miscegenation in his mind was one of the greatest sins imaginable, particularly when it involved the raping of a white woman by a Negro man. Far from being the child-like Sambo character seen by some whites, the image of the Negro held by Dixon was that of the Black Beast. He took it upon himself to disperse this nightmarish vision of America's future in hopes of spiritually reuniting the white men on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line into one living organism. Once this was accomplished, the Anglo-Saxon nation could--and must for its very survival--effect a separation of the races. His message was not only heard but listened to in the early twentieth century, but time slowly pushed him into the role of a fanatic. By the time of his death in 1946, he was no more than a cultural anachronism.
Dixon seemed destined for greatness. He was deeply sensitive to events around him, quick of wit and extremely eloquent; no audience could be unaffected by his speaking. If anything, he was over-ambitious; his talents were so great that he could not settle into a single career and be content. Thomas Cook subtitled his 1968 biography of Dixon "The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon," for Dixon made a strong name for himself in a variety of vocational pursuits. He was a gifted student, a state legislator, a lawyer, a minister of wide renown, an orator, a novelist, a playwright, an actor, and a movie producer. Desperately he fought to win more exposure for himself and the dissemination of his message concerning the future of the Negro in a new American century.
Dixon began with a belief that the Negro was inferior to the white man and for this reason he the two races could not live together peacefully in the American Democracy. Blacks should thus be segregated so as to allow them no role above that of menial servitude. In time he came to argue that repatriation of the Negro to Africa was the only means by which America could survive and fulfill her destiny. His proposals were widely embraced by both Northerners and Southerners at the turn of the century. As the new century advanced, though, the nation's interpersonal and interracial relationships changed somewhat. Dixon failed to change his own views; as a result, his message began to fall on deaf ears. A new order had been established in this first decade of the twentieth century, as the Jim Crow laws had done much to decrease the perceived political threat of the Negro. While the bulk of white society saw race relations as improving, in that the white race was now established as the political ruler of the South, Dixon came to characterize the Negro as a larger threat to the Anglo-Saxon because of his inferior blood. Dixon became obsessed with the fear of racial pollution and amalgamation. This neurosis was reflected in his novels, as his rhetoric became more and more reactionary with the passage of time. He called for complete segregation because any personal contact at all between the races would in his mind lead to the collapse of racial barriers.
Dixon at first was not sure on whom to place the blame for miscegenation. In time he came to put more and more blame on the Negro, criticizing him as a savage, hypersexual creature. In his own mind, he was convinced that ninety-nine out of every one hundred Negro men lusted for white women. The Negro female, particularly the mulatto, was shown as a cunning, sensual creature constantly trying to entrap a white man into a sexual union. By implication, Dixon placed the blame for miscegenation on the Negro race. The mulatto female was particularly dangerous in this regard in that the her white blood served to make more complex and effective her attempts to attract a white man.
Dixon came to be caught up in the Radical mentality that emerged in the South beginning in 1889. There were several contributing factors to this mode of thought emerging at the time. One was the attitude of Northern states. Despite the fact that Democrats had regained control of the Southern states after Reconstruction, the federal government continued to grant certain privileges to the Negro, particularly during the second administration of Grover Cleveland. More important to social relations was the terrible depression of the 1890s. As has been the case throughout American history, race relations became more heated as the economic conditions worsened. The Negro became a different threat to the white man, an economic competitor for jobs. Industrialization did not require highly skilled or even literate workers to work in the factory; the fact that Negro labor was cheaper to hire than white labor served to increase the economic threat posed to the white race. In the South, white yeoman farmers struggled on miserable plots of land while in many areas the Negroes worked the most fertile fields. This source of economic competition Dixon took advantage of to call for the united stand of whites on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line
One can also read into the conflict of the 1890s a psychological motivating force. The obvious outgrowth of the perceived Negro threat was channeled often into the lynching of Negro men for the raping of white women. In essence, race and sex became joined. In the Victorian South, each gender had its proper place in the organic society all but destroyed by the invading forces of Lincoln's army. Women were to be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive, the spiritual heart of family and community. Men had two primary roles, those of provider and protector. Military defeat had stripped them of them means for economically providing for their families. Attempts by the common farmers to organize politically in Farmer's Alliances and the Populist Party failed. By the depression of the 1890s, men were overstressing their role as protector of white Womanhood for the reason that they could not adequately fulfill the role of provider.
Miscegenation, although far from uncommon in the antebellum South, was not viewed as a serious problem. Cases of race mixture were attributed to society's mavericks who supposedly did not understand what slavery was supposed to mean. Many slaveholders had provided for their mulatto children by sending them north or granting them their freedom. The small mulatto elite generally identified with the white aristocracy and not the Negro mass. When the sectional conflict began to heat up in the 1850s, whites turned on all Negroes, including the mulatto elite, consigning them now to the Negro ranks. The idea of the white Woman as forbidden fruit to the Negro man was nothing new, but now it took on exaggerated implications. Most white individuals believed that Negro men lusted after white women. In effect, white men had painted themselves into a sexual corner by pedestalizing their women as the earth-bound angels whose purpose was to work for the salvation of the men. White men were taught not to abuse their wives sexually , implying that anything beyond sexual abstinence--unless for the noble purpose of the propagation of the race--was bestial. The sexual frustration inevitably felt subconsciously by white men would be channeled to Negro men, released intermittently through lynching. Fearing to deal with their own bestial urges, white men projected the image of passionate, hypersexual animalism on the Negro. Black women as well as men were seen as very sexual in nature. In basic terms, lynching often was a means by which the white male psyche could release its frustrations, in effect using the Negro victim to represent its own sexual urges.
According to Dixon, the Negro let loose from the culture-raising hand of paternalism present in slavery were quickly falling away from white civilization. The white man came to view the Negro as a threat to the white nuclear family, the very foundation upon which civilization was built. As weak-willed white men gave in to the temptations of racial mixing, the white family as an eternal unit was slowly disintegrating. This would come to be a sore point in Dixon's own thinking, for at times he seemed to waver on just whom to blame for miscegenation's existence; as he grew older and more reactionary in thought, he came to excuse those white men for the crime, blaming the Negro for all such disastrous matings. Negro retrogression was also dramatized by an increasing crime rate. The Radical leaders came to feel that the Negro could never learn to live in the civilized world of the white man because he was hundreds of years behind the Anglo-Saxon in terms of cultural development. For such reasons, the Radicals came to call for the complete segregation of the two races, preferably by repatriating the Negro to his native African continent. Dixon more than any other man in the early twentieth century would carry the Radical message to the nation.
This study of Dixon's writings will show the progression of the author over time to the position of a heretic even among conservative thinkers. Not only was Dixon no longer in the mainstream of American thought in his last years, he was to the political right of those characterized as right-wing extremists. The source of Dixon's ideological isolation was expressed by his intense desire of the mulatto woman, even more than the Negro male, as the most dangerous threat to racial purity. In Chapter I Dixon's life, particularly his developing ideology of the 1890s, will be discussed. The following chapters will trace his development through several stages of literary work; it will be shown how Dixon's initial "friendly warning to the Negro" became in the end a fiery condemnation of the white man for his descent into animalism and mongrelization. Finally, some thoughts will be offered concerning Dixon's place in American history. By analyzing his intellectual retreat into himself as racial tensions slowly died out, a unique perspective on the development of race relations in America in the first half of the twentieth century can be obtained.
CHAPTER I
THE BECKONING CALL OF DESTINY
Rising from roots in rural North Carolina, in the western town of Shelby in Cleveland County, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and his four siblings all achieved renown and respect. Indeed, success seemed to be hereditary, for Dixon's ancestors had also achieved local prominence. Thomas, Jr.'s paternal great-grandfather Frederick Hambright had migrated from Pennsylvania down to a spot near Kings Mountain via the Great Wagon Road. He joined one campaign against the Cherokee nation, Kings Mountain at that time being located on the western frontier of the state. In 1775 he served in North Carolina's newly-born Provincial Congress. When the War for Independence began, Hambright enlisted, ultimately reaching the rank of Colonel; with the aid of fellow soldiers like Colonel Isaac Shelby, for whom Dixon's hometown was named, these mountain men surrounded the left wing of Cornwallis' army and defeated the troops of Major Ferguson. This victory at Kings Mountain is considered by many to be a crucial turning point in the Revolutionary War.(2)
Thomas Dixon, Sr., was a product of the wave of Evangelical revivalism that inundated the South in the nineteenth century. His Puritan-like nature was in large degree a result of his teenage years. His father had died at a fairly young age as a result of an extended period of alcohol abuse, leaving his teenage son with the responsibility of providing for his mother and three younger sisters. A certain ire toward his father for ruining his educational opportunities remained with him. A preacher and occasional general store proprietor in Shelby, he vowed to teach his children to hate alcohol like hell itself. Likewise, he swore that no child of his would be denied the opportunity of an education. All five children who survived infancy did get college educations and went on to be leaders in their respective careers. Thomas, Sr., was a bulwark of Cleveland County society; in his productive lifetime he founded some twenty churches in the area and baptized some six thousand persons. He wed Amanda Elvira McAfee, the daughter of a prosperous planter in nearby York County, South Carolina. She was of Scotch descent, as were the majority of the area's inhabitants. An inheritance from her father provided the newly wed couple with thirty-two slaves, including the nursemaid "Aunt Barb," who would care for the young Thomas Dixon. Thomas the Elder opposed slavery, but for his wife's sake he kept them, in that they were her inheritance rather than his own.(3)
There is a degree of controversy concerning Amanda's age at the time of her marriage. Thomas Dixon, Sr., born on December 24, 1820, was much older than his bride. A handwritten list of family names found in the Amzi Clarence Dixon papers at the Southern Baptist Archives in Nashville, Tennessee lists Amanda's birthdate as January 14, 1835, and the date of the marriage as sometime in 1847; this would make her no more than thirteen years old at the time of the union. A son was born to the couple on February 8, 1853, only to die a few months later. Amzi Clarence Dixon entered the world on July 6, 1854(4); the mother was nineteen and the father thirty-three. Helen Dixon, Clarence's second wife, in her biography of her late husband agreed with these numbers. Thomas, Jr., however, did not. A crucial and formative part of young Thomas's life had come during his mother's debilitating breakdown in middle age. Writing to Helen in 1927 he emphasized the fact that he had been but eight years old at the time. There was a definite overtone of defensiveness in the letter, as when he simply stated that Clarence was away at college during the long episode of Amanda's illness. He explained how he had performed the household chores, then sat up with his mother each night from one until sunrise. Amanda was often out of her head; he wrote that in one episode she "reported[?] a scene with her own mother (long since dead) . . . in which she bitterly upbraided grandmother for marrying her--taking her out of school and forcing her into marriage before her menses had appeared." Dixon stressed the fact that Amanda had been but thirteen when she married, which led him to conclude: "I have always been sure that this premature marriage was the underlying physical cause of her pitiful collapse in her menopause. The collapse came after 4 months of menstrual bleeding, which the Doctor was unable to stop." He then related some details of his own birth in early 1864; Clarence was "9 years old," according to Thomas. In the space left over on page four of the letter, Helen has written her own figures:
Mother Dixon [Amanda] was born on Jan. 14, 1835. She was therefore 41 years old when the youngest child, Addie May,was born on May 4, 1876--Tom was then 12.(5)
In another letter to Helen, dated January 10, 1928, Dixon admitted that he may have miscalculated his mother's age, but "of one thing I am absolutely sure--she married my father in her 13th year. She told me this so many times--and reported it so often in her delirium [?] I couldn't be mistaken."(6) Eventually he asked Helen why even to bother with dates in her writing, for dates were really not that important, citing a certain biography of Napoleon having done well exclusive of specific dates in the text. In her biography of Clarence, Helen excluded the dates but not without a comment: "The young couple [Thomas, Sr., and Amanda] had been married several years when little Clarence was born. Girls of the sunny South are apt to mature early, and in her teens, Amanda Elvira McAfee was already a tall, handsome young woman, much overgrown for her age, although over young to enter into the responsibilities of womanhood and of married life."(7)
Certainly the episode of his mother's illness had a great effect on young Thomas. In it one can see a source of bitterness toward Clarence because he was not home to help. Joel Williamson in his 1984 book The Crucible of Race proposed it as a reason--or at least a strong clue--as to why Dixon came to his Radical views on the Negro question. The blood symbolism seemed to indicate so. Williamson explained the Radical mentality as arising out of the frustration of Southern men after the Civil War, exacerbated in the 1890s by economic depression. Such pent-up frustrations were often vented on Negroes in the form of riots and lynchings. Sitting night after night beside his mother's bed, Dixon fitted the role of protector. Several elements of such Victorian thought seem evident: the man as protector and provider, the woman as innocent, pious creature. Tom may well have felt that his mother had been violated in some sense, but he did not know whom to blame: his grandmother, his father, his brother, or even himself. In some manner he came to transfer these feelings of guilt to the Negro, thus purging his own soul.(8) In his literature the protection of white Womanhood would serve as the crux of his arguments against the Negro race.
Tom was born during the most destructive year of the Civil War, and he often stated his belief that the characteristics of his birth affected him greatly in life. Just before the Civil War began, Thomas Sr. and Amanda were living in Shelby. In 1859 John Brown led a raid on Harper's Ferry, but the Negroes he sought to free did not respond to his call for violence. It was not until Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860 that war fervor and tensions came alive in the Southern hamlet of Shelby. Once South Carolina and several other Southern states seceded from the Union, Tom Sr. decided his family would be safer out west. North Carolina was not yet a rebel state, but he knew it soon would be. He transported his wife and son Clarence, along with the thirty-two slaves inherited by his wife, to Little Rock, Arkansas, arriving even before the time of Lincoln's inauguration. Fort Sumter was fired upon soon after, bringing North Carolina reluctantly into the Confederacy on May 27, 1861. The family found Arkansas to be no safe haven when Union forces came to control the Mississippi River and much of Tennessee. Adding to Elder Dixon's concerns was the fact that Amanda had become pregnant again. She wanted to be with her family when the baby came, so the Dixons began a perilous journey home to Shelby via Columbus, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina, detouring around the path Sherman was beginning to cut through the heartland of the South. They traveled the eight or nine hundred miles in less than four months, managing to avoid any life-threatening dangers. On January 11, 1864, Thomas Dixon, Jr., was born. The South soon began to find out that surrender was not an end to human traumas, as Reconstruction began to enact sweeping social reforms. Thomas would turn to this era again and again in his novels. In Dixon's mind, the South lost a great friend when Lincoln was assassinated, for Andrew Johnson was not powerful enough to limit the reforms--abuses, Dixon would say--heaped on the Southern people by Congress. The military occupation of the South, which came after the Southern states refused to ratify the 14th Amendment, led only to counter-violence and chaos. Dixon blamed the horrors of this "Reign of Terror" primarily on leading Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens, whom he charged was manipulated by his mulatto "housekeeper." The Clansman, the second book in Dixon's Trilogy of Reconstruction, put forth the author's account of the events of Reconstruction. The attempt by Stevens to become a dictator of sorts is described, then the redemption of the South by the Ku Klux Klan, taking away the power from Negroes and Republican leaders. Dixon did have some intimate knowledge of the activity of the Reconstruction Klan; his uncle Leroy McAfee had himself been a leader of Cleveland County's Klan. Indeed, even Tom's father and older brother had been involved initially. The stated aim of the Klan was to restore law and order while insuring the protection of white women from the newly-freed Negro men. Dixon portrayed these men of the Invisible Empire as the heroes of the white race, whose courage and dedication "redeemed" the South.
The drama of Reconstruction could not help but play a major role in shaping Dixon's attitudes and beliefs. Certainly Reconstruction spurred Dixon on to work for the separation of the races, however misconceived or ill-founded the memories he had of it were. The reaction of Clarence Dixon, who was old enough to remember well the time of struggle, was quite the opposite. As Helen Dixon wrote in the biography of her late husband, "Such a background [Reconstruction] was calculated to develop either a spirit of hot-blooded belligerency towards opposition, or of patient forbearance in the face of misunderstanding. The latter was, without a doubt, its effect upon A.C. Dixon, in Whose nature the gentleness of chivalry was combined with an unshakable adherence to what he believed to be right and true."(9) It seems quite probable that she had Clarence's brother in mind as his opposite, for Thomas came to be the fiery spokesman for the more violent elements of Southern society, those who believed that the races could not coexist independently in America; these racial Radicals argued for separation, not appeasement.
In college Thomas's emotions and attitudes began to coalesce and mature into theories and arguments. Through both natural ability and hard work, he excelled at Wake Forest College. He not only followed in the academic footsteps of his older brother Clarence, he surpassed him to achieve more honors than any student up to that time. His most amazing victory came when he won the award for best orator in the school as a freshman. Such an oratorical gift would soon catapult him into fame. His years at Wake Forest were good ones, his mother having regained her health and the era of Reconstruction having mercifully come to a close. In 1883 he emerged with a degree and a long list of academic honors from Wake Forest College.
From Wake Forest Dixon journeyed to Johns Hopkins University for graduate study in history and politics. This was a road well-traveled by a number of the South's most brilliant minds. The professors there immediately impressed him, as did his fellow students; one such young man, though eight years Thomas' elder, was a shy Southerner by the name of Woodrow Wilson. In 1883 there were four well-known teachers of history and politics at Johns Hopkins, two of whom were Herman E. von Holst and J. Franklin Johnson.(10) Dixon personally praised Herbert Baxter Adams and Richard J. Ely. Adams was attempting to find the roots of modern-day democracy in ancient Germanic tribes. One resulting tenet of his argument was that all of the Anglo-Saxon race were one people.(11) The natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race took on a central place in Dixon's mindset; in all likelihood, these ideas were either inculcated or reinforced in him at the time.
Despite the quality of his education and the opportunities it would surely afford him, Dixon impulsively journeyed to New York to pursue an acting career. The thought of failure probably never entered his mind; until this point in his life--and indeed throughout the remainder of it--he had always accomplished whatever he sought. At six feet three inches and little more than one hundred fifty pounds, any person professionally involved in the theater would have advised Thomas to reconsider. Certainly this move was not an action supported by his family. One can find evidence for such in letters written by Clarence's first wife Mollie to her parents in mid-1884. Dixon himself had been rather infrequent in writing to those in his family. He had previously written Clarence, though, about being offered a part to play in a production of Shakespeare's Richard the Third, the promised pay being some two thousand dollars. Mollie did not take this seemingly good news at face value. Addressing her parents, she wrote, "I wrote to him and asked him to tell me candidly if he was as much pleased with his profession as he expected it to be--and he told me in reply he was not at all pleased," for reasons mainly pertaining to the constant drunkenness of the manager. The respect Mollie obviously had once held for her brother-in-law has eroded. She later wrote, "You can imagine just how unhappy it makes us to know that he is associated with such wicked men and women--I would rather he was in the poorhouse." As Mollie had expected, Thomas' big break turns out to be anything but a good experience. In a subsequent letter to her parents, she told them of Thomas writing that the company had broken up; having paid one hundred and fifty dollars to join, in expectation of earning two thousand dollars, Thomas and his fellow actors were now trying to get any money back by taking legal action. Thomas already had asked his father for more money, having previously received sixty dollars; now his father refused to send him any more for this foolish dream. Despite all this, Thomas decided to stay in New York and try once again. Obviously, Thomas Dixon did not accept failure well. Mollie left no doubt as to her wishes concerning her brother-in-law: "My hope and prayer is that every attempt will be a failure."(12)
By autumn of 1884, Thomas had finally decided to come home to Shelby, in some part due to the wishes of his parents. According to Mollie, "his mother and father seemed so distressed about him he would go home & study & write awhile--he is writing a play."(13) In point of fact, Thomas was penniless. At this point, the chances of Thomas achieving success in life appeared rather doubtful. Mollie lamented that she "never was so disappointed in anyone in my life as I have been in him."(14) This statement implicitly connotes the recognition Mollie had of Thomas's great potential. Dixon now had to ask himself into which field of endeavor he should next enter. According to Cleveland County newspaperman Lee B. Weathers, the money bug had bitten Tom while in New York, being as it was at the time a rare commodity for him. On the return trip home to Shelby, Tom started to think about a career in law, the main benefit of which would be the procurement of a comfortable income.
If Dixon was to be a lawyer, he needed to win a name for himself. Most men in Cleveland County already knew who he was, for virtually all knew his father. Taking his father's advice, he entered the race for the state legislature. Politics seems a natural place to find Thomas, for it allowed him to make use of his education, especially his great gift for oratory, which had been aided even more by his theatrical experience. His ability to sway an audience was very effective in this era of old-style, Southern politicking. The campaign consisted principally of public debates in each township of the county. Dixon had no small task before him, for the incumbent John W. Gidney was a two-term legislator, a Confederate veteran, and a relative.
Dixon's campaign was essentially a youth movement. Certainly he had few qualms about the leadership of the reigning generation of Confederate veterans, but he urged Cleveland County voters to give the sons of these veterans a chance to serve them. Interest in the debates built up to the point that many citizens followed the two candidates as they moved from one township to another; soon they began to number in the thousands. Dixon's most effective ploy came in the third debate. Turning his attention to Gidney's record in the North Carolina legislature, Dixon told the audience he would detail the incumbent's contributions. Reaching into his coat pocket, Thomas pulled out a large envelope, only to take out a pair of tweezers with the other hand and with great difficulty remove a tiny piece of paper no larger than a postal stamp from the envelope. When he told the crowd he would read this list if it did not fall too quickly from between the tweezers, his listeners laughed heartily, to the great embarrassment of Captain Gidney. Each of the few issues listed as having been put forth by Gidney met with a round of laughter. Gidney could not recover from this incident, for his speaking talents proved no competition to the fiery rhetoric of his young opponent. Thomas won the election by a two-to-one margin. He was not yet twenty-one years of age, yet Dixon now sat in the North Carolina legislature. Always the energetic young man, he made a run for the speakership of the House. Only when it was fully discovered just how young he was did his colleagues elect a more experienced man.(15)
Almost immediately Thomas Dixon, Jr., began to make a name for himself. True to his self-assured nature, he made his first speech to the Finance Committee. He boldly proposed to them a bill that would grant pensions to disabled Confederate veterans and their widows. Nowhere else in the South had such an idea been formally proposed. Like a spiritual magnet, Thomas attracted wide attention to himself concerning this issue. The galleries were filled with people when he gave speeches before the full legislative body. These speeches then came to be published in virtually every major Southern newspaper. This widespread discussion in the press brought the issue to the attention of the entire nation. The bill easily passed, and soon became law in the other eleven Southern states.(16) Dixon, despite his success as a politician, soon became disillusioned by the inner workings of politics. After one term, he left the North Carolina legislature and began studying law in Greensboro, North Carolina. During this period he met Harriet Bussey, the sister of the preacher of Shelby's First Baptist Church. Dixon immediately fell in love with her; on the heels of her return to her home in Columbus, Georgia, he followed and proposed marriage. Her father, though, disapproved of Dixon's lack of wealth. The couple secretly eloped and began a life together in Shelby. In short order Dixon turned to yet another profession, that of the ministry. His father was a minister, as were his two brothers Clarence and Frank. Within a month after preaching his first sermon, he was called to a church in Goldsboro, North Carolina; his stay would be a short one, as he migrated to a Raleigh church. He won wide acclaim for his speaking skills, and within six months the Dudley Street Church in Boston called him. Dixon accepted, his migration to the North coming when he was only twenty-four years old.
Dixon's experiences in the North came to show him certain differences between the North and the South. Feeling that the South was unjustly maligned or at best misunderstood in the North, he soon found himself defending his homeland. No more dramatic example could be found than his reaction to a public speech on the "Southern Problem" delivered in Boston's Tremont Temple. The speaker was Justin D. Fulton, a Baptist minister.(17) Having just spent three weeks in the South, Fulton felt himself to be an expert on the Southern way of life. As he spoke, he continued to heap condemnations on the South, finally declaring the region a still-dangerous element in America's social fabric. Dixon, newly arrived to Boston, sprang up out of his seat and accused Fulton of lying. He almost caused a riot before he could be escorted from the building. It was in the aftermath of this night that he began to study the issues of Southern society and the Negro in hopes of one day writing a defense of his people, his all-encompassing goal being to end the last vestiges of sectionalism in the nation.(18) In his own words, Dixon swore to "destroy Sectionalism, reunite our nation and make the careers of fools, like Fulton, impossible."(19) Thus began a decade of research for what would become his Trilogy of Reconstruction.
In the meantime, 1889 saw Dixon move to New York to pastor the Twenty-third Street Baptist Church. By this time, his sermons had become almost completely social commentaries pertaining to the new industrial order and the society that would spring from the transfiguration of America. In that year he published a collection of sermons entitled Living Problems in Religion and Social Science. The final chapter was a speech written to answer Fulton's slanderous comments. In this speech, aptly titled "The Southern Question," Dixon defined the Southern question to be one of still-existing sectionalism in America, not the social conditions of the region. He posited that sectionalism could be removed from the national consciousness only by first identifying what the barriers were to racial accord among whites. The fact that the North and South, although men of the same racial stock and European tradition, simply could not understand one another was a major handicap in decreasing sectional animosities. The North was especially ignorant about the harsh realities of Radical Reconstruction and the persistent social problems springing from that era of chaos. He gave explanations for this lack of spiritual unity: the Republican office-holder in the South worked to prevent the Southern white population from gaining the sympathy of the Northerner; "cranks" like Fulton spent no more than a vacation time in the South, then returned North to demand action that simply was not needed; also, many men gave the North false information to increase their own personal means. Newspapers had been the main organ, he argued, for disseminating this false portrait of the South, yet the press would soon serve, he predicted, to spread the truth about these matters among Northerners.(20)
A second source of friction stemmed from the Negro's ties to local government. A New South had been born; the young generation had no personal memory of slavery. As such, these men, their ties to their own history being rather thin, would not hate the Negro for his being a black man; instead, they would oppose his political involvement for the reasons that the Negro represented the lowest order of society, possessing little wealth or intelligence. Given the chance to govern, the Negro would bankrupt the county or state, just as he had during Reconstruction, Dixon argued. Therefore, it was only right and just that the white men of that era of lawlessness rose en masse to prevent the Negro from voting. If this was unconstitutional, Dixon claimed that the emancipation of the slaves was also unlawful, for to Dixon federal Constitution was a Southern document, with provisions for slavery clearly granted. The exploits of the Invisible Empire arose from the Anglo-Saxon's strong instinct for self-preservation. The air of ruin hanging over the South was the North's creation, he added. The white race, bitterly opposed to giving the Negro political equality, had been forced to concentrate on politics rather than the furtherance of the industrial revolution so late in arriving down South.(21) Only when the Negro question was solved would the white man be able to turn his attention to business because every aspect of Southern society was linked inextricably to its racial foundation.
Nonetheless, Dixon closed with a positive assessment of the Negro. In defending his rhetoric, he stated that "all this I say with the kindliest and tenderest feelings for the negro race."(22) The Negro race needed only to recognize him as a friend and he could help solve the problems of both races. He assured his audience that he in no way hated the Negro and that he had been raised to hate the institution of slavery as if it were hell itself. What he was suggesting to them was a program meant to benefit not the white race exclusively but the Negro race as well:
Pass the Australian ballot system or a good educational qualification for suffrage in every State in the Union, and it will disfranchise two-thirds of the negroes and one-third of the whites in the South, the terror of negro misrule will disappear, and with it, I believe,sectionalism.(23)
This proposal could not be characterized as extremist for the time because it provided for a fairly modest solution, one widely advocated in America at the time. Clearly, in that year of 1889, Dixon saw a place in America for both races, provided that the Negro was held down in a menial position and kept out of politics. The chaos and sufferings of the 1890s would greatly change the social fabric of the nation, forcing Dixon to reevaluate his thinking.
In the first half of the 1890s Dixon worked at a dangerously frenzied pace. He began giving lectures in the North-east in addition to fulfilling his ministerial duties. By the middle of the decade, he had begun to set in motion forces that would realize a great dream for him. He resigned from the Baptist church to establish a non-denominational church; this People's Church would be the instrument through which he could further extend his influence, in hopes of reaching a vast urban audience. John D. Rockefeller, impressed with Dixon's fiery passion, promised him matching funds to build a new temple, but Dixon never acquired anything near the sums of money he needed. Church services were held in New York's Grand Opera House to accommodate the large crowds that came to hear him preach. His messages became strictly political sermons based on contemporary social conditions. He fought the corruption of New York's Tammany Hall, denounced from his pulpit William Jennings Bryan, supported Theodore Roosevelt for Governor of New York, and made the church a safe haven and headquarters for the Cuban resistance to Spanish domination.(24)
Dixon spoke in front of countless numbers of people in the last few years of the nineteenth century. A collection of his sermons from 1898 and 1899 showed the scope of Dixon's message expanding, seemingly demanding a means by which he could bring more people under his influence. The Bible seemed to have little to do with many of these sermons. In general, they reflected Dixon's efforts to heal the social wounds received in the 1860s and to encourage national unity as America entered a new century. In "The New Thanksgiving Day" he referred to the Civil War as the supreme test of God; the sins of slavery were sins against the South and God Himself, justly punished. In the wake of the war, though, a new nation had been formed from the remnants of North and South, a nation in which the universal themes of "solidarity, nationality, fraternity"(25) had to be insured for all people. Dixon contended that God had declared America to be the most powerful nation in the world, a force for goodness in every society. To fulfill this destiny, however, America would have to conquer all wrongs in its own makeup.
Ten years after his speech on "The Southern Question" in Living Problems in Religion and Social Science, Dixon still fingered sectionalism as the giant barrier the nation would have to overcome before she could begin to carry out God's plan for her. Much of this sectional conflict had to do with the Negro presence. In speaking upon the "Destiny of America," Dixon sounded almost liberal in his racial views, but in reality he was ignoring the Negro rather than silently including him in his design, for elsewhere he had made it clear that the Negro would have no important role or status in the new America he foresaw. After victory in the Spanish-American war he boasted that America was now once again one nation only a generation after the Civil War. This progress he attributed to the ability of the American people to "amalgamate and unite all races, from all climates and conditions of the human race."(26) The fact that even lowly immigrants could be made into contributors to American progress was the strength and distinguishing characteristic of the nation. Speaking on "The Anglo-Saxon Alliance," he elaborated on this view:
The Anglo-Saxon race has the peculiar power of absorbing into a consistent unity all races that flow into its life. These foreign streams disappear in the second generation and emerge with scarcely a trace of their national origin.(27)
America had been given the duty to civilize all the nations of the world. Dixon excluded the Negro from this positive depiction of amalgamation, for he expressed doubts: "There may be a danger in the attempt to amalgamate all the tongues of the human race, yet the motive principle that underlies it--the principle of universal human love, is that foundation on which this republic is built that makes it heir to immortality."(28) Such an argument centered on cultural differences rather than genetic ones.
The instrument for American advancement would be economic progress. Moral improvements would follow closely behind material gains. A railroad built to reach into a jungle of savages would open up the way for these savages to improve themselves. Through the example and teaching of American Democracy, justice and civilization itself would come to characterize this region newly delivered out of brutality.(29) Dixon was convinced that America would fulfill her designed role. Other empires had fallen, but America was the first nation of modern foundation; as such, there was no precedent for failure.
Dixon had become by 1898 a rabid imperialist. Having supported Cuba's efforts against a demanding Spanish motherland, he became a passionate propagandist for the entry of America into war with Spain. The war provided an excellent opportunity to spread Democracy. The fight would be one proclaiming all men to be free and equal. In war time, the American people would be spiritually reunited; there would be no Southerners and Northerners, Republicans and Democrats, for patriotism would always overcome partisanship. Areas needed to be conquered and civilized; once established, the black shadow of brutality and savagery could not destroy what civilized man had instituted.(30) Ultimately, Democracy and Christianity would be worldwide institutions. "The church of Christ is an invisible empire," Dixon declared.(31)
The very basis of Anglo-Saxon civilization lay in the institution of marriage, an institution claimed by Dixon to be older than even church and state. Women had created marriage, he felt, because they were the pillars of morality in society. Monogamic marriage was the basis upon which civilization had been constructed, its existence a safeguard for law and order. The family was the divine ideal of life and had to be built on love. Any marriage lacking the consent of one or both individuals was a great wrong, one that could ultimately lead to racial degeneracy. Marriage was created to allow for the propagation of a noble race.(32) Dixon at this time saw the Negro, especially the hypersexual Negro male, as a threat to this civilized order of Anglo-Saxon society. Clearly the future of the Anglo-Saxon had to be one free of the Negro presence.
Any ambiguities elsewhere in this collection of sermons as to the Negro's proper role in the new world order were made clear in a sermon entitled "A Friendly Warning to the Negro." Dixon began by stressing his compassion for the Negro, calling himself a "warm friend" speaking in the interests of both races. The Negro race faced a severe crisis in this time, when the Anglo-Saxon race would be working toward its worldwide aims. The Negro by his own actions would determine his own future. The nation would have less and less use for the Negro as the Anglo-Saxon race advanced. Already the Negro was privileged over the white man in the North, in that he could undersell his labor. As a result of economic competition, the Northern white men would be more concerned with providing for their families than in continuing to support the Negro.
Dixon went so far as to say race prejudice in the North far exceeded that in the South for the very reason that it stemmed from economic competition for industrial jobs. He debunked the notion that the North had a deep interest in the future of the Negro: "The Northern white man, as a matter, has only had a fictional interest in the negro, that came from the complications of the great Civil War. In reality, the Northern white man has as much hatred for the negro as the Southern white man."(33) The Northerner, due to lack of contact with the Negro, could not understand him as could the Southerner. Above all, he had no desire to fight Negroes for industrial jobs. The economic discrimination that would be applied to blacks in the North would be far worse than human bondage, Dixon predicted, for the mill owner only has to pay the worker, not provide for his upkeep and welfare.
As for the emancipation of the Negro, Dixon contended that this was in no way intended to raise the Negro to the level of the white man. In explaining the elements that led to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Dixon was rather emphatic:
The war between the states, was begun without any reference to slavery in the United States. Even Mr. Lincoln protested with vehemence, that nothing was further from his mind than an attempt to free the slaves. The original abolitionists, with their center at Boston, were Lincoln's bitterest opponents, and the harshest critics of the war during its first terrible and bloody year. But in the providence of God, Abraham Lincoln issued his Proclamation of Emancipation.(34)
The action was no more than an accident of war, Dixon preached, an economic assault on an already weakened Confederate government. In no way was it an anti-slavery measure, for "white men have never fought one another in behalf of the negro, and they are not going to do it in the future."(35) The Negro was going to have to learn how to take care of himself.
Dixon used the Spanish-American War as a springboard to spread his message of racial inequality in wider circles; the defeat of the Spanish monarchy was a great tool for his propaganda. He utilized the war effort to begin mobilizing the American people for a new battle. Having fought bravely alongside the Northerner, the Southerner could no longer could be called un-American. This restored nationalism Dixon carried to the point of outright imperialism. The American war effort against the Spanish was, in his interpretation, a war to proclaim that all men are created equal. The Negro, however, could have no part in this world movement; to progress, the nation had to lay aside all internal problems of a divisive nature. The Negro's lifeline to the North was severed when the Northern industrialist's son and Southern farm hand marched side by side in the face of Death to defeat the last remaining monarchy in Western Europe.
Already the Negro was being forgotten, Dixon argued. The Northerners wanted to concentrate on progress, not social wrongs. As he was cut off from Northern humanitarian support and the like, the Negro once again became exclusively a Southern problem. The Southern paternalist would care for the Negro if the Negro just asked for help because they, not the Republicans and abolitionists, had always been his best friend. It was up to the Negro to decide whether or not they wanted such help. Whichever was the case, the American society now could afford no signs of racial tension were its message of liberalism to be more than a farce. Necessarily, the Negro had to be stripped of the franchise, for political equality would inevitably breed racial conflict. It was the mission of the Anglo-Saxon race to govern. The Negro should concentrate on his own affairs and work with his Southern friends to uplift himself and his race. Business--more aptly the work of the Negro in menial jobs for the white man--was the sphere the Negro should concentrate upon; faithful service would reward him with a sense of achievement and a ladder with which to gradually pull himself up into the ranks of society.(36) Dixon, believing all white men were mentally prejudiced, attempted to draw such discrimination out into the physical realm.
The Negro was thousands of years behind the Anglo-Saxon in cultural standing; as such, the twentieth century offered the Negro an age of self-improvement, following the pattern established by Tuskegee Institute's Booker T. Washington. The Negro's work should be individual; group action would appear as a threat to white eyes and could only lead to tensions. Therefore, the Negroes should be spread out all over the South to allow them the best opportunity to progress at his their pace without pressure from above. Negro education was to be of a practical nature rather than an intellectual one, Dixon believed at the time. The Negro could not understand abstract thought; he should be taught--trained--to obey white authority, without which even the Southerner would not allow him to stay in America.
Wrapped up in his new ideal of the American nation, Dixon felt compelled to take his message to as many people as possible. For such a purpose, he resigned from the People's Church in 1899 and returned to the traditional Baptist faith, although he would never preach again. To further his influence he now began to lecture throughout the nation. Over the next four years he spoke to over five million people, giving an average of two hundred lectures per year to audiences of six thousand or so people.(37) He thus became a major figure in America, an influential man asking the Anglo-Saxon race to meet God's challenge of establishing a new world order. His church could hold only several thousand people, but on tour Dixon could address, in a sense, the entire nation. The lecture circuit also provided him with a very good income. Dixon had five lecture topics. "Backbone" urged the individual white man to ready himself intellectually for the Anglo-Saxon world conquest; "Fools" was devoted to morality and decision-making. These two were the most popular of his five lectures, but they were not used exclusively. "The New America" stressed America's victory over Spain in 1898 was one of divine purpose, serving to unite the Anglo-Saxon race and prepare it to export the values of American Democracy to all countries of the world. "Modern Babylon" was devoted to harsh criticisms of the industrial city.(38) The final lecture, "The New Woman," allowed for a role for women in the coming new society but this role was to maintain a good home life and avoid any push for political involvement.(39)
During this lecture tour Dixon began two years of intensive research concerning the South and the Negro. An incident in 1901 made writing a Southern history an all-consuming pursuit. Dixon was greatly angered that year when he saw a dramatic production of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. By the end of that year, he had spent fourteen years researching the subject of Reconstruction and had compiled over one thousand pages of notes. His immediate response to the play was more controlled than had been the case when he arose and accused Fulton of lying. This time there was no outburst, but Dixon left the theatre committed to answering Stowe's gross misinterpretation and slander of Southern society. He decided to write a book criticizing the mistakes Stowe had made, which naturally suggested to him a sequel to her abolitionist novel. He was determined to have Simon Legree as a character; in fact, his original working title was The Rise of Simon Legree.(40) Realizing the great influence of Stowe's novel on the American public, Dixon chose to write in the genre of historical fiction on a level that anyone could understand. He did not try to become a master of literary technique. Taking up his story where Stowe had stopped, Dixon followed the historical development of the South into Reconstruction and the final decades of the nineteenth century. The result was a milestone in America's history, a commentary on the state of the population's social philosophy during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Since its publication in 1903, despite the fact that it has long rested undisturbed on the shelves of libraries all over the nation, The Leopard's Spots has better reflected the ideals of those espousing the Radical race mentality at the turn or the century than any other one source.
CHAPTER II
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
The occurrences and characters of The Leopard's Spots serve to clearly show the Negro as retrogressing to a more bestial state, thus serving as a threat to white civilization for as long as the races must share American soil. This Negro degeneration is most clearly seen in the sexual realm of affairs, consistent with the common interpretation of the Negro as a sexual creature of emotional passion and instinct. Common in the fiction of Southern writers of the era following the chaotic years of Reconstruction was the contrasting of the "good Negro" and the "bad (or "new") Negro." Clearly this can be found in the writing of Thomas Dixon. In The Leopard's Spots, Nelse is the ideal Negro, a "hero" faithful to his master even after this master has fallen on the field of battle in the war, indeed faithful to the Colonel's family back in Hambright, North Carolina. Nelse is the quintessential "good Negro," one who accepts happily and proudly his place as a servant to those of the white race. Nelse continues to take little Charlie Gaston to church every Sunday, sitting proudly in a gallery now essentially vacant of Negroes, for they are organizing their own church. In the face of an invading Negro force headed toward Hambright, Nelse wields the sword of his late master to protect the Gaston family, breaking all codes of international law by sharpening it to a fine edge. Such a Negro, though, becomes a rare commodity in the chaotic days after the end of the war. Nelse refuses to have any dealings with the Freedmen's Bureau or Union League, and thus he is forestalled when he
tries to vote on election day for the Democratic Party. Reverend John Durham manages to win him his right to vote, but from this day on Nelse is a marked man among his own race. Eventually, he is beaten to death. Unfortunately, in Dixon's mind, the Nelses of the South are by far the exception to the rule, as the "new Negro," led astray by meddling Northerners bent on destroying the South for their own personal benefit or revenge, quickly comes to separate itself out from society, in the process ridding itself by intimidation and violence of the faithful Nelses of the destroyed Southland.
One sees the form of the "new Negro" in the character of Dick, the Negro playmate of young Charles Gaston whose father (in truth or accusation) had tried to cut Dick's head off in the furor of a drunken rage. This evident scarring of the Negro lad suggests a natural sort of deformity in the physical make-up of the Negro, at the very least a different organization of life cells, more in the array of an animal than a human, insinuated when Dick tells Gaston the doctor sewed his head back on and it "grow'd," as if Dick were not a human being at all but a hydra of the animal world able to regenerate himself despite whatever actions taken by mankind (the white man, figuratively) to destroy him and his kind. Dick has not known the way of life led by the Negro in slavery; a paternalist would say that he has not been baptized in the civilizing river of slavery. Thus, his most basic passions serve to instigate his actions without the acquired restraint put in the head of the Negro by an aristocratic heritage of servitude. In essence, Dick is a new creature, displaying a naturally lazy character, more interested in playing pranks on unsuspecting victims than in working. Seemingly, he cannot be taught proper conduct, for he is forever stealing things. His animal-like nature always seems to hide a sinister shadow just underneath; indeed, the mask he wears of a child-like nature just covers a malignant face expressing in its very shaping and contours the possibility if not probability of great harm. It is not his tendency to pick up anything he finds at his feet or to play pranks such as the rather serious one he accomplishes in the Negro revival service that serve to make him dangerous and malevolent to the Anglo-Saxon race; rather, it is the potential that lies within him for future sin, the kind of acts that force the Almighty to turn his head a second time in disgust while mankind is entrusted with the prerogative of punishing the act of utter brutality in a manner as closely as possible fiendish in itself, such crime and punishment so base and disgusting that no Being of purity can watch and retain his omnipotent powers in restraint. Never before has the Southern white man had to live in a world with Negroes who have never been subject to the bounds of slavery, those who now grow up in a society as political equals to their former masters. No one knows that this will lead to (excepting perhaps Rev. Durham), but men such as Dixon himself point to eventual social equality as the necessary culmination of political equality, which to the more conservative element of society means miscegenation and the putrefaction and destruction of the Anglo-Saxon's blood right to rule the world. So the "new Negro" is an unknown, unquantifiable variable in the life of the new Republic. As Dick represents this element in Dixon's first novel, in the list of characters the author chooses to identify him as simply "An Unsolved Riddle." In the words of Joel Williamson, Dick represents "the great mass of hovering blacks, a dark nemesis over Southern civilization."(41) The white fear of the "new Negro" is in large part due to his inability to calculate the course of Negro progression in a world without slavery.
In this new world of constant change of amazing rapidity, Negro life becomes rather chaotic as a rebellious nature suppressed by centuries of enforced servitude comes bubbling up to the surface. The aftermath of surrender is one of rapid segregation of society by race. The Negro's reaction to emancipation is originally one of jubilation. The Negro, led by the Republicans, comes to expect a complete inversion of society overnight, with he who was once owned body and soul by the white man not given the position of luxury, his needs to be fulfilled and wants supplied by a white race forced into subservience. The Negro quickly becomes "a possible Beast to be feared and guarded."(42) Such an example of this conception is provided by Tim Shelby's exuberant and extemporaneous speech following the promises of the Republican ambassador Simon Legree(43) to the Negroes of Campbell County. Legree promises the Negroes that Andrew Johnson will soon be forced out of the White House, leaving the way clear for the plans of the Radical Republicans in Congress to be set in motion. Southern land will be confiscated from the whites and distributed among the Negroes, placing them in a position of wealth based on the exploitation of white labor. The first step in this campaign is the granting of the franchise to the Negro and the disfranchisement of the bulk of Southern white men. Tim Shelby gives an emotional speech, warning the white man to fear for their Desdemonas, as Othello's day has surely come. All things will now belong to the Negro, he boasts, and clearly white women are high on his list of personal wishes.(44)
In contrast to Republican promises, however, the Negro does not receive his "forty acres and a mule," as the land remains with the white man during the humane attempt to reconstruct Southern society via the plan intended but never explicitly spelled out by the slain Abraham Lincoln, a friend of the South prevented from leading his men into the land of Canaan on the very outskirts from which could be seen a peaceful, homogeneous society reestablished for Anglo-Saxon America. Necessarily, a sense of anger and bitter frustration arises and grows in the heart of the individual Negro, excepting those few like Nelse who are content in their former lives as valued servants. This increased sense of frustration and powerlessness translates itself into chaos and, ultimately, violence. The Freedmen's Bureau itself proves unable to restrain the forces of the unleashed "Black Beast." Negro insolence becomes anarchy as Tim Shelby insists the time has come for the white man to suffer. The assassination of Lincoln is mourned as the passing of the only man, in Dixon's opinion, who could have spared the South from the torment of Radical Reconstruction, which he interprets as an effort to replace Anglo-Saxon civilization with African barbarism.
The Negro waiting expectantly for an unrealized life of luxury turns in time upon his own kind even before he turns on the white race. Promiscuity increases as seen by the eyes of whites. Negro violence inflicted upon one and another becomes a common occurrence, as is evidenced quite well by the disfiguring scar carried by Dick for the rest of his life. The easiest outlet for Negro frustration is in the form of attacks upon "good Negroes" such as Nelse who refuse to join them in the pursuit of Negro dominance over white society. Nelse is beaten up when he tries to cast his vote for the Democratic ticket on election day. Symbolically, the "old Negro" is driven out of the Negro community by the "new Negro." It is thus not long before the childlike, servile slave who had placed his service to his master above all else, was replaced by a different Negro animal, one who chooses to pull himself away from the white world only to engage in guerilla warfare against it by an increasing number of Negro crimes.
The first direct episode we see of Negro violence being inflicted on the white population itself is that of the crime committed against the daughter of Tom Camp on her own wedding day, although there have been allusions made before this to random acts of Negro violence of a brutal nature. After the marriage ceremony has been performed in Tom Camp's house, a drunken Negro soldier bursts into the room, while fifteen others surround the cottage. Six of them rush into the house, douse the lights, knock out the groom Hose Norman, and head for the woods with the struggling form of Annie Camp in their arms. Tom Camp dispels the confusion of the event by ordering the men to shoot. When one man warns him they might shoot his daughter accidentally, Camp screams even louder for them to "shoot, men! My God, shoot! There are things worse than death.!"(45) This idea will occur over and over again in Dixon's novels; no woman can live with the shame of having been raped by a Negro. By the time the ordeal is over, two Negroes are dead, one mortally wounded, and three more injured. Annie Camp also is dead from a bullet wound to the temple. Camp thanks his friends for saving his daughter from an unbearable fate. The violence seen in this episode is utilized by Dixon to show the reader just how dangerous the Negro threat is; the sexual stirrings of the emancipated Negro compel him to lust for the white Woman of the South; this is Dixon's contention, seeing as he does the Southern lady as the crux of civilization itself in her unbreakable ties to the sacred institution of marriage; the Negro may no longer by forced into labor, but he can also never be truly equal in the emancipated role given him as an accidental consequence and no more of the War Between the States until he is entitled to take the white Woman as his own. Less obviously, Dixon in this Annie Camp episode puts forth his deeply-held tenet that death is a much better end than life with the black shadow of sexual outrage by the Negro covering one's soul and forever tearing asunder the ties to purity upon which the Woman depends on for her very role in the organic society the South had attempted to build before the war and now tried to resuscitate from the death struggles brought about by Yankee invasion of the land. This base desire of the Negro male for the white Woman is the real threat of the Negro to the Anglo-Saxon race, for it is a threat against family itself as a sacrosanct concept, family being the very cornerstone upon which was supported not merely the Anglo-Saxon way of life but civilization itself. The rape of a white Woman, be it either committed or even thought about by the Negro, is the primary instigator of the new Southern phenomenon of lynching, but Dixon's main concern is that political equality for the Negro will, indeed must, lead to social equality of the races, which is synonymous in his mind with miscegenation and the "raping" of Anglo-Saxon culture itself, as inferior Negro blood comes to defile that of the superior race.
The character Tim Shelby is used by Dixon to show just how dangerous the educated Negro can be. Shelby is far from secretive in espousing his desire to take a white wife. On the floor of the North Carolina legislature after having been elected from Campbell County, he proudly announces a bill he has long been working on in secret. This bill would declare as felons all former Confederates and forever ban them from voting or holding elected office; the wives of these criminals would be declared legally divorced and forbidden to abide with their own husbands. Shelby's intent is to force white women into the arms of Negro men. His Carpetbagger colleagues quickly force him to withdraw this proposal for the sake of all their plans, for such an act would lead every Southern white man to once again take up his gun in battle.(46) He also tells the Republican postmaster, "I expect to lead a fair white bride into my house before another year, and have poor white aristocrats to tend my lawn,(47) this comment being made in reaction to the news that intermarriage has been legalized in Charleston, South Carolina. In Campbell County he has the job of interviewing teachers for a position in the new school. Miss Mollie Graham, a white young lady desperately in need of money to support herself and her blind mother, is given a private interview, wherein Shelby promises her the job if she will do just one thing--kiss him once.(48) Mortified, she flees screaming. The white community reacts boldly. Shelby is found three mornings later hanging from the balcony of the courthouse. Upon him is a placard with the words: "The answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to Negro lips that dare pollute with words the womanhood of the South."(49) The White Beast has finally risen up in response to the Negro challenge, taking the form of the Ku Klux Klan. This action is by no means spontaneous; made up of proud, upper class white men, the Klan is a move to defend the South from the disasters of a second war, one waged not against the Southern white man but against civilization itself. These hooded saviors seek a restoration of law and order, a large part of which involves the protection of white Womanhood. Tim Shelby even more than the Negro rapist is a danger, for the individual rapist violates an individual physically while Shelby maps out a crime against the white race itself; a world of miscegenation is by far a more nightmarish world than one in which one woman is raped criminally, one reason being that society can exact punishment on the individual rapist but it cannot do much to stay off a widespread wave of interracial relationships based on consent, for a world where miscegenation has become legalized and socially accepted is a world beyond the point of salvation. Dixon's main purpose in writing this novel is to awaken in the white mass a consciousness of the real possibility of this threat, believing than an enlightened white race would come together in a common effort, laying aside any disagreements concerning politics, religion, class, etc., to end the threat of Negro domination, for the most fundamental aspect of life is racial self-protection, as put forth in the novel. This is the key stimulus for Dixon's appeal to and invoking of national unity.
This nightmarish fear of future social equality leading to a mulatto America necessarily addresses itself to the question of education. The debate of course in late nineteenth-century America was a bitterly debated one, some calling for education equal to that given to the white child; the proponents of this were to a large degree New England benefactors offering such aid to the emancipated Negro during the years of Reconstruction. A more practical argument was made in the South by those of a slightly liberal orientation to give the Negro an industrial education, to teach him a trade that would keep him below the white race in a dependent state of life. Dixon, however, speaking predominantly through Rev. Durham, from the starting gun opposes even this much education for the Negro, opposes in fact any education whatsoever for him, for fear that any foothold in industry or commercial agriculture gained by the Negro could somehow breed a degree of social equality as this door of opportunity is gradually forced open by the persistence of Negro aspirations. It is Durham's argument that any and all education for the Negro is wrong and dangerous.
It is in offering proof of the power of the white mass that Dixon turns to the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days, placing the laurels of victory on these men's brows for Redeeming the South from the Republican-instituted government of Negro domination in the South of the late 1860s and early 1870s. Having accomplished its goal of securing once again the white government of the Founding Fathers for the white man to once again oversee, the Klan disbands. However, a component of the younger element have been mesmerized by the raw power such a movement can muster; these rebellious men, under the lead of the young firebrand and ward of sorts to General Worth by name of Allan McLeod, ignore the orders of the Grand Wizard and organize themselves. This bastard son of the Klan is a menace to society, opposed by Dixon himself, albeit that time has chosen to label Dixon a strong supporter of any and all Klan activity. Rev. Durham is often compelled to keep these men of wilder sorts under control in Campbell County until federal forces are eventually brought in to break up the primordial gang of hooded marauders. One cannot but take note that the one man sought by the original Klan and silenced, in this case by murder, is one Tim Shelby.
The whole of the story in Spots centers around Rev. Durham, even more so than it does the protagonist Charles Gaston. Durham is the one man all individuals, black and white, can turn to for help. He is the peacemaker, the mediator of division, and serves as the religious pacemaker that keeps the burgeoning society of the New South alive and beating. In this role of spiritual leader, Joel Williamson has characterized the Preacher as "the prophet of white supremacy."(50) Durham is quite obviously the oratorical device by which Dixon sermonizes over and over again the political and social questions posed by the continued presence of the Negro in an America without slavery. His authority is established by his statewide and even national fame as an evangelist. In a world where war has brought down or killed the bulk of Southern society's heroes, Durham stands tall in the community. He does not hate the Negro, but he more than anyone else in the novel is convinced that the Negro and the white man cannot live together in the ambiguity of a world where the white man is not specified as the superior element in society. From the inception of the Negro problem in the chaotic days following the war's end, Durham had interpreted the basic question of miscegenation as the pivotal factor in the future of civilization itself, for "no one knew more clearly than he that the issues were being joined from the deadly grip of that conflict of races that would determine whether this Republic would be Mulatto or Anglo-Saxon."(51) Seemingly only he and his wife see the signs of Negro retrogression as it comes about in everyday life. Durham's common political sermons to Gaston show this understanding, as does the Preacher's refusal to continue preaching occasionally in the Negro church, telling the Negro preacher that his race has sunk too far into barbarism and corruption to be helped by a man, even a man of God such as himself, yea even by God Himself. In time, his warnings to white society are seen to have been insightful and correct, yet he up to the end pushes Gaston to realize that separation is the only possible answer to the Negro question.
Rev. Durham leaves no doubt whatsoever as to what his position is in regards to the Negro. He appraises political equality as a precursor for full social equality, which can mean only the creation of a mulatto race to supersede Anglo-Saxon civilization. For a preacher who never once mentioned politics or the war itself in the four years of the Confederacy, Durham seems a purely political orator during Reconstruction days. Five times in the text a key component of his argument is italicized. Political equality for the Negro, he argues, will give him a foot in the door of American society; with the Republican efforts to disfranchise a large component of the white race in the wake of the war's end, the door toward social equality is not being forced open so much as it is being broken down off its hinges, the hinges which hold not only the door in its place but keeps civilization itself stabilized from the natural tensions buried within the collective unconscious of mankind, now paving the way for a destructive romp of Negro domination over mankind. It must be made clear that Durham (as well as Dixon himself) is a firm believer in the one-drop rule, which states that one drop of Negro blood in an individual makes him a Negro. From this argument can be extracted one great danger of rampant miscegenation, that of the individual white in appearance who is secretly (consciously or unconsciously) hiding Negro blood within his veins. As to the logical flow of his argument, Durham predicts that the individual asking the Negro for his vote must some day invite him into his home; having found a place in his home, the Negro will later be asked to dine with his host and the same dinner table around which sits the host's family; the Negro granted this privilege will then demand the right to ask his host for the hand of his white daughter in marriage.
The test for the white man comes when this question is asked of him to allow his daughter to marry a Negro. Only when the Negro has won the right to marry the white daughter of the South will true equality have been accomplished. Thus, to Rev. Durham, the politicization of the Negro leads to racial amalgamation and the degradation of the white race, which is the equivalent of death itself, the racial suicide of Anglo-Saxon civilization. It is this test that arouses race hatred as well as acquiescence in the individual heart of man. One witnesses this when Everett Lowell of Massachusetts, a staunch defender of full equality for the Negro, is horrified when George Harris, whom he has looked after as a son and allowed to roam rather freely around his house, asks for Lowell's permission to propose marriage to his daughter. No matter how noble his abstract thoughts, Lowell is not about to tolerate this personal consequence of equality; he now distinguishes political equality from social equality, expressing no desire to infuse the blood of his noble line with the "mark of shame,"(52) which could at any time in any future generation result in a Negro baby, for one drop of Negro blood is enough to push civilization back four millennia. At this stage wherein the Negro has the right to marry a white Woman, seeing himself as the cultural equal of the white man, civilization cannot be saved short of by racial warfare. The rejection of the Negro after leading him up to the point of total equality will create a disruption of society so serious as to instigate this race war. Durham tries to make Gaston understand that only total separation of the races now, before the Negro is cruelly led to believe social equality his right and destiny, is the only solution capable of preventing both a race war and the mongrelization of the Anglo-Saxon race.
The Negro must be careful not to rush things before the white race is so separated from the Negro that it can accept amalgamation blind to its inherent dangers. One can see in the murder of Tim Shelby by the Ku Klux Klan the sort of response that the white race will make while those whites are men who experienced the antebellum days and watched the horrible progression of Reconstruction. Only the older generation can understand the scope of the danger posed by Negro equality; the young do not see this future because these men have never seen the past. This generation gap explains the zeal of the preacher and Gaston's passionate determination to fight and break up the fusionist alliance of Republicans and Populists in the late 1890s. It is Durham who convinces Gaston to pursue this political campaign to preserve the Democracy while there is still time. Nothing can harbor so much the impending mulatto world, he fears, as the union being formed between Negro Republicans and lower-class whites, particularly farmers. Further increasing the chance of social equality coming about is the fact that the older generation controlling the Democratic Party has become complacent and uninvolved actively. Such a man is seen in General Worth, who puts little stock in politics, choosing to devote his efforts toward economic gain; these New South men have had their fill of politics and in the stage of the most crucial crisis to ever face the white race they become political isolationists. On top of this, General Worth dissociates himself from the Negro rather completely, hiring only white men to work in his mills. Gaston accuses him of ignoring the Negro question altogether, which can only bode well for the Republican Party's plans for the future.
Charles Gaston comes to be the leader of the new Democratic organization in the 1890s, in large part due to Durham's encouragements and fear for the future. The words of Durham seem to revolve perpetually within his mind:
My boy, the future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto. We are now deciding which it shall be. The future of the world depends on the future of this Republic. This Republic can have no future if racial lines are broken and its proud citizenship sinks to the level of a mongrel breed of Mulattoes. The South must fight this battle to a finish. Two thousand years look down upon the struggle, and two thousand years of the future bend low to catch the message of life and death.(53)
Gaston realizes his duty to lead this crusade, rejecting an attractive offer from Allan McLeod to join the Republican Party. The Democratic Party stands for just one thing--white supremacy. Since the fusion ticket between the Populists and the Republicans had seized control from Democratic hands, insolence on the part of the Negro began to increase again as it had a generation earlier. Families were beginning to move into town for fear of Negro violence in the countryside, particularly those families with young girls. Even the social changes going on clearly around him do not lead Gaston to agree with Durham that an apocalyptic threat threatens Anglo-Saxon civilization. Durham blames this naivete on the fact that Gaston had never known the slave system. In his own mind there can be no peace and no improvements in economics or politics until the Negro question has been firmly dealt with, hopefully before the dawn of the twentieth century two years away. Durham's rhetoric becomes more emphatic:
This racial instinct is the ordinance of our life. Lose it and we have no future. One drop of Negro blood makes a Negro. It kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lips, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions. The beginning of a Negro equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the end of this nation's life. There is enough Negro blood here to make mulatto the whole Republic.(54)
To avoid this fate, the Anglo-Saxon had to have a workable solution, but at that time Durham (and necessarily Thomas Dixon) had no such feasible plan.
Mrs. Durham offers a different kind of stance toward the Negro. She had grown up on a plantation in Virginia, an aristocrat by nature and practice. Feeling betrayed by those slaves she had held during her marriage and then lost during the war, she cuts all ties to the Negro. She is firm in her objection to education of any sort for the Negro, agreeing with her husband that any such education serves only to dislocate him from a society in which the Negro sphere is a limited one. The cornerstone to such thinking is a belief that there are certain physical differences between the races which will forever forbid them from living together as equal members of society. This pure belief in a physical difference between the races makes one a Radical. Cultural equality can be achieved, as one sees in the case of George Harris, a Harvard graduate. Harris, though, is quickly robbed of his illusions for total equality when he suggests his desire for a physical relationship with Helen Lowell to her father. Physical contact between the races is the one thing that even liberals like Everett Lowell cannot tolerate. Mrs. Durham maintains that the Negro necessarily must seek total equality, which means racial amalgamation. She is not passionate in this regard, far less so than is her husband. She wants to ignore the Negro altogether, fully endorsing the removal of the race from America should a satisfactory system of transport be found. Until that time, the Negro must remain a servile creature; to educate him at all is to manufacture in his heart the first longings for social equality. In accordance with her firm belief that total equality is an impossibility for the Negro, education is a cruel temptation serving only to tantalize the Negro, working up frustrations within him that can only be released through crime, the most odious of which is rape; implicit in her words is the threat of large-scale racial warfare, but her fundamental desire is to forget the Negro altogether by separating him out into his own world where the temptations found in education and exposure to the forbidden fruit of white Womanhood can never be aroused. Separation should keep the Negro servile until the time comes when he can be moved altogether.
Logically enough, it is Durham who reveals Dixon's thinking concerning miscegenation. He does this in his conversation with a New England deacon sent to woo him to a Boston pulpit. Durham refuses to leave the South while it still needs his help; the deacon cannot understand what Durham means because he is not a Southerner. Despite the widespread assumption in the North that the Civil War had solved the Negro problem, Durham contends that only then did it begin. In his mind, there can be no national unity without solidarity:
And you can never get solidarity in a nation of equal rights out of two hostile races that do not intermarry. In a Democracy you cannot build a nation inside of a nation of two antagonistic races; and therefore the future American must be either an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto. And if a Mulatto, will the future be worth discussing?(55)
It is for the noble cause of racial absolutism that he must stay in the South; the Negro must be prevented from gaining a foothold in society politically and economically, for such necessarily leads to social equality and amalgamation.
The deacon points out that already there are mulattoes in the South, though. Durham's response provides the key to Dixon's views on miscegenation at this stage of his career. He portrays the practice as not yet a significant one, but one which could quickly spread exponentially in terms of danger:
This mixture you observe has no social significance, for a simple reason. It's all the result of the surviving polygamous and lawless instincts of the white male [italics mine]. Unless by the gradual encroachments of time, culture, wealth and political exigencies the time comes when a negro shall be allowed freely to choose a white woman for his wife, the racial integrity remains intact. The right to choose one's mate is the foundation of racial life and of civilization. The South must guard with flaming sword [italics mine] every avenue of approach to this holy of holies.(56)
Although matters appear peaceful at present, Durham implies that a race war could result spontaneously if hit with a certain sort of catalyst.(57) Until American society is established on the foundation it was built upon by the Founding Fathers, the potential for an internal collapse of the American Democracy is possible. The threat is only beginning to take effect on society. In the South, where the vast majority of the Negroes are yet to be found, the rising industrialism in the form of the textile mill offers a context upon which racial violence can erupt out of the economic competition for jobs.
The most gripping scene in the novel centers around the brutal crime committed against Flora Camp and the ensuing lynching of the Negro Dick. There could be no worse crime in the South of the 1890s than the rape of a white woman at the hands of a Negro man. This is further the case if the victim is no more than an innocent young girl, such as Flora is. Only such a brutal crime can unite the white population fully. In The Leopard's Spots, this crime will prove a crucial turning point in the society of Campbell County and in the mentality of Charles Gaston. Charles for the first time begins to fully grasp the message Dixon has been maintaining all along, that there are indeed some things worse than death. The brutality is far too much for young Flora to deal with. She regains consciousness, only to immediately sink into the throes of her death-struggle, calling out in her pain for the father that can do nothing to help her now. Her death is in a real sense welcomed, as it is the only means by which she can escape the living memory of her violation by the Negro beast. Joel Williamson succinctly describes the pain of the male community's position: "White men could not protect, nor could they heal; they could only take revenge."(58) In a common effort, the white men of the community dole out a punishment almost as cruel and barbaric as that of the original crime itself.
Undoubtedly the key event in the novel is the lynching of the Negro Dick in punishment for his brutal attack on the young and defenseless Flora Camp. It is an automatic reaction by the white community; Tom Camp himself is now a broken man who has no role to play in the lynching. The criminal is hunted down; throughout this climactic period, the Negro population stays hidden behind closed doors, for the crime committed is a racial crime even more than it is a personal one. Any Negro could find himself persecuted by a white mob now blinded with rage and thirsty for revenge. Inherent in this invisibility of the Negro race is the implication that the race will look after its own and attempt to hide Dick from his white executioners. Dixon's use of the crime and punishment of the Negro brute is a device used to show beyond the shadow of a doubt the two races as completely separate. It is not merely a Negro being punished for his crime but the Negro race standing judgment and being handed out retribution in blood; any black man is in danger in the midst of this climate, and Dixon makes clear his charge that the Negro race works in concert to hide its criminals from just punishment. Retribution is a necessary act, though, and it is evident that some Negro must be killed, for it is not the Negro Dick being lynched for his crime so much as it is the Negro race itself being judged and punished for its continued and increasing insolence.
Dick is soon apprehended and brought to the scene of the crime to face mob punishment. Charles Gaston only now realizes his childhood Negro playmate is the criminal, and he proceeds to plead for reason to assert itself over passion to spare the wretched brute. In this fight he is quite alone. The white men overcome by the fiery stirrings of race hatred listen not at all to his appeals for justice. Gaston argues that the court system must be allowed to take care of the criminal elements of society; the punishment meted out by the legal system would be right, but this action of brutality must not be performed, for to do so is to indelibly stain the hands of the white race with the blood of savage brutality. Having seen the sort of law and order effected by the courts of Reconstruction and the years following, the mob ignores and in fact restrains the zealous young Gaston on its way to gaining retribution. The lynching itself is not so much an execution as it is a sign to the Negro race that such crimes of violation will not go unpunished. Forced to watch the event, Charles Gaston receives an illumination concerning the true nature of Southern society. Only now does he realize the sacred truth of the words repeated over and over again by Rev. Durham. The two races cannot live together without the violent nature of their physical differences erupting into racial warfare.
The most significant aspect of Gaston's enlightenment comes not from the example of Negro brutality but rather from the actions of the white mob. These men who capture and lynch Dick are not men, he realizes; they are parts of one living organism, one that can only be seen as the white beast. The men's individual actions are concerted into the actions of one creature, acting on the same level as that of the Negro brute who raped and murdered Flora Camp. This spontaneous generation of the white beast is the real tragedy of the race problem, representing the debasement of the white race into an animal spurred on by the taste of blood to an act of murder; the lynching of Dick is in reality the crucifixion of the Negro race itself. The black beast has finally created the white beast in opposition to it, and the taste of blood is a base instinct to be acted upon by an animalistic nature. It is for this reason of blood- passion that the two races cannot live together in America. Thus is the realization arrived upon by Gaston. An America of both races will ultimately sink the Aryan race into a cesspool of animalism on the same primitive level as that of the Negro. Integration can only sink the Anglo-Saxon to the inferior level of the Negro race, and on this level the two racial beasts must ultimately fight a race war that will destroy one or the other, or more likely both. Even a victorious white race would be a loser because four thousand years of progress would be nullified by the animalization of the Anglo-Saxon to a point of ancient pre-civilization. The white beast that lynches not a Negro but the Negro is a harbinger of the coming destruction of civilization itself.
It has been Rev. Durham's argument all along that only a select few leaders of the white race can lead the Anglo-Saxon to a majesty not yet attained in history, but only by severing all ties with the inferior Negro race. The fight will be for civilization itself. Having been reluctant to accept such an apocalyptic appraisal of matters before, Gaston, having seen the white beast in action responding to the example of Negro criminality, now takes his foster father's words to heart. Gaston's fight is not against the Negro so much as it is for the Anglo-Saxon, for a society of both races necessarily gives birth to mob violence. The white race is in his eyes now literally the civilized world, and its purity must be maintained and sexual pollution forever guarded against if the nation and world are to remain a world of intelligence and not base, animal-like passion. In the Victorian sense, Anglo-Saxon society is itself the Ideal Woman, the perfect bride for the Jesus Christ. There can be no more noble pursuit than one taken in an effort toward racial self-preservation. Only two things can destroy civilization: miscegenation and racial warfare. Having seen Flora's unconscious refusal to go on living with the shame of her violation, Gaston now wholeheartedly devotes himself to the protection of the sanctity and purity of white civilization. Such a goal can be reached only by destroying the influence in the South of Negroes and white Republicans. The Democratic campaign he pushes forward most fortunately coincides with the fighting of the war against Spain in 1898; the national unity of the Anglo-Saxon race in America that follows on the heels of speedy victory in war serves to cut the umbilical cord that since the end of the war has been funneling to the Negro in the South from Northern philanthropists and opportunists the nutrients intended for the growth and maturity of inter-racial hatred. Gaston's political race is one based solely on white supremacy; nothing else can be solved, he asserts, particularly matters of an economic nature, until the Negro question is answered firmly in some manner. Negro intimidation in the tradition of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan now taking the form of "Redshirts" helps secure Gaston's victory, as it did the success of North Carolina's Governor Aycock in historical fact.
The final chapter of The Leopard's Spots serves to imbue a sense of ambiguity to the story, perhaps as part of a prelude toward the two forthcoming novels in Dixon's Reconstruction Trilogy. Always the stead fast zealot, Rev. Durham is conversing with Gaston in the final days leading up to his inauguration as Governor of North Carolina. The topic of discussion is one which met with a lot of debate in history at this time of the reassertion of Democratic political power in the South. The debate centers over the question of what to do now with the Negro. Gaston has plans to advocate in his inauguration address a policy of industrial education for the Negro. Durham goes to great lengths to warn him of the dangers in this; clearly, Gaston does not fully understand the Negro as does the preceding generation, for which Durham speaks. The preacher's argument is that to let the foot of the Negro into the world of industry is to set up a situation where Southern industry is taken over by the Negro race; with no education for industrial work, there can be absolutely no danger that the whites can lose any power, be it political, economic, social, etc. He cannot fully convert Gaston to his way of thinking, for the young Governor-elect simply cannot understand the Negro as well as Durham could; the quarter century of the segregated, post-slavery South has put up an invisible shield blocking from the eyes of the land's youth from seeing a world they never knew--for this reason alone, the Negro should be repatriated. The North has never understood the Negro, the young Southerner cannot fully understand him, and the white man of the future will be even further isolated from the living memory of the integrated society of slavery. Time is the real enemy, in Durham's judgment, as he is constantly haunted by the fear that it may already be too late to save mankind. Only the Southern white paternalist can save the Negro, but he is now a vanishing quantity in the new America of the twentieth century. Whatever the case, the reader sees that Gaston is still not a total Radical in terms of racial beliefs; certainly, Dixon had softer views at this time than he would just two years later at the time of publication of The Clansman, perhaps accounted for by the fact that his native North Carolina was at the time (1902), while caught up in the frenzied arms of progressivism, granting rather liberal concessions to Negro education.(59) The reader can only ponder to himself the chances of Gaston coming to learn this lesson regarding educating the Negro; quite likely, this is Dixon's intent in finishing with a rather unclear ending.
One must closely examine just what position Dixon lays forth in this first novel regarding the Negro. The easiest assessment to give Dixon is one of a life-long, unchanging white supremacist, but it seems to follow from a systematic study of Dixon's life and writings that his ideas on race, particularly miscegenation, were fluid things, albeit a thick sort of fluidity as that characterized by liquid glass, able to shift position slightly in the heat of battle and debate, an aura of confrontation in which Dixon delighted in. Despite the attacks leveled against The Leopard's Spots at the time of its publication, the novel seems to show the reader a fiery author rooted in and restrained by his strong and recent background as a minister of God, an author who seems not fully sure of his own position regarding the Negro question. The 1890s were a time of great influences and changes on Dixon, and the intellectual baggage he acquired in these years, observing his beloved South from the Northern section of the country, can be identified in his first novel. By the time The Clansman is published, though, his mind is firmly set in complete support of repatriation. Over time his friendly message to the Negro becomes entrenched in reactionary rhetoric, showing Dixon to be further to the political right than he had ever been before, as evidenced in his disenchantment with Franklin D. Roosevelt. With the passage of time, the man and his message constricted into a tighter, more passionate belief that the rest of America could not accept.
* * * * * * *
One must turn to Dixon's twelve years as a minister in the 1890s, principally in the North, to grasp the antecedents and influences of and on his racial viewpoint in 1902 when he sat down to write a novel concerning the truths of Reconstruction. Dixon is an interesting case study for a search into the makings of a Radical. The area of land at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina was by no means a stalwart buttress of the Confederacy. The Civil War had brought to these mountain counties an internal guerilla warfare, as North Carolina's men rebelled against the Confederate draft. North Carolina was not a rich state by any means in the Southern world, and no poorer section of the state could be found than in the foothills and mountains. Here a slave was by no means a rule, for these people were of pioneer spirit, carrying with them the pride instilled in their families by the first settlers in the area, men wanting a free life, a life based on independence and interdependence. There were no plantations in Cleveland County of any great significance. The Negro population was far below that of the white population. One must ask why Dixon then became a Radical and when. The Radical movement began in the eastern regions on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, soon spreading to the south and west. Typically, though, the Radical mentality arose strongly in areas with a large Negro population, one thus serving as a real threat to the white race by sheer numbers if nothing else. Cleveland County was no such area.
There were freedmen that Thomas knew and loved, though. He of course served as a protector to his Negro playmate Dick. Also, he has many words of love to say for his Negro nurse, a woman devoted to the Bible and the Dixon family. There was no hatred for the Negro in his childhood, although he did come to see them in a light of inferiority, especially after his trip to the legislative building to see the Negro legislature make a mockery of American democracy. His brother and father did serve in the Ku Klux Klan at first, and it was led by Dixon's beloved uncle Leroy McAfee, but the relationship was a short one, as Thomas Sr. and Clarence left the Klan when the danger of recklessness became a real problem. Dixon maintained that he had been taught to hate slavery as hell itself by his father.(60) Proving his disdain for the antebellum South's peculiar institution, he wrote in 1892 in Dixon on Ingersoll that "of all the absurd statements of infidelity the absurdest [sic] of all is that the Bible upholds slavery."(61) The Negroes in Dixon's childhood life were simple creatures who Dixon saw manipulated by the Union League and Freedmen's Bureau, but he knew of the great tenderness they could harbor in their hearts if they were not led astray. When he left for college, Dixon saw the Negro as a servile creature to the white race; in a world where few Negroes had yet been educated at all, it was far from extraordinary that Dixon could see himself as a kind paternalist over a seemingly inferior race.
Dixon's religious notions changed significantly while at Wake Forest College, as he went through a time of agnosticism. It would be at John Hopkins University, though, that his racial views would be either shaped or reinforced. Although he only attended the graduate school a few short months, he was exposed to the Teutonic germ theory of democracy by his professors. This doctrine taught that every people on earth has a certain gift, and inherent in its teaching was the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. Such thinking had pervaded the antebellum South as an organic society was being formed before its destruction by the war. Each race had its own place in society designated by God, and Dixon saw the role of the Negro in America as a service role. Such thinking, particularly his motivating force of self-preservation of the superior white race would be forever instilled in his heart and easily identifiable in his novels.
CHAPTER III
THE DIXONIAN SOLUTION
Naturally enough, The Leopard's Spots met with different responses, the majority of them quite vocal. Essentially, the novel was a sketch of the race problem during and following Reconstruction, as told with a Southern viewpoint. The controversy stirred up by the novel was largely due to the fact that the North had never seriously questioned the events of Reconstruction. The Negro problem was simply not a big topic of conversation in the North in 1902, for the Negro was still very much a Southern creature. Now in Dixon Northerners heard a different viewpoint, and an emphatic one at that. Mansfield Allan, in his review of the book on publication for the Bookman, asserted that just the novelty of such a revisionist history of Reconstruction would be enough to draw a large audience to the novel, in both the North and the South.(62) Allan describes the logic of Dixon's argument, suggesting that his ideas as stated did imply strongly that the two races could not live together in a Democracy. His appraisal of Dixon's theme was that Dixon blamed the North for Reconstruction and the pitting of the two races against one another in the South, repeating Dixon's evaluation that political equality meant Negro corruption and a travesty of the government envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
The novel achieved fabulous sales for the time, far surpassing even the numbers anticipated by the ever-confident Thomas Dixon. Dixon felt that a sale of 100,000 copies would let him consider the book a success; this was a sales figure all but unheard of for a first novel. The publishers at Doubleday and Page told him to aim for 25,000 sales. So sure were the publishers that the novel would do nowhere near the numbers envisioned by Dixon that they let him work out his own contract, which called for 10% royalties on the first 25,000 copies sold, 12.5% own sales numbers above 25,000, 15% above 50,000, and 20% over 100,000 copies sold. The first printing of 15,000 copies sold out quickly as the novel took the nation by storm. In its first six months, Dixon's first novel sold over 100,000 copies; it would go on to sell more than one million. Following in 1903 with a second novel almost as popular, Thomas Dixon was a rich man.(63) These readers were not simply casual readers attracted to the love story woven into the novel. The novel was not just read but discussed, especially in women's and literary clubs. As Dixon's friend and fellow Cleveland County native described its impact years later, "He [Dixon] had given the South a hearing."(64) If nothing else, Thomas Dixon attracted attention to himself and the Negro question, for the first time drawing forth a real discussion of history and, more importantly, the present. Clearly his message was one the North had been readied for with the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the reorientation of American society back toward Anglo-Saxon rule.
The significance of The Leopard's Spots becomes more apparent as examined singularly within the work of Dixon's extended life. In this first work, Dixon spoke of the South standing guard with flaming sword over the racial purity of the white race. In the broad scope it seems apparent that Dixon was not yet firmly established in his opinions, for he expressed a degree of ambiguity concerning the best solution to the Negro problem, not committing himself fully to a policy of repatriation until the time just after the novel's release. Indeed, he had not yet shed the hopes of education as a solution, but fear soon led him to the conclusion that it was not. In essence, the first novel says strongly only that the Negro should not be allowed to participate in the electoral process of America. He got at the root of his impending racial ideology by focusing on the family and marriage as the basis of civilized society. Mansfield Allan in his review of the book seemed to say more than Dixon had in the novel, proving quite the prophet as to what direction Dixon's writings would come to take:
Political activity is not an isolated fact: it draws its deep meaning from the interior significance and construction of society; society rests on the family; equality of the suffrage connotes also social equality; and social equality signifies the right to love and wed as one will.(65)
The remainder of the review was a rehashing of Dixon's views. The Negro question, he put forth, was only a theoretical problem in the North because by far the majority of Negroes remained in the South. Allan asserted that the Southern white man had the right to maintain his racial integrity. He questioned the strange tie binding the Negro to the Northerner, for he could list no other minority groups to whom the North reached a helping hand. Reiterating Dixon, he could not fathom why the Negro had always been the nation's "sentimental pet." Finally, he agreed with Dixon that the South should be left alone to solve the problem for itself, as the Negro has always been a Southern problem.
Dixon's second novel in his "Trilogy of Reconstruction" would excite the nation even more than his first novel had. The Clansman was a political statement as much as it was an historical novel. It was the first popular attack on the principles behind Radical Reconstruction, labeling for its especial target one Thaddeus Stevens, represented in the novel rather thinly veiled as Austin Stoneman, a traitor to his race, led to his shame at the hands of a wicked, contriving mulatto enchantress supposedly his Washington, D.C. "housekeeper." Its very controversial nature made it a landmark in American literature. By far it would be Dixon's most famous and best-selling novel. In one month in 1905 it was in greater demand than any other book on the market. For the year, it ranked fourth on the best-seller list.(66) One cannot accurately say why the book sold so well. Many critics asserted that the very controversial nature of the story induced grand sales, thus arguing that sales numbers could in no way measure the degree to which readers agreed with Dixon's radical rhetoric. For whatever reason, the novel sold well over one million copies and was soon turned into a highly successful drama.
Dixon blamed the horrors of Reconstruction, referred to him repeatedly as the Reign of Terror, on Thaddeus Stevens, whose program he labeled an act of personal vengeance the goal of which was to put the Negro in power over the white man in the South. In The Clansman, Stoneman was manipulated by his mulatto "housekeeper," Lydia Brown. As described physically, Stoneman was not quite human, for he was cursed with deformity and physical weakness. One leg was deformed and both were lame, with his left foot resembling more a cow's (or devil's) hoof than a human foot. He was also totally bald, but he wore a ridiculous-looking wig that barely covered his head. Despite these handicaps Stoneman, known as the "Great Commoner," was plotting the worst act of vengeance the world had ever known, a Reign of Terror on a defenseless South.
Dixon at this point turned his attention more toward the threat of miscegenation than an impending race war. It had been his assertion in The Leopard's Spots that all white men basically feel the same antipathy to the Negro and desire no personal contact with him in the physical sense. Such a man was Massachusetts Congressman Everett Lowell, who was horrified at the thought of George Harris marrying his daughter. Lowell was no different from the Southern white man in his feelings toward the Negro, except for the fact that a lack of close contact with many Negroes had created in his mind political equality as an ideal. Dixon continued to attack the North for its hypocrisy as shown by the existence of this double standard in their feelings toward the Negro.
The Republican leaders who worked for political and social equality in The Clansman were portrayed as either vengeance-seeking vigilantes who placed personal gain and revenge over racial integrity and democratic tradition or as effeminate, idealistic individuals with no personal knowledge of the Negro. Such a man was Charles Sumner, who disdained the very touch and presence of a Negro. He was like Miss Susan Walker in The Leopard's Spots, effeminate and idealistic. These liberal humanitarians, at least those few who Dixon saw as noble in their goals, served only to widen the racial gap, while the hypocrites in power set in motion their plan to destroy the South altogether and make of it a military occupation zone. Their efforts were not made in an effort to help the Negro, only to use him for their own purposes. This exploitation of the Negro race was Dixon's justification for proclaiming himself working in the best interests of the Negro as well as the white man in trying to take political power out of the hands of the Negro.
It was Dixon's contention that the Northern white man disliked the Negro and wanted him to remain a creature of the South. To a large degree this was due to the fact that the Northerner had little physical contact with the Negro race, and such contact was more and more taking on the shape of Negro strike-breakers being brought in to factories by management to replace striking white union workers. The Negro presence in the North purely and simply meant economic competition. Dixon felt sure that the bonds of the white race would hold secure in the event of a race war. Of course, black sexuality was Dixon's main concern. It was this theme that he presented to the reader of The Clansman as the main threat to white society. Stoneman came to realize in that novel that he had been to a large degree manipulated by his "housekeeper" Lydia Brown and pulled down into the depths of animalism. Rumors had spread rampantly all over Washington, D.C., concerning Stoneman and this "strange brown woman of sinister animal beauty and the restless eyes of a leopardess."(67) All visitors to see Stoneman had to do be admitted by her first. After the assassination of Lincoln, Stoneman was seen as the most powerful man in the capital, far more powerful than Andrew Johnson would be in the face of a hostile Congress. Politicians came to Stoneman's little cottage to "acknowledge their fealty to the uncrowned king, and hail the strange brown woman who held the keys of his house as the first lady of the land."(68) She greeted even the most important legislators in a condescending manner. Sumner, having just recently spoken in Boston on the "Equality of Man," visibly disdained this personal contact with a member of the Negro race. When Stoneman held a meeting with his underlings, Lydia Brown was the one really in charge. One of Stoneman's men was a mulatto man of charming features, obviously the result of his full inheritance of the characteristics of the Aryan race. Such a man was the kind of "new Negro" Dixon feared most, for his intelligence acquired from Aryan tradition could not put out the glow in his eyes reflecting "the brightness of the African jungle."(69) An artist had described this man, Silas Lynch, as having "the head of a Caesar and the eyes of the jungle,"(70) a mixture of wiles and animal instinct in a man of great oratorical powers and charm. There could be no more dangerous creature to the white race than such a talented mulatto man. Lydia had brought him to Stoneman's attention and had the Commoner send him through college, while Stoneman remained oblivious to the secret sexual bond between her and Lynch. Lydia's very character exuded her feeling of conscious power in the room. Her danger to the nation could not be exaggerated by Dixon, being as it was unrecognized by Stoneman and rather disarming to Lynch himself. She was the greatest shadow ever to cast her dark pall over the future of the American Republic. Her control over Stoneman was greater than his rapidly increasing stranglehold on the nation itself. Such physical attraction was only natural, which made it such a danger. When Tim Shelby in The Leopard's Spots contended that there would be the modern counterparts of Othello and Desdemona, he was quite correct. Even the most stalwart white supremacist might experience a moment of temptation in the figure of a more sophisticated Negro. Thus, only separation could combat the evils of miscegenation.
Dixon's racial philosophy had grown into adolescence by the time he wrote The Clansman. Rev. Durham explained in The Leopard's Spots to the Boston deacon sent to Hambright to woo him to their Northern pulpit that the instances seen in the South of mulatto children being born were due to white men of weak wills who could not resist this temptation. By 1905 Dixon was appraising miscegenation as a natural result of prolonged physical contact. He was not sure whom to blame, coming to see it as no one's fault. As the two races coexisted in physical contact daily with one another, the racial differences sank into an unnoticed state. Common association bred racial amnesia and eventually amalgamation as all racial barriers would be forgotten. This subtle threat was what was so important about the young generation after the Civil War. The "new white," never having seen the Negro as a servile creature and nothing more, was unaware of the dangers in granting certain equalities to him. This was the wandering pursued in the mental tracks of Rev. Durham: if the Negro did not serve the white man, the white man would not see the Negro work hard, save money, buy a house, gain economic power, and slowly begin to enter the white man's circles as an equal. Dixon could no longer justify placing the full blame for miscegenation on the white man lacking moral fiber, instead beginning to attribute it to the environment of a democratic society composed of two coexisting races. Thus, Dixon now fully endorsed the idea of repatriation for the Negro, no longer wavering ambiguously on the subject as he had in his first novel.
It was in The Clansman that Dixon's reactionary rhetoric took on its full voice for the first time. In certain portions of the novel Dixon made it sound as if the North were responsible for slavery, miscegenation, and the Civil War. Certainly the "history lesson" Ben Cameron delivered to Elsie Stoneman leads one to consider the South an unfortunate victim to the economic selfishness of the North, as if slavery had been forced down the throat of an unwilling South in much the same manner as Radical Reconstruction had been. Ben believes the North supported abolition only after the slave trade was cut off and thus all possible profits for themselves in the transport of Africans to Southern harbors were lost. Clearly, Dixon did not believe slavery or the Negro to have been the underlying cause of the War Between the States, as he often commented. In his opinion, states' rights and the South's stubborn commitment to the original democratic spirit of the Constitution in the face of Republican modernism and economic pursuits seemingly made a secession crisis inevitable. The Negro was not an integral part of the question of sectionalism, for the organic society being created in the South was the victim of a Northern Republican campaign of destruction when Yankee troops invaded Southern lands. As such, emancipation was only a coincidental consequence of the war, a decision made by President Lincoln to further weaken the vulnerable South by ending the very basis of the Southern economic system. It was the North and not the South which pitted the races against one another,(71) he would conclude. The "Negro rule" established in the South following military defeat was a betrayal to honorable men who had never been warned of such a humiliation. In essence, the North was not satisfied with victory, using the Negro as a means of personal revenge on a war-ravished South.
The Clansman detailed a long register of "racially improper" laws instituted by Radical Republican politicians, several of whom themselves engaged in interracial affairs, particularly the infamous Austin Stoneman (Thaddeus Stevens); virtually all of these laws supported the right to intermarriage. Corruption ran rampant in the Negro governments. Dixon picked South Carolina rather than his native North Carolina for the setting of the novel because South Carolina had been the only Southern state to have a Negro majority in the legislature during Reconstruction.(72) Based on his experiences there as a child journeying to Columbia with his uncle, he detailed the stench of the Negro presence, the bankruptcy of the state as Negro politicians filled their own pockets, the disgrace of a brothel and a bar being set up inside the Capitol building itself, etc. He strove to unmistakably detail the horrors of Negro irresponsibility that he himself read into history so that he could justify the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, which he praised for Redeeming the South from Negro domination. Not only did he absolve the Klansmen themselves for taking the only recourse of honorable men forced to the wall in defense of racial purity, he also exonerated the Northern common man, placing all of his hateful blame on the Radical Republicans; from this position he voiced his call for Anglo-Saxon unity. Once the Klan was successful, Dixon viewed its victory as little more than a ceasefire, one that would once again heat up into racial warfare in the 1890s as the Populist-Republican alliance seized power away from the white man in an effort to promote Negro social equality.
The determining factor in Dixon's political maturity of the 1890s was not so much his extended stay in the North as a minister but his observation of the Southern crisis of the 1890s in the form of the Populist revolt and the ensuing fusionist ticket with the Republican Party. Such an alliance between poor whites and Negro Republicans threatened to hasten the inception of social equality. The Leopard's Spots centered on this era, as Gaston's victory marked the peaceful resolution of the problem in favor of the Southern white man. The Democratic response Dixon actually saw as nonpolitical or, more correctly, above politics. In his view, every white man with any responsibility and pride in his racial heritage owed it to his race to stand up against the fusionists in a mass movement to preserve Anglo-Saxon civilization. The time had passed for compromise now that the 1896 elections had restored to the Negro a place in politics. Not only must the Negro be forever banned from politics, Dixon argued, but his presence must also be shunned for its naturally debilitating effect on political institutions. The federal Constitution, by his own interpretation, offered no protection for the Negro in that it was a white man's document designed to establish and protect a white man's government. Seeing as how the African knew only tribal rule in his native land and had not yet had time to learn the intricacies of the complex American system, he was not qualified to take part in American politics.(73)
Only a short time after Lincoln's assassination, Stoneman began to set in motion a program that would see Andrew Johnson impeached and the South made a military district. The Commoner's first bill, designed to confiscate Southern land, was vetoed. Stoneman continued his move toward becoming the dictator of the nation by instigating impeachment hearings against Andrew Johnson; during the proceedings, Congressional--and national--power lay in the hands of Stoneman. In the wake of this Constitutional crisis, Negro crime increased dramatically and the economy began to fall apart. Stoneman planned his next move for the approaching period of complete economic paralysis. He condemned any man who might vote "not guilty" in the impeachment trial of the President, cheered on by Lydia Brown seated in the gallery. Overwork pushed Stoneman into a physical collapse, but he insisted on making a personal appearance on the day of the vote. He was carried into the room by two Negro men, creating a serious impression:
No sculptor ever dreamed of a more sinister emblem of the corruption of race of empire builders than this group. Its black figures, wrapped in the night of four thousand years of barbarism, squatted there the "equal" of their master, grinning at his forms of justice, the evolution of four centuries of Aryan genius. To their brute strength the white fanatic [Stoneman] in the madness of his hate had appealed, and for their hire he had bartered the birthright of a mighty race of freemen.(74)
Despite Stoneman's efforts, though, the vote to impeach Andrew Johnson fell short by one vote.
Throughout his ministry of the 1890s Dixon had been greatly concerned with the secondary issue of Socialism as a great threat to mankind. One of the many positive results of victory in the Spanish-American War was a momentary decrease in the chances for the spread of the socialist doctrine into America. A monarchy had been destroyed, and Democracy was the victor. As a result, America could now focus her attention more closely on the Negro problem as the main threat to domestic peace and prosperity. Dixon saw the chance for a permanent solution to the Negro problem once and for all in this atmosphere. Owing to his lack of experience in the American political system and his natural inferiority as to learning its complexities, the Negro in the role of active participant in American democracy would only serve to degrade the system. In Dixon's fictional world, the Anglo-Saxon race united to repulse the fusionist challenge, in effect declaring a new declaration of independence to reiterate the original traditions, values, and aspirations of America's founding fathers, The epitome of such a new racial creed was best demonstrated by Charles Gaston's Declaration of Independence in The Leopard's Spots.(75) Either the Anglo-Saxon race would lead in a united front to a brave, new world, or the Negro's rise to social equality would squash out the divided white race in short order.
Of course, the real consequence of the 1900 elections was the emergence in the South of the Negro's disfranchisement. Dixon, though, from his observation point in New York, was not content with even this political victory, doubting that segregation could effectively solve the race problem. It was while he was debating in his own mind the effectiveness of disfranchisement and the separation of America into two separate, neighboring worlds that he wrote The Leopard's Spots. As a result, he did not come out fully behind the idea of repatriation, although he certainly gave the idea a sound presentation through the passionate words of Rev. Durham. He could not shake the intense fear that disfranchisement was only a temporary solution to matters, one that could only delay and intensify the coming crisis of mongrelization or racial warfare. As he came more and more to believe the Negro could not be fully integrated into white society due to his four thousand years of racial stagnation while the white race advanced by leaps and bounds, he began to long more and more for a permanent solution.
Dixon attempted to push forward his now fully-embraced solution of repatriation by depicting the Negro as a creature totally different from the white man. Still, he did this not out of hatred but out of love for his own race and for the black race as well, for he truly believed that the two races could only prosper in separate spheres. There was a "good Negro," in every novel he wrote concerning race relations, a faithful, servile creature of immense aid to the white community, accepting as he did the Negro's natural inferiority and servitude to a superior race, in fact taking great pride in this service. Nelse was such a fellow, for his total commitment to the Gaston family during Reconstruction, to the point that he stood up to and was eventually killed by the Negro men being duped, as it were, by the Union League and Freedmen's Bureau. In The Clansman, there was __________, the faithful former slave of the paternalistic Dr. Cameron, who punched the deputy humiliating the doctor by dragging him in chains over the town, and he thereafter offered to give his own life for his former master. Such men in Dixon's mind were as noble as any white man could be but they recognized for themselves that they were not as racially advanced as Anglo-Saxon people. Such Negroes were the exception, though. In fact, Dixon believed that ninety-nine of every one hundred Negroes fully and consciously desired the amalgamation of the races. It was this vast majority which made social interaction a deadly event in the life of the white man and, especially, the white woman. Likewise, it was his hope and contention that even the Northern liberal once in contact with representatives of the Negro race would come to recognize his unworthiness and dangerous challenge to the social stability of the nation. The very fact that the Radical Republican effort was made to effect Negro dominion in the South stemmed, in Dixon's comprehension, from the fact that the Negro was a foreign element to the Northern men leading the campaign of revenge on the defenseless South. These were individuals such as Everett Lowell and Miss Susan Walker from The Leopard's Spots, Charles Sumner and Austin Stoneman himself in The Clansman. Stoneman realized the blunder of his actions only at the end of the novel, when his son's life was threatened by his own political program, only to be saved through the intervention of the Ku Klux Klan he had come to hate so deeply. Before his illumination as to the malevolent influence of Lydia Brown, though, there had emerged doubts in his mind, during his recuperation in the South, as he observed the daily practices and living standards of the Negro. Negroes who accepted their formerly subservient conditions only disgusted him for their lack of pride. The average Negro, unless blinded by sexual lusts, seemed afraid to assert himself in his new world of freedom. As Stoneman observed such characteristics of the race he had worked to set up as the new kings of the South, he sometimes thought of giving up his entire program for social equality on behalf of such undeserving creatures.
Beyond a doubt Dixon did not want social equality, and the point of his writings was to urge his audience against allowing such a racial catastrophe. His "Trilogy of Reconstruction" was originally devoted to the central idea that "the Negro is inherently and unchangeably inferior to the white man and that the Negro should forever remain in a position secondary to the white man of the South."(76) At the time, he watched warily the encroaching dangers of social equality and miscegenation threatening the racial purity of the Aryan race. As it became clearer to him that the two races could not coexist in America without ultimately resulting in social equality, he was forced into the acceptance of social isolation as the only solution, namely the repatriation of the Negro race to his original homeland of Africa. In his novels, the result was a characterization of Negro individuals as less than human, creatures at best half-child and half-animal. Certainly there was a much more obvious use of such a descriptive device in The Clansman than had been evident in the pages of The Leopard's Spots. The Negro became overtly characterized by an animal-like physical description, his primary motivating force being one of a particularly sensual nature. Dixon's battlecry became the simple maxim: "Amalgamation simply means Africanization,"(77) his motivating force a deep-felt belief that social interaction would inevitably lead to intermarriage, upon which the very foundation of America, namely the family and the sanctified institution of monogamic marriage, would crumble, leaving the Republic a mere successor to the fallen empires of Rome, Greece, etc., which were brought down after the deadly injection of barbarous elements into their society.
Dixon's Negro became a creature of incredibly simple dimensions. He was at best half-child and half-animal, living on the basis of meeting his physical needs without the emotional restraint of reason. In essence, he was not long "out of the jungle." His feet were flat-footed; as a case in point, when Ben Cameron found footprints of a flat-footed man outside the Lenoir home on the morning after the women's deaths, he knew unmistakably that the footprint was that of a Negro, for no Aryan could make such a print. The Negro was almost always described as exuding a definite "African odour" whether he were a sharecropper or an educated mulatto the likes of George Harris or Silas Lynch. At heart he was a coward, wary of standing up to any white man. Even Gus, the Negro responsible for the violation of Marion Lenoir in The Clansman, froze in a moment of terror when verbally confronted by Dr. Cameron earlier in the novel's course of events. Only when he was controlled by his simple, animalistic passions was such cowardice blocked from affecting the Negro. A Negro under the effect of blood-lust and sexual desire knew no fear, and Dixon brought this point home by sparing no detail in describing the rape scenes of white women at the hands of Negro men such as Gus. Such utilization of the age-old theme meshing race and violence was Dixon's most effective weapon in converting his audience to his racial ideology, at the same time giving his works a spark of controversy that can only bring more and more readers into his literary world. The Negro was naturally inclined to violence precisely due to the subjugation of reason to the drum-beats of lust in his veins, lust for the white woman; in the Victorian mind, the sexual creature was necessarily prone to fits of violence. If no other notion is drawn from a reading of Dixon's novels, the reader will pull out from the pages he has read Dixon's flat assertion that the Negro is a brute.
Ben Cameron is secretly the Grand Wizard of the state Ku Klux Klan, which he is mobilizing to prepare to meet the Negro threat with force. His father will not join a group dedicated to lawlessness, despite Ben insisting such action is the South's last resort. One must stop the rise of social equality as early as possible, or else "the next step will be a black hand on a white woman's throat!"(78) The elder Cameron comes to see the importance and truth of what Ben has been telling him when he hears Silas Lynch speak. Lynch could not have been more direct in presenting his arguments:
Here and now I serve notice on every white man who breathes that I am as good as he is. I demand, and I am going to have, the privilege of going to see him in his house or hotel, eating with him and sleeping with him, and when I see fit, to take his daughter in marriage!"(79)
Immediately Dr. Cameron sees he has underestimated the scope of the Negro problem; to hear in no uncertain words the Negro ask for amalgamation puts his thinking in line with that of his son; the elder Cameron becomes a Radical.
With each passing day spent in the South, Phil comes more and more to oppose his father's program. He has found the Southerner to be an ultraconservative, whose secession was forced on him by his refusal to let the Constitution be taken less than literally. Certainly the war was not fought for the Negro, he feels. His own opinion of the Negro is that he is a lazy, inefficient worker. He tells his lover Margaret Cameron that "but for the Black Curse, the South would be to-day the garden of the world."(80) He combines his conservatism with his wishes for economic improvements. With help from Northerners who know him and his father, he is able to get the funds to build several textile mills by the Catawba River. He is thus in a great position to lead the South into the twentieth century, even though he is not a Southerner by birth.
Dr. Cameron wins an audience with Stoneman and attempts to plea for help for his people, in hopes of alleviating some of the awful horrors of life in the South. It is with futility that he speaks boldly, convincingly, and evangelically:
Black hordes of former slaves, with the intelligence of children and the instincts of savages, armed with modern rifles, parade daily in front of their unarmed former masters. A white man has no right a negro must respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure it? . . . No people in the history of the world have been so basely betrayed, so wantonly humiliated and degraded!. . . For a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shaped negro exuding his nauseating animal odour, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief.
. . . There is a moral force at the bottom of every living race of men. The sense of right, the feeling of racial destiny--these are unconquered and unconquerable forces . . .(81)
Stoneman blandly states that universal manhood suffrage is inevitable in a democracy, only to be challenged by the doctor that this movement cannot cost the price of racial purity. The Republic is great, he asserts, because of the genius of the stock of men who founded the government, and these were white, pioneer citizen-kings of European ancestry. The nation's future depends on maintaining the purity of this racial stock.
Education is not the solution to the problem, the doctor continues, because the Negro will only progress so far before the white race is dragged down to his racial level as a consequence of continued social interaction. He tries to explain to Stoneman the true nature of the Negro race:
[The Negro race] is not an infant; it is a degenerate--older than yours in time. . . . Can we assimilate the Negro? The very question is pollution.. . . The issue, sir, is Civilization! Not whether a negro shall be protected, but whether Society is worth saving from barbarism.
. . . Education, sir, is the development of that which is. Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa--rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crushing acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail! He lived as his fathers lived--stole his food, worked his wife, sold his children, ate his brother, content to drink, sing, dance, and sport as the ape!
And this creature, half child, half animal, the sport of impulse, whim, and conceit, `pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,' a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger--they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people-- . . . Merciful God--it surpasses human belief!(82)
Certainly no more passionate speech on the behalf of the sanctity of the Anglo-Saxon race could have been given, yet Stoneman is unmoved beyond an unconscious shock at the deep passion of feeling in Cameron's words. While he regrets individual suffering, he insists that this noble experiment with the Negro must be seen through to its end.
Stoneman is not an uncaring creature, for he loves his two children . He also is very fond of the Lenoirs, so much so that he offers them $10,000 for five hundred acres of the Lenoir estate, which he invests for them in the North. When an insolent Negro pushes Marion Lenoir to the ground, he orders his henchman Silas Lynch to arrest him. The Lenoirs return to their old home, as Stoneman takes up a residence in town. Ben had wanted to stay with them that night as a source or protection, but they convince him they will be fine. They are sharing memories just after midnight when the Negro Gus and three other black brutes suddenly burst into the house. Quickly they go to work. The mother is tied to a bedpost and the daughter penned in a corner. Marion tells them they have no money, but Gus slowly approaches with an evil leer on his face and says simply, "We ain't atter money!"(83) With a quick tiger's spring the claws of the Black Beast are upon Marion's throat. The deed is not described, for it is much too terrible and obvious what the crime consists of. Marion awakens a few hours later, knowing what she must do. She and her mother clean up the house to remove all evidence of what has happened. They will hurl themselves over the cliff at Lover's Leap, so that people will think their deaths a terrible accident. All that matters to Marion is that her name remain sweet and pure on the lips of her friends. The mother hesitates, but Marion tells her they cannot escape the memory of what has happened and that death will be sweet while her name remains untainted. Her words do justice to her position of Womanhood: "The thought of life is torture. Only those who hate me could wish that I live. The grave will be soft and cool, the light of day a burning shame. . . . This shame I can never forget, nor will the world forget. Death is the only way."(84) With these words, the two jump into the waters below.
When the two are found to be missing the next morning, Ben is immediately pushed into action by his fears of what crime may have been committed. He finds no evidence of assault in the house, but in the yard there is the unmistakable flat footprint of a Negro. By mid-morning the bodies are found, that of the mother still slightly warm. Marion had died instantly. The coroner concludes their deaths were accidental. Two men know the truth, though. Dr. Cameron, with Ben assisting, performs an experiment in which he examines the eyes of the deceased through a high-powered microscope. His theory is that no memories are ever lost, and that the figure of the Negro brute would be burned forever into eyes. He sees nothing in Marion's eyes, but in her mother's there is "the bestial figure of a negro--his huge black hand plainly defined--the upper part of the face is dim, as if obscured by a gray mist of dawn--but the massive jaws and lips are clear--merciful God--yes--it's Gus!"(85) proclaims the doctor.
Following the funeral, a trap is laid for Gus by the Ku Klux Klan. He is taken to their secret meeting place in a cave at Lover's Leap, where he is given a trial before the High Court of the Klan. Dr. Cameron hypnotizes Gus; the brute confesses not just this crime but outlines plans for several others he has laid out for the future. The proud white men cannot bear to hear such things, trying to beat him to death then and there, barely ordered off of him by the Grand Dragon, who is Ben Cameron. Before morning, Gus is lynched and deposited in the front yard of Silas Lynch. The Klan moves to take over the county, calling for the disarming of all Negroes. Stoneman sends for his son, who tells him the white community is in an uproar due to rumors that a great crime had been committed against Marion and her mother, one of such a horrific nature that they chose to take their own lives rather than live in shame. Stoneman returns to his old brusque manner, telling Phil to stay away from the Camerons, for no one else could have organized and orchestrated the lynching of Gus. The result is a break between father and son, Phil warning him "that if it comes to an issue of race against race, I am a white man."(86) Stoneman shows him a note he has received warning him to leave the county with forty-eight hours for his involvement in the Union League, a connection Phil had not been aware of concerning his father. Elsie alone stands by her father, telling Ben she cannot see him again because of his Klan involvement. Ben tells her that he is "fighting the battle of a race on whose fate hangs the future of the South and the Nation,"(87) refusing to ignore his duty to the Anglo-Saxon race.
The Klan quickly moves to disarm all Negroes in the county, seizing control of the armoury, as well. The Union League begins to collapse. Stoneman sees his defeat but is determined to see Ben Cameron hanged. Silas Lynch leads a force of one thousand armed Negroes into Piedmont in a counterattack, ushering in a renewed epidemic of Negro insolence. Stoneman sends two Negro soldiers for Ben; entering the hotel, they terrify Margaret Cameron, bringing Phil running into the room. He kills one of the brutes, while the other escapes. Ben convinces him to flee the county, and he is arrested for the killing. Phil hears of Ben's bravery and returns, too proud to let Ben die in his place. He gains access to the cell by virtue of his being the son of the Great Commoner, wherein he switches places with Ben, the two looking very much alike. Stoneman leaves the county and is only found at a late hour to tell him Phil and not Ben is to be executed. He arrives back in Piedmont after dark, an hour after the scheduled time of execution. He purges his soul by confessing all his misdeeds to Dr. Cameron. He admits he masterminded Radical Reconstruction, admitting to three motivating factors--party success, personal revenge for Lee's destruction of his mills in Virginia, and the terrible influence of Lydia Brown. "When I first fell a victim to the wiles of the yellow vampire who kept my house, I dreamed of lifting her to my level,"(88) but now he acknowledges his mistake in letting her pull him down to her level. When the men return, Phil enters the room with Ben, to the great joy of Stoneman, the Klan having saved his son. The election of the next day proves a great victory for the white race of the South, as Redemption is now achieved following the heels of the great victory over Negro brutality and criminality orchestrated the night before by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Negro characters in the first two books of Dixon's Reconstruction Trilogy served to show the Negro retrogressing to his naturally bestial state in all aspects of life, not just in terms of his sexual threat to white Womanhood. Most vividly was this demonstrated in The Leopard's Spots by the degeneration of Negro religion in Campbell Counties in the years separating Reconstruction and the fusionist challenge of the 1890s culminating in Democratic victory in 1900. Black religion, having separated itself out from that of the white world, came to incorporate paganist practices and beliefs. Rev. Durham as a result refuses to preach occasionally in the black church, calling the congregation a collection of scoundrels, the deacons criminals in their own rights, and the Negro preacher a creature far from possessing the wings of angels. The Negro preacher reinforces this interpretation by telling him that to disallow criminals from attending and taking part in the church would mean no congregation. Durham loses all hope for a happy solution of the race problem and simply refuses to associate any longer with the black race he had once considered his friends. Negroes indeed have seemingly all become in Dixon's portrayal roving criminals. Those serving in federal jobs seem to lack any moral set or priorities, thus serving to corrupt and weaken the Anglo-Saxon justice system, while the intermittent presence of Negro militiamen in the area served only to protect lawlessness and chaos. The "new Negro" gets full opportunity to test his new freedoms in this society. The good blacks remaining by the 1890s were certainly few in number, for the "good Negro" was typically molded into such a suitable role in the white world by having been a recipient of the civilizing effects of slavery. On top of that, they were comic figures that prove themselves naturally inferior to the white man although much more advanced than the brutes who function as purely emotional creatures thinking only of satisfying their passionate needs. In his effort to write his first novel, Dixon came to realize that civil rights and the economic integration of the races being led by Booker T. Washington were not the primary issues of concern to society. The central issue on which the future of civilization depended was a question of whether or not white society in democratic America was to be saved from the corruption of barbarism in the form of the Negro in his continued presence in the nation.
In The Leopard's Spots Dixon was essentially asking himself what was to be the future role of the Negro in the new America as it emerged in the twentieth century. His ten years of research into Reconstruction and the Negro question developed in him three basic tenets by 1902: 1) once racial lines were crossed by the Negro into white society, the Anglo-Saxon race was already defeated; 2) only the prohibition of intermarriage could insure white dominance in America; and 3) the Negro must be forever prevented from taking part in American politics, for political equality must inevitably lead to social equality and racial amalgamation.(89) In this first effort toward his goal of swaying the thoughts of a national audience, Dixon visibly wavered back and forth when proposing a solution, for he saw no way in which the two races could harmoniously survive separately in one democratic nation. By 1902, there was a contradiction in his statements concerning the education of the Negro in the novel. The common appraisal of the Negro in Reconstruction years by the Southern conservative was one of the Negro as a primitive savage who cannot be taught overnight the civilizing lessons imbedded in the white man by four thousand years of progress over him; only when infused by white blood could the Negro develop himself through education to a level at all above that of the servant. By 1902, even Thomas Dixon could not assert that the Negro was incapable of learning, for it had already been proven that he could indeed comprehend such things as calculus, etc. His answer to this was to assert instead that the white man would not tolerate the educated Negro because it made him necessarily an economic competitor with the white man. Thus emerged Dixon's racial doctrine that no place above that of the servant would be permitted the black man in America. When the Negro got his foot in the door leading to economic equality, just as was the case with political equality, eventually that door would be battered down and the Negro freed to run into the promised land of social equality and mongrelization in the form of mass intermarriage with whites.(90) Only Rev. Durham argues for complete separation of the races in The Leopard's Spots, as Dixon was using him to play devil's advocate with his rising notion of repatriation as the only possible solution to the race problem. Just as the reader can only wonder whether Charles Gaston came to agree with this radical pronouncement by Rev. Durham, likewise one had to wonder if Dixon himself would accept it. The answer is found loud and clear with the publication of The Clansman, where Dixon for the first time came out unequivocally for repatriation of the Negro.
Only in this second novel did the reactionary Dixon fully emerge. In regard to miscegenation as a theme, in The Clansman Dixon came to detail a different aspect of the threat of the mongrelization and Africanization of the white race than that seen in The Leopard's Spots. Whereas the events seen of miscegenation in the South had been blamed by Rev. Durham on weak-willed white men of a low nature, now the first accusations, albeit subtle in this early work, of the mulatto woman already created in American society by a certain history of
"shadow families" in the antebellum South were made by the author, implying that the sexual mulatto woman was as much a sexual creature as the Negro man albeit in a more subtle if not unconscious manner, and as such served to imperil the wisdom and morals of the white man.(91) The very subtle nature of this threat made it a much more dangerous one than that of the Negro man raping the white daughters of the South. The horror of the consequences of such action was heightened by an awareness of the bleaching out of the Negro and mulatto; there were already in society certain men and women appearing physically to be white yet having an element of Negro blood in their veins. Such individuals were automatically Negroes in Dixon's world where the one-drop rule determined all racial make-up, but they could live as a white person by appearance alone. As such individuals "passed over" the racial boundary separating the white and black races, the danger to the purity of Anglo-Saxon blood was further heightened. In this world it was possible to marry a Negro without knowing it; such a covert infiltration of white blood by Negro blood could only be avoided by complete separation of the races immediately.
Dixon cemented himself fully in the reactionary rhetoric he would become famous for by the publication of an article in the Saturday Evening Post of August 19, 1905, following the publication of The Clansman in novel form and just preceding the premiere of the dramatic version of that story. The article was entitled "The Future of the Negro and Booker T. Washington's Work," and it serves as the most clear exposition of his views on the social relationships of the races, the ideas which would characterize his reactionary view of society for the remainder of his productive life.
Dixon lengthened his article somewhat and published it in a pamphlet pertaining to the newly-running drama "The Clansman," complementing it with articles entitled "The Story of the Ku Klux Klan" and "What Our Nation Owes to the Klan."(92) Not only did this publication mark the inception of his public call for segregation as the only possible solution to the Negro problem, it also laid out a plan for accomplishing such. The main obstacle in the way of the immediate action Dixon called for was the apathy and ignorance of the Northerner. Dixon employed the Malthusian argument that Negroes were multiplying in great numbers, so surely some immediate action on the part of the white man was needed. A Northern friend was quoted as being in agreement with the idea of the Negro as a bestial, useless parasite, but for the simple fact that the Negro was here in America to stay he argued education was justified; above all, this individual much preferred to let time determine the outcome rather than to get involved personally. Dixon condemned this Epicurean desire to enjoy the present with no look to the future. In his world time is fluid, and the past and present must be used to bring about a future worth living in.
Dixon's assertion was that education can in no way solve the race problem, no matter how noble the goals of a Booker T. Washington might be. Not only had Dixon jumped off the fence of uncertainty, he had journeyed far across the field of racial conservatism to join the ranks of Radicals such as Vardaman, Bilbo, etc., the ideological crusade of whom could best be described as reactionary rhetoric. Dixon as his first racial axiom insisted that "no amount of education of any kind, industrial, classical or religious, can make a Negro a white man or bridge the chasm of the centuries which separate him from the white man in the evolution of human civilization."(93) He reinforced this assertion by employing his often-quoted words of Lincoln in regard to the Negro and education, namely expressing his view that the two races could not live in a state of social equality. Dixon's prejudice was not founded on color but rather on the large gulf of thousands of years of inherited progress for the Aryan. Dixon could not name one Negro who ever contributed substantially to human progress, chiding B. T. Washington for his statement that the Negro race had developed more quickly in the three decades following the War Between the States that had the Latin race in a millennium of freedom. Dixon could see little potential in the short-run for the Negro population if this Tuskegee leader was the most intellectual member of the race. Virtually reiterating what Dr. Cameron had said to Austin Stoneman in the pages of The Clansman, he summed up the ignorance of the Negro in evangelical passages:
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. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never built a harness, cart or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an ax, spear or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. In a land of stone and timber, he never carved a block, sawed a foot of lumber or built a house save of broken sticks and mud, and for four thousand years he gazed upon the sea yet never dreamed a sail.Who is the greatest Negro that ever lived according to Mr. Booker T. Washington? Through all his books he speaks this man's name with bated breath and uncovered head--"Frederick Douglass of sainted memory!" And what did Saint Frederick do? Spent a life in bombastic vituperation of the men whose genius created the American Republic, wore himself out finally drawing his salary as a Federal office-holder, and at last achieved the climax of sainthood by marrying a white woman!(94)
No matter what the Negro's chances for developing his culture in America, Dixon could never get beyond the fact that the result of equality would be amalgamation.
This fear of rampant miscegenation he stated bluntly in the form of his second fact on the race question: "The greatest calamity which could possible befall this Republic would be the corruption of our national character by the assimilation of the Negro race. I have never seen a white man of any brains who disputes this fact. I have never seen a Negro of any capacity who did not deny it."(95) Dixon in The Leopard's Spots and in The Clansman had done much to portray the races as having many basic physical differences, to a large degree by describing Negroes in animalistic terms and as having deformities never seen in the white man; all the stereotypes for the Negro were employed in these two novels. Now that he was a devoted convert to the idea of repatriation, he turned his attention to the mental chasm that separated the races; four thousand years of this inherited progress for the white man was simply impossible for the Negro to make up for.(96)
Always a man to utilize facts and figures when they suited his purpose, Dixon quoted a Negro professor as predicting that the new race [of mulatto Americans] would surpass the white race in terms of ability and intellect. Not only this, he went on to assert that the mulatto would draw more from his Negro roots than from the element of white blood flowing through his veins. Dixon had only recently been overwhelmed by his understanding that several Negro leaders favored and hoped for amalgamation. W. E. B. DuBois plainly could be seen as such a man by reading "The Souls of Black Folk"; Charles W. Chesnutt had personally told Dixon he endorsed amalgamation; certainly Kelly Miller in his reply to Dixon's rhetoric showed himself a believer. All of a sudden, Dixon had become completely convinced that no more than one out of a hundred Negroes did not passionately long for racial amalgamation. Seemingly the shock of this revelation proved to be so sudden and involved that he could not incorporate such an idea as the Negro's primary ambition into any kind of normal world. For such a reason, Dixon became a Radical of extreme order.
Dixon had formerly been a strong supporter of Booker T. Washington and his efforts. As of late, though, he had become suspicious about the reasons behind the Negro's reluctance to take a side on the issue of intermarriage. Were he explicitly to state amalgamation as one of his goals Washington would destroy his own power base and isolate himself and his school from any and all financial support from the North. Dixon's emerging interpretation of Washington's words convinced him that he too wanted full social equality. Why else would Washington express publicly his admiration for Frederick Douglass time and time again? Suddenly, gripped by the rising tide toward a national fate Dixon could not even imagine on account of its horrible nature, this man who had as a preacher openly admired Washington's work to "make Negroes producers, lovers of labor, honest, independent, good," through the "development of solid character, intelligent industry and material acquisition"(97) revolted. The new reactionary Dixon saw the error of his former ways, in that he did not then consider the effects of economic competition between Negroes and whites. Economic influence in the hand of the Negro could not but ultimately lead to economic, and then social, equality. Dixon now gave voice to a new view of the Negro in Tuskegee. Removing his blinders, Dixon had found that "the simplest truth is he [Booker T. Washington] does believe in social equality for the races, desires it, and the purpose of his great work is to ultimately make it inevitable . . . The trouble with Mr. Booker T. Washington's work is that he is silently preparing us for the future heaven of Amalgamation--or he is doing something equally as dangerous, namely, he is attempting to build a nation inside a nation of two hostile races."(98) In other words, Washington was not teaching the Negro at Tuskegee Institute but was instead training him for the inevitable race war, the prime force of which was the breaking away of the Negro from any kind of dependence on the white man--the Negro was segregating himself in preparation for his full-scale attack of society in pursuit of the goal of perfect integration. Already there were signs of this plot; as an example, Dixon maintained that only half of the South's cotton was now being produced by Negroes. The Negro was brought to America for his labor power; for the same reason he had remained here. The South had not yet realized that the Negro was no longer a necessity in society; because Southerners had always believed they needed the Negro, they had fought any and every attempt to remove the African from America.
Education only widened the gap between whites and Negroes, for the white man, Dixon posited, cannot tolerate Negro insolence and economic competition. It was due to his belief that a fusion of the Negro problem and the labor problem would lead to a war of the worst sort of brutality that Dixon preached for immediate separation, not within America but outside of her borders.(99) Such a plan had been favored by Lincoln, Dixon contended; the sixteenth President had requested from Congress an appropriation of one billion dollars with which to colonize the Negro outside of America's borders. His premature death ended all discussion of the implementation of repatriation.
Dixon now turned to statistics to show the economic feasibility of his plan for resettling the Negro, a program he referred to as "friendly colonization." Returning to his present day (1905) he said the nation had spent $800,000,000 on Negro education since the end of the Civil War; half this amount could have easily made Liberia a rich and powerful Negro state in Africa. With only $10,000,000 a colony of 500,000 Negroes could be established there in the matter of a couple of years, establishing a free black republic in which all American Negroes could be repatriated within a quarter of a century. Not only was the plan feasible, Dixon insisted it was the only rational solution whereby both a race war and the mongrelization of the American Anglo-Saxon could be prevented. Such was the nature of Dixon's proposed solution:
We owe this to the Negro. At present we are deceiving him and allowing him to deceive himself. He hopes and dreams of amalgamation, forgetting that self-preservation is the first law of Nature. Our present attitude of hypocrisy is inhuman and brutal toward a weaker race, brought to our shores by the sins of our fathers. We owe him a square deal, and we will never give it to him on this Continent--we cannot give it to him unless we are willing to surrender our birthright and sacrifice the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race.(100)
Education was a noble but impractical idea; it was in fact a quite dangerous solution. The determining factors of the threat were indeed economic in nature, coming into sight only as the New South of progressivism and industry emerged. Dixon feared any Negro participation in this economic expansion above the level of menial servitude. Unfortunately, he observed just the opposite happening. Economic competition was adding a new element to the Negro problem and the inherent dangers involved with its continued existence. When striking white workers up North saw a gang of Negro strike-breakers being led through the picket lines to replace them, these proud Aryan men obviously came to harbor a significant degree of hatred toward the Negro. Even involvement in a single trade by an individual Negro man could have negative consequences for white society. Such economic participation allowed the Negro to save his money, perhaps one day buy a house and come to rent it to a white man. No white man could do anything but resent the example of a Negro thus exercising a degree of power over a member of the superior white race. For all the complexities involved in the Negro problem, Dixon's solution was a simple but direct one; stated in such frank terms he told a reporter, "There is but one solution and that is to colonize the Negro. The black problem will be the eternal problem of the south. If the Negro is not sent away, there will be a race war."(101) Having shown the state and extent of the Negro problem in The Leopard's Spots, then in the course of writing The Clansman fixing in his mind what he considered to be the only solution open to the white man, namely repatriation of the Negro, and on top of this laying out his personal plan of action, he was ready to embark on a new journey in his fiction, one designed to bring his program to fruition. Because he was busy finishing his Trilogy of Socialism, touring the nation with the dramatic production of "The Clansman," and producing the much less significant finale of the Trilogy of Reconstruction in The Traitor, it was not until 1911 that Dixon began a new stage in his writing career, one which has been termed an "Appeal to Authority," starting with the second most reactionary novel he would write in the course of his lifetime, the only novel to be devoted primarily to theme of miscegenation, this novel being The Sins of the Father.
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The most acerbic and comprehensive attack on Dixon came in late 1905 from Kelly Miller, a mulatto professor at Howard University. In his opening sentence Miller described himself as speaking for the entire Negro race when he condemned Dixon's "evil propagandism of race animosity to which you [Dixon] have lent your great literary powers," relegating to the author the unkind title of "chief priest of those who worship at the throne of race hatred and wrath."(102) Certainly he could not understand how Dixon could claim to be the Negro's friend while endorsing violence and forced submission as acceptable and practical means by which to solve the Negro problem. Dixon himself was a riddle to Miller, somehow differing his stance toward the Negro race from specific representatives of that race.
Miller's interpretation of Dixon's views assigned him a place as a rightful successor to antebellum Southern leaders like John C. Calhoun. He restated Dixon's thesis as such: "no amount of education of any kind, industrious, classical or religious, can make a Negro a white man or bridge the chasm of the centuries which separates him from the white man in the evolution of human history."(103) He was quick to offer examples pointing to the exact opposite coming about, as already Negroes were finding jobs in the professions only recently held by white men alone. The message of his words was that Dixon failed to prove any psychological differences between the races.
Acknowledging the fact that Negroes are indeed behind the white race in terms of progress, Miller was not so quick to judge this as indicative of the Negro's relative inferiority. Had not the Middle Age European lived an inferior life compared to that of the Roman a thousand years earlier? he asked. One could not judge an individual with a racial stereotype for a whole race. Miller argued that the Negro had been held back by the African environment, as well as by his subjugation in America. The capacity of the Negro to improve himself was equal to that of the white man, for "capacity is potential rather than a dynamic mode of energy,"(104) he argued. No Negro in antebellum Southern society was allowed to be outstanding, yet the Negro race advanced despite the restraints imposed on them because advancement is a perpetual process which cannot be wholly suppressed.
Miller contested Dixon's statement that he was in favor of amalgamation, for he in fact argued against it as a solution to the race problem. He admitted having said that the two races could not live together without ultimately fusing, but he asserted that this statement was in no way a proposal for amalgamation to begin. He in fact said he knew of no Negro individual who considered amalgamation a solution to the problem. If it were true, the female Negroes would be giving themselves over to the abundant number of white men who proved unable to suppress their lustful passions even in 1905. Miller did not condemn amalgamation, he tried rather to downplay its relevance by portraying the white man and not the Negro as being overly concerned with miscegenation. He boldly accused Dixon of quitting his church in order to warn the white race to flee from the horrors of amalgamation. Turning matters around, Miller warned Dixon that he himself was the leading promoter of racial amalgamation in the nation. By holding no respect for the full-blooded Negro, Dixon's rhetoric forced mulattoes and those Negroes of a light hue closer to the ranks of the white race; an ever growing number of these Negroes could "pass over" the racial boundary by living as white men in an area where their Negro features were not recognized.(105) Dixon made such individuals want to escape their Negro status, thereby encouraging the invisible contamination of white blood.
Miller accused only ignorant Negroes and no refined members of the race as being at all supportive of miscegenation. As for Frederick Douglass, he argued that the Negro race respected him despite his having taken a white bride. Miscegenation was no creation of the Negro race, he reminded Dixon, but rather the result of illicitness in Southern white society in the antebellum era. Had slavery existed for another hundred years, there would have been virtually no pure Negroes to be found, for the sexual violation of the Negro female slave was a commonplace occurrence. Miller had no respect for a white race only now coming out strongly against miscegenation when its members were responsible for taking it to the high level of development it reached. It was far too late to reverse course now, for Miller estimated sixty percent of America's ten million Negroes already had an element of white blood in their veins.(106) To advocate racial purity now was to devote oneself to an impossible goal, in Miller's estimation. He advised Dixon to acknowledge the Negro's lack of culpability in the ever-increasing danger of amalgamation and to take to missionary work among those of his own race, for they and not the Negroes created the problem and allowed it to mature into a serious threat.
Miller found little credibility in Dixon's scheme of "friendly colonization." Liberia, with her present population of one and one-half million Negroes inside an area of only forty-eight thousand square miles, could by no means harbor America's whole Negro population. In the end, the mulatto professor dismissed Dixon as a malcontent whose primary motive behind writing was to stir up racial tensions and revel in his aura of controversy. Dixon is encouraging the very things he condemns in his novels, namely racial chaos. In Miller's estimation, Dixon was clearly "the high priest of lawlessness, the prophet of anarchy."(107) He offered the reactionary writer his own "friendly warning" that his work might have unintended consequences. When a mad dog bites a man, the dog dies while the man recovers; such is what Dixon must face in dispensing his racial rhetoric. The Negro does not fear the white man, Miller seemed to be saying, for the race would survive; the poison would only weaken and threaten the Anglo-Saxon race. Radicalism was a disease in the mind of the white man that would lead to his own destruction. "You [Dixon] are a greater enemy to your own race than you are to mine,"(108) Miller concluded.
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Following up on his major successes in the realm of historical fiction, Dixon now assigned himself the chore of developing a dramatic version of his works pertaining to Reconstruction. Dixon was far from a novice in the theatrical profession, having left his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins to pursue an acting career in New York. Standing six feet, three inches tall, with a slim build, he was finally made to realize he had no career in the field. Now in 1905 he was delighted to return to this one pursuit in which he had failed to find success. His first play was "The Clansman," which as essentially a Dixon production was a major success; in its trial run alone the drama took in fifty thousand dollars.(109) All across the nation, the production company played to full houses; more people went to see the play in the North than in the South, in large part for the simple reason that Northern theaters were larger and could thus accommodate larger audiences. Dixon's return to acting came about when the play's leading man was eaten by a shark off the coast of Wrightsville Beach, Virginia, for only Dixon knew that part well enough to take over the role. Thus, Dixon added to his list of highly successful careers by drawing rave reviews for both his writing and acting.
The play opened in Norfolk, Virginia, on September 2, 1905, and scored from the outset a major success. The reviewer for the "Virginian-Pilot" wrote that the drama swept the large audience off its feet and encouraged intense feelings in the hearts of both whites and Negroes in attendance. The audience, as a matter of fact, was an active participant in the production, cheering the heroes and hissing at the villains' actions. Memories of Reconstruction days were necessarily brought to mind for those old enough to have suffered through the experience, despite Dixon's statement that he was not attempting to stir up racial and sectional disagreements. His ambitions for the play he expounded upon before the curtain first opened: "If my play is true, the young South should know it, the young North should know it. If it is false, it should be suppressed. If it is good for one section, it is good for all. I seek national unity through knowledge of the truth."(110) The different reactions that took place in the audience were quite clear, though. Several hundred Negroes were there to watch from the gallery, and each positive reaction of the whites was matched by an opposite one from the Negroes. No viewer could fail to notice the author's assertion that the white race must dominate the Negro. This was especially true in relation to a Southern audience.
At the conclusion of the first night's performance there in Norfolk, Dixon emerged on the stage to an eruption of applause from the audience. Reiterating his purpose in presenting this story, he told them: "My object is to teach the north, the young north, what it has never known--the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful reconstruction period."(111) Dixon was clearly the toast of the town, reveling in the widespread attention afforded him. Little did he realize that in many ways he was at the peak of his popularity, for his message would not adapt well to the changes of coming years. Not even the great commercial success of the motion picture Birth of a Nation ten years later would match this time in terms of his audience's acceptance of his racially Radical vision.
When "The Clansman" toured Dixon's native North Carolina, it was greeted very favorably by the population. For the most part, the crowds there accepted the message of the tale, with no more than a small minority of liberal elements worrying about renewed racial discord being stirred up by the playwright's passionate dissemination of such an incendiary message. That year of 1905 the Radical philosophy of race relations was still a powerful ideological force in North Carolina's white society and in the Deep South as a whole. The situation would change not long after the tour of "The Clansman," though. This gradual waning of the Radical mentality in terms of acceptance would be the determining factor in the less emotional response evoked by Birth of a Nation in 1915.
Dixon now turned his attention more deeply toward explaining the character of the Ku Klux Klan and its downfall. He devoted a large part of The Play That is Stirring the Nation to the Invisible Empire, arguing that no one could understand the South and her history without being conscious of the Klan's role in that development and progression. Dixon spoke of the Klan in relation to another secret society, that of the Union League organized by Radical Republicans to work for the confiscation of Southern land during Reconstruction. Had there have been no Union League, Dixon said there would have been no Klan, for the kinship between the races would not have been forced apart by outside forces. A single shot fired in Ford's Theater provided Thaddeus Stevens with the opportunity to consolidate power in his own hands. The only recourse left a proud race suffering during the Reign of Terror Stevens unleashed was to organize in the Invisible Empire to disarm the Negro and reestablish Anglo-Saxon control of the South. The white race owed a debt it could never repay to those brave young men who risked death and arrest to fight for the American tradition of a Republic governed by and for the Anglo-Saxon.
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Dixon devoted his final novel in the Trilogy of Reconstruction to a portrayal of the demise and collapse of the Invisible Empire. The Traitor proved a less moving as well as less popular novel than either The Leopard's Spots or The Clansman. It was rather hastily written, Dixon having found himself in financial straits after losing his fortune in the panic of 1907. Beyond the haste in which it was penned, the novel also served as a more moderate work in terms of the Negro question. Despite the novel's shortcomings, it sold over one million copies,(112) a testament to Dixon's popularity at the time. The novel centers on the dissolution of the Reconstruction Klan into gangs of rebellious marauders corrupting the sacred goals of the original Invisible Empire by calling themselves Klansmen. It is these young men who are the traitors, not the Yankees or Scalawags.
It is interesting that no Northerner plays an integral part in the story. The action involves the unfolding of an internal war against the new Klan by the older generation who instituted the original Klan with the express purpose of restoring law and order to a ravished countryside. The original Klan's chief is John Graham, who obeys the orders of Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest in dissolving the secret society before its enticement of power corrupts the minds of the more naive members. The new Klan is headed by Steve Hoyle, who refuses to obey the order of dissolution in blatant defiance of Graham. The action begins in 1870 in Independence, North Carolina, society having been recently rescued from the clutches of the Black Beast that Thaddeus Stevens and his Radical Republican disciples in Washington had unleashed, yet now society is facing the threat of the White Beast, an unintended consequence of the Klan's success in ending Negro domination.
Despite the elements of control white society has by this time regained, the social situation is far from ideal. John Graham's former home is now occupied by Judge Butler, a Scalawag sitting on the U. S. Circuit Court, with Butler having acquired the property through less than legal means. Only four Negroes take on any significant importance in the story, two of whom are Graham's former slaves who now work for Judge Butler and his daughter Stella, they being Aunt Julie Ann and Maggie. Alfred is a faithful servant of Graham, while the intriguing character of Isaac A. Postle, whom Dixon identifies as a "sanctified man," rounds out the Negro cast. The novel begins with Graham threatening Butler with the information he knows of his purchase of the house and implicitly with the Klan itself if the Judge does not give up the property back to him, its rightful owner.
The Klan under Graham parades the streets at midnight as their last activity as a group before disbanding. The white population turns out en masse to watch the procession. Butler meanwhile has called in federal troops to deal with the Klan, but even these soldiers do not view the hooded riders as any sort of serious threat. Despite this, Graham knows well that the federal government is soon going to clamp down on the Klan in an effort to destroy the Invisible Empire altogether and for all time. This of course puts Hoyle's Klan of marauding youths in danger of federal punishment. The rebel Klan even has a significance for Graham; it is a massive show of disrespect for him and his authority, and along this Hoyle's men could sabotage his own ambitions for gaining public office. In the tradition of the Southern gentleman, Graham readies for the duel that honor demands be held to settle his dispute with Hoyle. Hoyle refuses to fight, thus setting the stage for a continued conflict between the two men throughout the course of the novel, to be exacerbated by the fact that the two men also come to compete for the attention of the Judge's daughter Stella.
Butler's bid for a Senate seat meets its most important challenge in the country Republican convention, his able opponent being a Carpetbagger of less than perfect morals by the name of Alexander Larkin. It is Larkin's intention to inter Butler's political future by winning the delegates of the Judge's own county over to his side. John Graham watches from the background, noticing that "the Judge was particularly sensitive to the atmosphere of a crowd of Negroes. He had to associate with them to get their votes, but like all poor men of Southern birth, he hated them without measure."(113) Larkin, the most unscrupulous and powerful Carpetbagger in the South, is smart enough to see the Negro as the key to his obtaining influence. He had given Graham the information concerning the manner by which Butler had come to own the Graham estate, only to have this scheme backfire on him; Graham's lawsuit had done nothing but make Butler a hero to county Republicans. As for Larkin, there were rumors of his past life in England, including a story that he had once spent time in prison. In the Reconstruction South, such negative character traits meant much less than they had in the hierarchical antebellum South. One thing that could not be disputed, though, was Larkin's total commitment to Negro equality. Dixon contends that even the Negroes were a little afraid of him, so strong was his commitment to their cause.(114) They were quickly warming to him, though; since ninety percent of Republicans in the South were Negroes, any serious Republican candidate depended fully on Negro support.
The key implement of Larkin's putsch at the convention came to be the utilization of Isaac A. Postle for his cause. Isaac is without a doubt the most intriguing character in the novel. He is the husband of Aunt Julie Ann, a three- hundred-pound woman. Julie Ann had formerly been the wife of Graham's manservant Alfred, leaving him for Isaac when she saw him beat Alfred up. From that moment on, she belonged to Isaac, seemingly drawn powerfully to manly shows of strength and power. Isaac himself had been a sort of wanderer in the immediate aftermath of emancipation. In time he comes to be a preacher, and during the course of his development he comes to refer to himself as a sinless person, an example of the Lord's "sanctification" of a personal messenger sent to earth. It so happens that the majority of his religious followers are women, however. In several ways he is the epitome of Negro insolence, owing to the fact that in public he proclaims his own sinless perfection but at home he constantly abuses Julie Ann. The twin themes of sex and violence are meshed in an elaborate manner in Isaac.
Knowing Butler's aversion to personal associations with Negroes, Larkin wins over Isaac and seats him beside the Judge; this action draws forth applause from the Negroes in the crowd. Butler cannot long abide Isaac's insolence and tells him to shut his mouth and behave himself. Larkin proceeds to nominate six Negroes as delegates, including Isaac. Isaac is allowed then to address the crowd; given this opportunity, he tells the audience of a "dream" he had recently had, one in which he and the Judge had been before the pearly gates; the gist of the tale is that the Butler rode his back up to the gate and then hitched him outside while he himself entered.
Larkin now seeks to boldly capture the county's delegation before Butler can react. In pursuit of such, he jumps up to the stand when Isaac finishes speaking and proceeds in giving a spontaneous and eloquent appeal for the equal rights of man; he makes quite sure that the audience understands this world is the equivalent of Negro rule in the South. His speech is dictated directly to the Negroes, urging them to use force if need be to bring about equality, for the time of justice can be delayed no longer. He denounces the Ku Klux Klan as a gang of criminals; this appeals to the Negroes, for they have never before had a white man publicly criticize the Invisible Empire. Only a step away from winning over the audience completely and destroying any and all support for Butler, his calling the Klansmen cowards incites John Graham's brother Billy to defend the society. The delay is a Godsend for Butler, who manages to get an adjournment in the immediate aftermath of Billy being led away. Butler now takes the initiative, calling Larkin to meet privately with him. Here he lays forth the evidence concerning his opponent that his private detective had discovered: his criminal record and the fact that he never obtained citizenship in America. Not satisfied with the mere political assassination of his opponent, Butler agrees not to go public with his information only when Larkin agrees to work for him, although Larkin will not simply concede defeat without his own covert plans for revenge.
As for John Graham's political ambitions, he gives them up to dedicate himself to destroy the rebel Klan under Hoyle. He organized vigilance committees to counteract Klan numbers. Success is only partial, as Hoyle and his men continue to commit violent acts on Negroes and certain whites, motivated solely by personal antipathy and revenge. Finally, the Klan is weakened, thereafter playing pranks rather than exacting physical punishment on anyone. One such prank scares the "sanctified" Isaac A. Postle from town momentarily. In time the Klan serves to do no more than attend parties in disguise. Butler's whole platform is based on destroying the Klan, yet his daughter Stella invites the Klan to show up at a party she herself throws. Graham watches events unfold with a sick dread, trying to warn Butler of danger. Butler is himself terrified, but he cannot stand to deny Stella any wish. During the party, when Butler journeys downstairs to make his short appearance at the request of Stella, eight hooded men in Klan garb emerge from the house's secret passageway to murder him and then disappear without a trace, leaving the blood stains of guilt seemingly on the innocent Klansmen there for the party.
The assassination of such a prominent member of society attracts national attention, quickly stirring up a reaction in the nation's capital to punish the whole South for the preponderance of such heinous deeds, resulting in the passage of the Conspiracy Act by Congress. This piece of legislation made Klan membership a felony with accompanying charges of murder, treason, and conspiracy. In addition, the President was given the right to declare martial law in any section of the South, upon which declaration the writ of Habeas Corpus could be suspended. The town of Independence is immediately put under the command of a military government, and two regiments of troops are sent in to investigate Klan activities there. Two months of investigation and a $10,000 reward fail to find a clue to the "Butler Murder Mystery." No trace of the rebel Klan can be found, as all men now denounce the secret society; nonetheless, the original purpose for which the Invisible Empire was formed remained in the hearts of all whites, and not one traitor arises to implicate his fellow culprits.
As the government begins to withdraw in failure, Stella vows to bring her father's murderer to justice; to do this, she must have conclusive proof of the identity of the Klan leader, whom she is certain is John Graham. Steve Hoyle has been a suitor of her, but he cowardly refuses to answer when she asks if John Graham is indeed the man, instead denying he has any connection at all with the Klan. She manages to evoke his comment that he would suspect John Graham for the murder because of his well-known hatred for the Judge. He boldly hypothesizes that Graham used the Klan to carry out an execution of Butler. His proposed solution is to have the Klan judge Graham, as they had judged others before. Graham in the meantime compels all members of the reckless Klan to flee to the West before some coward implicated them. He decides to take the blame on his own shoulders, for his failing to control Hoyle's disaffection.
Stella, with the aid of a detective by name of Ackerman, sets a trap for Graham. She asks Graham to handle her father's estate. She remains up to the date on events in the county, which include the departure of twelve young men and of Isaac, as well as the conflict between her father and Larkin at the convention. Most importantly, she learns of the existence of a secret passageway leading into the house, and in a week's time manages to entice Graham into revealing all his secrets concerning his old home. The passageway opens in a vault in the family cemetery, and here Ackerman finds footprints, but he cannot be sure what they mean, as one set seems to turn back from the entrance without going down the passageway itself. Ackerman deduced that one man showed a group of men the way of the passage then retreated to the outside himself.
While circumstantial evidence begins to strongly implicate Graham, Stella finds it hard to believe he could commit such a dastardly crime. These doubts she strives to ignore. She comes to talk of love with Graham, declaring that real lovers can have no secrets from one another. She asks him if he was a Klansman, and he pleads innocence in her father's murder; she goes on to ask him if he was the Klan leader in the state, and he cannot answer her. She rebukes him and ends the relationship. Graham, unwilling to lose her, decides to tell her the truth, calling her to meet him at the former home of General Gaston, "Inwood." He takes her into the basement where he shows her all the Klan's official papers, also admitting he led the Klan in North Carolina.
Stella wants to meet here again in two days to see him in his costume. Hoyle's men will surround the spot and take Graham. She admires the bravery of Graham and is nagged by doubts. On that next night at "Inwood," Graham tells her he entered the vault the night of Butler's murder but did not enter the passageway. He also tells her of his dissolution of the Klan. Suddenly Stella is convinced he is innocent and that she is in love with him. She panics when the Klansmen come to take him, but they come to be Graham's own men, who had ambushed Hoyle's forces earlier that evening. When they return to town, Graham is arrested. Stella now works to prove his innocence. Graham is found guilty, despite her work. Dixon describes his jury as the lowest tide-mud in history, being made up of "one dirty, ignorant white scalawag and eleven coal-black Negroes."(115) The sentence is a defeat for the whole white community. In Dixon's description, "a pall of helpless grief and fear hung over every decent white man who witnessed the High Court of Justice of the Anglo-Saxon race suddenly transformed into a Negro minstrel farce on which hung their liberty and life."(116) Despite the vast inconsistencies of his testimony, Isaac A. Postle is the prosecution's star witness. The defense counterattacks by presenting as evidence a pair of Isaac's shoes that matched the footprints found in the vault and the murder weapon itself, a knife which once belonged to him. Suddenly Larkin, who was a counselor for the prosecuting attorney, tried to flee the courtroom, but Ackerman restrains him, calling for his arrest as the true murderer of Butler. Isaac now confesses all, admitting he had shown him the secret entranceway to the house the existence of which he alone among local Negroes had knowledge of. He claimed Larkin had promised him that the plan would defeat the Klan, never intimating any plan to kill Butler.
Despite Larkin's guilt, John Graham, following the testimony of a long line of perjured witnesses, is convicted of conspiracy in his dealings with the Klan. Dixon presents this scene as a great tragedy: "John Graham, in whose veins flowed the blood of a race of world-conquering men, entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers, rose with quiet dignity and heard the verdict of his condemnation fall from the thick protruding lips of a flat-nosed Negro [foreman]."(117) A long list of Klan members face conviction in the following days. In time, though, all these men are fully pardoned. The final theme is a proclamation that time heals all wounds, even the severe lesions of Reconstruction. This is in accordance with Dixon's plea for Anglo-Saxon unity and the end of sectionalism in America.
The four years following the publication of The Traitor were transition years for Dixon. This first phase of his foray into historical fiction was in many ways a culmination of his ideology of the 1890s as a minister and orator. His racist conclusions, most particularly his total commitment to the idea of repatriation, were merely the natural results of his maturating world-view. He had now accomplished his first goal; he had voiced his interpretation of Reconstruction and the horrors borne by the Southern population in those chaotic years. Additionally, he had completed a trilogy on the dangers of Socialism , which in his mind was the second biggest danger the nation faced. "The Traitor" and several other dramatic productions enjoyed only limited success in these years, certainly falling short of matching the great popularity of "The Clansman." The poor sales figures of The Traitor seemed to suggest that the theme of Reconstruction was no longer one of great appeal to the American consciousness. Finding himself free of his self-imposed constraints concerning theme, Dixon could now plot for himself a new course, one in which he would follow up on the ideology he had already laid out before the general public by 1911. This transition time would move him into a new literary stage, an "Appeal for Authority,"(118) which would take him into the 1920s, at which time he would disappear from public view until the publication of his magnum opus in 1939, the perfect culmination of his life's work and a complete failure, as well. The end of The Traitor showed John Graham, having been released from prison, entering into the young field of textiles, achieving a prosperous life for himself and Stella. Thus, in 1907 Dixon still held out hope for the New South.
CHAPTER IV
FACE TO FACE WITH THE BEAST
The years between 1907, with the disappointing sales of The Traitor, and 1911 were years of indecision and lack of focus for Dixon. As always, he was doing several things at once, thus robbing him of keen focus. He had presented his revisionist history of the South in his Trilogy of Reconstruction. Now he needed to decide on a path that would follow up on his early literary success and drive his manner of thinking into the American consciousness, particularly his call for the Negro's repatriation. One particular drama he wrote and produced in this interlude was "The Sins of the Father," which in the words of Dixon researcher Stephen Karina was "a black and seamy tale of miscegenation."(119) Despite being Dixon's most extremist racial statement up to that time, it was a failure at the box office. Nevertheless, Dixon converted the play into a novel of the same name, which was published in 1911. This novel marked a turning point in the literary evolution of Dixon, representing as it did his sole novel devoted exclusively to detailing in explicit terms the apocalyptic dangers posed to mankind by miscegenation.
The Sins of the Father revealed much about how Dixon's ideas had adapted to the rapidly changing social and economic aspects of society, particularly those instigated by the propagation of industrialization in the New South. Dixon reacted to what he saw, but he was in the North almost exclusively, coming South only with running tours of his dramatic productions, for the most part. The Leopard's Spots had been written during a passionate time in his life; in 1902 the younger generation was reaching adulthood having never experienced life in antebellum days, the dark days of Reconstruction, or a society with any significant degree of racial integration, as had indeed been the case in the slave South. They had only witnessed the Populist-Republican threat to Democratic control of the South in the economic doldrums of the 1890s; this conflict of interests had emphasized class issues over racial conflicts. The Democrats, men such as Charles Gaston, had worked hard to assert race as the predominant campaign issue, arguing that economic woes could only be dealt with when the Negro problem had been taken care of, putting the full blame for all of society's ills on the Negro. The fusionist challenge had been dealt with in 1898 and 1900 following the Democrats' holy crusade of racial union in the form of white supremacy.
Radicalism as categorized in The Leopard's Spots continued to burn in the hearts of Southern whites fighting to forestall social equality, but by 1905 the younger and more liberal elements of white society began to see the Negro problem as a thing of the past, having been solved by disfranchisement at the start of the twentieth century. These men saw politics alone as the area in which the Negro could corrupt white civilization. Believing the Black Beast had been tamed, more and more whites began to accept the Negro as a permanent fixture in American life. The race was growing strongly in number, proving wrong an earlier notion that the Negro would die out as a result of his unclean manner of life, particularly vulnerable to venereal diseases; also, the mulatto proved to be quite capable of continuing his race. The fact that the Negro could learn and comprehend such subjects as science and higher mathematics seemed to argue against the portrayal of the Negro as an unintellectual brute. Feeling the Negro was in America to stay, liberals felt he should be educated and prepared for a useful role in society. The Jim Crow laws would deny the Negro any political or economic power, seemingly. Such thinking combined with the economic prosperity of the new century served to decrease the prevalence of race hatred after 1905, as evidenced by a decline in the number of lynchings each year. For Dixon, such a liberalizing influence could only help precipitate miscegenation rather than racial warfare. He did not know how to prevent the leftward turn his audience was making. At one point he almost decided to write no more novels and to concentrate on his plays. Finding his mode of thought already too extreme for mainstream America, low box office receipts propelled him back to the literary profession.
Publication of The Sins of the Father would serve to show Dixon's reaction to the modernization of society. He responded to the more moderate line of racial thought of the new age with a more reactionary and vitriolic attack on the Negro. He knew he needed a controversial and sensationalized plan of attack if he were to keep alive his hopes for Negro repatriation. No better topic than miscegenation could satisfy these needs. In his own horrible conception of race mixing, the inferior blood of the Negro polluted that of the Anglo-Saxon. Furthermore, in time it could lead to the creation of an army of invisible Negroes, those with white skin but also one drop or more of Negro blood in their veins. Such individuals could "pass" undetected into white society because they appeared white. Such Negroes were in Dixon's assessment a covert force--many even unaware of their own Negro blood--paving the way for the destruction of civilization. White resistance to amalgamation could lead to racial warfare, but the practice of ignoring the race problem could quickly topple the Anglo-Saxon world order before the danger could be detected. Dixon pleaded with his fellow man to act now, before such a catastrophe could occur, by effecting a complete physical separation of the races on different continents.
In the pages of The Sins of the Father one hears a slightly different message concerning race mixing than had been put forth in the Trilogy of Reconstruction. Dixon was writing more defensively, relying on graphic imagery and unabashed melodrama to warn his wandering audience that the Negro problem has just begun to pose a serious threat to America. John German Mencke in his doctoral dissertation concerning the portrayal of the mulatto in fiction explains the transition Dixon had now taken:
>Dixon shifted away somewhat from his earlier view that racial mixing was largely the result of the ill-thought actions of white men to the notion that it was primarily due to the untamed sexual passions of mulattoes and blacks.(120)
In The Leopard's Spots Rev. Durham had dismissed the existence of mulatto children as the result of indiscretion on the part of white men lacking the will to suppress their sexual lusts. Such a view did not speak well for the supposedly superior race of the Anglo-Saxon. The Negro was all but absolved of guilt by Durham because it was his very nature to live a slave to instinct and passion. The ability of the Anglo-Saxon man to suppress these strong forces marked a serious distinction between the races. Eventually, Durham was pointing to a spiritual rather than a physical flaw in the white male, whereas in the Negro the motivating force was on the physical plane.
As for the white Woman, she is beyond reproach in Dixon's novels--until The Flaming Sword. As God's heavenly representative of ideal love sent to earth, she held society together principally through the institution of marriage. She was pious, pure, domestic, and submissive.(121) Dixon followed the Victorian manner of thought to silently endorse the idea that the white Woman felt no sexual urges, sexual relations for her being a means by which to propagate the race rather than a pleasurable activity. Portrayed in such a virginal light, the violation of the white Woman is the most horrifying sin imaginable, infinitely so if it comes at the hands of a Negro brute.
The portrait of the voluptuous Cleo in The Sins of the Father is that of the ultimate seductress. She is the daughter of a common white man and his mulatto housekeeper. Major Daniel Norton, the Klan leader and devoted white supremacist, as well as a father and husband, is infatuated by his very first sight of her. A creature of such beauty as Cleo possesses is hard to see as a Negress, for she is almost wholly white in appearance. No white man can look at her without any sinful feelings. She is the equivalent of a sexual white woman in Norton's eyes: "As he [Norton] looked into her eyes he fancied he saw a young leopardess from an African jungle looking at him through the lithe, graceful form of a Southern woman."(122) Norton finds himself haunted by her face, despite his knowledge that she is a Negress. These feelings would have disappeared, Dixon strove to make clear, had not Cleo taken up the initiative to pursue him. Sexual lust is easily suppressed if the object of that lust is not a person with whom physical contact is a common part of life. For Norton, this does not happen, and time wears down his defenses until he sinks into the abyss of animalism.
Cleo clearly pursues the Major, first insisting on cleaning his office: he is the editor of The Daily Eagle and Phoenix, a reactionary newspaper known throughout the state for its bold racial ideology. In this role, Norton is the last man in the population who should fall into the arms of a Negro woman and be dragged down into animalism and heinous sin. As he watches Cleo work he cannot shake off the impression that "she was a sleek young animal, playful and irresponsible, that had strayed from home and wandered into his office."(123) Cleo's seeming innocence is no more than a means by which she hides her seductive nature, which she will ultimately use to entrap Norton. Norton's tragedy is a terrible one; while he is fighting to restore white rule to the South, he is "proving himself defenseless against the silent and deadly purpose that had already shaped itself in the soul of this sleek, sensuous young animal."(124) Norton seems doomed from the beginning. He sees she is in love with him and commits himself to uphold firmly racial purity. He relieves her of her cleaning duties but even in that scene Cleo is the one really in control. She looks at him as a cat would a mouse while he struggles to find the words by which to send her away. Nonplussed, as she leaves she says she will be waiting for him and asserts that he will come to her.
Meanwhile, Norton is arrested for his racial editorials as the Scalawag governor suspends the writ of Habeas Corpus. While in jail, Cleo begins to work for his invalid wife, her main job being to care for Norton's son. The Klan effects Norton's release from prison, and the men then ride to seek revenge on the governor. Only the former governor Cartaret, also Norton's wife's grandfather, talks them out of making such a rash move. He agrees that the Negro has "the instincts of the savage and the intelligence of the child,"(125) but the white man's victory must be a legal one, he insists. His sound advice is taken, and the next election sees the reins of power put back in the hands of the Democratic Party; Norton is a top choice for governor, as well. In his victory, though, are sown the bitter seeds of defeat. Norton has by now succumbed to Cleo's charms. Dixon portrays him as a victim, but even then no excuse can be made for the terrible sin of miscegenation.
Norton now lives with a Black Shadow threatening his family life and political future, and he is reminded of his moral degeneration daily by the presence of Cleo in his home. Adding to his sin is the fact that his wife is the epitome of Southern Womanhood, to whom miscegenation is a thought beyond comprehension. Her blind faith in her husband is soon destroyed when Cleo tells her of her husband's indiscretion. The sin is an unforgivable one for the frail wife, whose horror is only increased when her own mother, in trying to comfort her, informs her that her own husband had died in the cabin of a mulatto woman. She stresses the fact that the man must be forgiven for his weakness, but she also does nothing to dismiss the seriousness of the crime, blaming the very defeat of the South in war on this great sin of miscegenation: "The white motherhood of the South would have crushed slavery. Before the war began we had six hundred thousand mulattoes--six hundred thousand reasons why slavery had to die!"(126) Norton's wife manages to forgive him but she cannot forget. In a few short months, she dies, having lost her will to live.
Norton, beset by guilt and shame, now devotes himself to a close examination of the Negro in America. He concludes that the inherent danger of amalgamation far exceeds any value supplied by Negro labor in the South. Nothing can justify the weakening of the Anglo-Saxon's racial purity. His final estimation is that slavery was a retrogressive force that held back progress, particularly that of an economic nature, in the South. He espouses physical separation as the only possible solution to the Negro problem, moving up North with his son to bombard into his spirit a great commitment to upholding racial purity. Within several months, Norton receives a message from Cleo that she has had his child. This knowledge forces him into a state of great depression and resignation. This sense of futility is borne of his utter frustration concerning the reasons for the sin itself. He is unsure as to whom is to blame, for he cannot pin all the blame on himself. "Had it not been inevitable?" he asks over and over in his mind. "Did not such a position of daily intimate physical contact--morning, noon, and night--mean just this? Could she [Cleo] have helped it? Were they not both the victims, in a sense, of the follies of centuries?"(127) Dr. Williams in tending to his wife on the night of the terrible revelation offered sympathy to him as a defenseless victim. After all, "with that young animal [Cleo] playing at your feet in physical touch with your soul and body in the intimacies of your home, you never had a chance."(128) In other words, the doctor believes that the close proximity of the two races can but lead to the crime of miscegenation.
Herein was the heart of Dixon's argument for the complete separation of the races as a nation priority. It was a natural result of physical contact that led to miscegenation, he argued. Certainly he did pin substantial blame on the manipulative scheming of the mulatto woman, but her basic and natural desire for a sexual relationship with a white man was a natural component that came with the presence of Negro blood in her veins. Temptation could only be prevented by denying the races access to one another. Norton himself is a broken man, returning South with his son and Cleo, to oversee his son, she having given up her baby in the North for adoption. The implicit dread in Norton's resignation is akin to the white race, as miscegenation becomes more rampant in society, resigning itself to Dixon's apocalyptic future of amalgamation, the establishment of a Mulatto America, and the end of white civilization.
When the novel shifts twenty years ahead to the tumultuous 1890s, Norton has made his newspaper an even stronger organ calling for racial purity, his determination ever fueled by his own personal shame. His son Tom is now a young gentleman working alongside his father at the newspaper office. As part of the deal he had struck with her long ago, Cleo remains in the house. She represents to the Major a concrete example of the mulatto who would ultimately force the white race into an interracial union the likes of which would revert American society thousands of years. He does not ever "see" Cleo as a woman, only as a symbol which he utilizes to focus his line of attack against the Negro race, an example of the manifestation of sin into "the mongrel brood of a degraded nation."(129) Naturally, his fanaticism leads him back into politics. The Spanish-American War victory affords him this opportunity to organize a campaign of white unification. He leads a new campaign of white supremacy to electoral victory.
The Major espouses his ideology to a Professor Alexander Magraw from the Educational Movement in the South. Magraw asks him to tone down the fiery rhetoric of his editorials, for it is impeding his work to help educate the Negro. Norton assures him his campaign for racial purity is much more than political rhetoric. Magraw does not call for amalgamation, rather leaving time to decide the future. It is this ambivalence so prevalent in society that Dixon ever feared, for apathy allowed for the mongrelization of the white race through subterfuge. Norton sees no purpose for the Negro education Magraw is working toward, for the very coexistence of the two races side by side will lead to eventual amalgamation, and even the best of intentions will have no importance in shaping time's course. Thus, even though Magraw has no real desire to found a Mulatto America, Dixon warns him that it will be the necessary culmination of his project.
By this time Norton has devised a plan which could repatriate the Negro within two centuries. When the Southerner finally realizes that he in fact does not depend on Negro labor to survive, it can quickly be put in motion. When white men begin to see intermarriage incidents increase, they will wake up to the dangers of the Negro problem and join his crusade to save the white race. Norton sees his role as one of paving the way for the white man's awakening, hopefully much more quickly than it otherwise would come about. The predominant goals he is working toward are the Negro's disfranchisement, the repeal of the 15th Amendment, and the restoration of citizenship to the white man exclusively. Magraw sits in disbelief as Norton sermonizes the true nature of racial mixing:
The first great crime against the purity of our racial stock was the mixture of blood which the physical contact of slavery made inevitable.But the second great crime, and by far the most tragic and disastrous, was the insane Act of Congress inspired by the passions of the Reconstruction period by which a million ignorant black men, but yesterday from the jungles of Africa, were clothed with the full powers of citizenship under the flag of Democracy and given the right by the ballot to rule a superior race.(130)
Continuing, Norton calls the Emancipation Proclamation a war measure and nothing more. Lincoln had no intention of assimilating the Negro, he informs Magraw; rather, he sought to repatriate him at the end of the war. The act perpetrated on the fateful night of April 15, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, "the great crime against Democracy,"(131) ended the discussion of such action as the Radical Republicans in Congress quickly seized power to push through a severe punishment on the rebellious Southern states. No greater insult could be inflicted on the white Southerner than the stripping of his citizenship for the purpose of setting up the Negro in command. This great crime he blames on the North, a worse act than had ever even been thought of by the most barbaric of Yankee soldiers. Political equality breeds social equality, which is essentially the deliverance of the American nation into the hands of a Mulatto race.(132)
Norton still feels very threatened by the existence of Cleo, who has been silent for twenty years concerning the truth of their former relationship. Yet Norton has seen lately a look of desperation in the creature, now beginning to lose her beauty as the tell-tale signs of the Negro blood in her veins begin to surface. He knows she loves Tom, though, and convinces himself she would do nothing to hurt him while he is touring the state in his campaign. The night before he leaves, though, Cleo confronts him and for the first time in twenty years demands the right to love him. He is sent into paroxysms of anger and only by a massive force of will restrains himself from killing her then and there, to rid himself of this Black Shadow once and for all. She only laughs at his pitiful state. This episode is a moving analogy to the Negro problem itself. The white man is often hostile in his passions regarding the Negro, representing as it does the perpetual threat and outrage symbolized in the African. The emotional desire is often simply to kill the Negro, for this action alone can remove the threat of Negro barbarism. Reason barely wins out and destroys his boiling desire for blood. In terms of the South as a whole, the reader is asked to consider how much longer reason can retain control of the white consciousness and keep in check the powerful stirrings of racial warfare.
Norton on this night reacts so passionately to her threats because for twenty years he has tried to ignore her very existence. This moment of insight is representative of the birth of the Radical mentality in the 1890s; the realization that the Negro is to be a permanent fixture in American society awakens the white population and forces society's leaders to examine the Negro problem closely, the result of such an undertaking Dixon maintains to be the realization of the threat of miscegenation. In essence, Dixon is calling for the white man, even at this late date, to unite in the fight of a holy crusade against amalgamation, which Dixon believes to be the divine purpose of the Anglo-Saxon race in America.
When Norton departs for the campaign trail, Cleo forges his signature and invites her daughter visit. This girl--Helen--has grown up in a Northern convent with no knowledge of her parentage, only being told that Norton is her guardian. Helen arrives, and from the start she and Tom, Norton's son, fall in love, having no knowledge of their close blood kinship. Such is Cleo's plan for revenge against Norton, combining race and sex to insure drastic results. When he learns what Cleo has done, Norton is furious and terrified for his son. He knows Helen is ignorant of her condition, but he cannot allow his son to take a Negress for a wife, especially when she is also his half-sister. Painfully, he works up the nerve to tell Helen she has Negro blood and can thus never marry. She agrees with this, citing an example of one girl who found out she had hidden Negro blood when her child was born a Negro. Dixon fully believed that a mulatto, no matter how far removed from his Negro progenitor, can suddenly breed back to a full-blooded Negro. Helen, although traumatized, agrees that to pass Negro blood into a white family line is a heinous sin that cannot be justified.
Tom confronts his father and refuses to give Helen up, despite her element of Negro blood. It is the Major's great hope that he can prevent their marriage without having to admit to his son his own racial sin. He defends his prejudicial stance to his son: "the white man's instinct of racial purity is not prejudice, but God's first law of life--the instinct of self-preservation! The lion does not mate with the jackal!"(133) The Negro is millennia behind the white man in terms of development--such a chasm cannot be bridged. It is not color per se that is responsible for inferiority, for the mulatto that "passes" over the racial line is still a Negro. There is no easy solution. "Change every black skin in America to-morrow to the white of a lilly [sic] and we'd yet have ten million negroes--ten million negroes whose blood relatives are living in Africa the life of a savage,"(134) he explains to his son. One's personal feelings cannot let one take an action that will have long-term effects on future generations and society itself. The white race must always keep in mind the consequences of miscegenation:
No white man ever lived who desires to be a negro. Every negro longs to be a white man. No black man has ever added an iota to the knowledge of the world of any value to humanity. In Helen's body flows sixteen million tiny drops of blood--one million black--poisoned by the inheritance of thousands of years of savage cruelty, ignorance, slavery and superstition. The life of generations are [sic] bound up in you . . . You are bound by the laws of heredity--laws that demand a nobler not a baser race of men! . . . You have no right to damn a child with such a legacy!I tell you, you can't defy these laws! They are eternal--never new, never old--true a thousand years ago, to-day, to-morrow and on a million years, when this earth is thrown, a burnt cinder, into God's dust heap.(135)
Surely now Tom must understand the reasons for forbidding an inter-racial marriage. The future of the white race depends on the preservation of white purity. Norton, caught up in his emotions, continues his tirade over miscegenation:
But yesterday our negroes were brought here from the West Soudan, black, chattering savages, nearer the anthropoid ape than any other living creature. And you [Tom] would give to a child such a mother? Who is this dusky figure of the forest with whom you would cross your blood? In old Andy [Norton's negro servant] there you see a creature half child, half animal. For thousands of years beyond the seas he stole his food, worked his wife, sold his child, and ate his brother--great God, could any tragedy be more hideous than our degradation at last to his racial level!(136)
The fear in the hearts of white men for the Negro race is not simply a fear of the black man; rather, it is a dread of being brought down to the Negro's animalistic level. It is the greatest danger the Anglo-Saxon race could ever face, and it must be taken as such. The barriers between the races must never be let down, for "a pint of ink can make black gallons of water. The barriers once down, ten million negroes can poison the source of life and character for a hundred million whites."(137) The most sacred aspect of white society is the family, based as it is on monogamic marriage. The sanctity of the family must be protected if civilization is to remain pure.
Tom ask him why he allowed him to be raised alongside the Negro and not until adulthood told to erect a racial barrier. He then goes on to comment on the number of mulattoes evident in the Southern population; surely this is a sign that the white race is not firmly committed to racial purity. Interestingly, the Major blames miscegenation on the lower elements of white society. However, he makes a point to say that those guilty of this sin never defend their actions. Tom shocks his father by informing him he and Helen are already married and then goes to his wife. Norton goes after Cleo to demand of her how she could do this. She now appears as a monster to his eyes, all of her former beauty gone. Looking at her, Norton was wondering "how a man of his birth and breeding, the heir to centuries of culture and refinement, of high thinking and noble aspirations, could ever have sunk to the level of this yellow animal--this bundle of rags and coarse flesh! It was incredible! His loathing for her was surpassed by one thing only--his hatred of himself."(138) Seeing her as an animal, he understands Cleo's lack of morality but he cannot comprehend why she would destroy herself in the process. If she loved Tom, she could no nothing to hurt him. He doubts her very humanity. In questioning her he learns that she did not know of the marriage, that things have gotten out of her own control.
Norton remains faithful to his basic conviction that a noble death is better than a dishonorable life; with this thought in mind and a loaded revolver in his desk, he calls Tom for a final word. Painfully, he begins to confess his awful secret to his son. Only a full confession will convince his son that Helen is a Negress. When Tom realizes that Cleo must be Helen's mother, he is horrified. He cries out, asking why he did not kill him before telling him this. The Major takes out the gun and admits only cowardice had prevented him doing this very thing. There is little left to be done, for he cannot undo the past, nor can he excuse his sin:
There's no appeal, my boy! The sin of your father is full grown and has brought forth death. Yet I was not all to blame. We are caught to-night in the grip of the sins of centuries. I tried to give my life to the people to save the children of the future. My shame showed me the way as few men could have seen it, and I have set in motion forces that can never be stopped [referring to his political victory of that night]. Others will complete the work that I have begun. But our time has come--"(139)
The son stands four paces from his father, his noble head held erect. Meanwhile, Cleo has found a viewing place from which to watch the scene in terror. She leaps into the room, but already the Major has fired the bullet of moral salvation for his son. This noble act being complete, he puts the revolver to his own temple and fires.
In the wake of this tragedy, Helen runs into the room to where Tom lies prostrate on the floor. Amazingly, he still lives, the bullet having exited his head without damaging the brain for the reason that he held his head back to meet death bravely. When he awakens, he insists he has to die because he has married his own mulatto half-sister. The doctor, though, tells him this is not the truth; bringing Cleo into the room, he forces out of her lips the confession that her own baby had died and she had found another child with which to blackmail Norton. Helen is a pure white with no mark of the Beast. Tom and Helen go on to enjoy a happy life together. Tom takes up where his father had left off, dedicating the newspaper to the cause of racial purity. Never again, from that day on, though, does a Negro pass into the Norton house.
* * * * * * *
This increased focus on the dangers of miscegenation shows a more reactionary Dixon, one now very suspicious of the Negro race. More emphasis is put on segregation than in his Reconstruction novels. For example, Norton had put Helen into a convent because he wanted to spare her any confrontation with either race, thinking her to be a mulatto. Dixon could not put all the blame for miscegenation on the naturally sexual Negro. It is hard to specify just whom Dixon blamed for the sin of racial mixing. The white man in his weakened spirit following extended contact with a Negro temptress is the determining factor as to whether or not an interracial tryst takes place, but Dixon described the position of such a man as one of manipulation at the hands of the Negress. Over and over there are references made to the call of the Beast. Just as no man could resist the song of the Sirens in Homer's epic of Odysseus, seemingly the white man, weak in spiritual fortitude, was unable to hold out indefinitely against the overt sexuality of the Negro female; this thrust was basically now attributed to the mulatto, for the white and Negro had segregated themselves out in society. Daily contact with the yellow race was not as easy to resist. One can see the tenuous position of the mulatto in society. Cleo, an octoroon, in no way considers herself a Negro, having nothing but disdain for that particular race. Her Negro traits are almost unrecognizable, and she thinks of herself as having a white soul merely contained in a yellow skin. In times of panic or anger, though, the Negro heritage in her blood rises to the surface. Norton had several times seen the light of the African jungle in her eyes. Owing to four thousand years of primitivism compared to Anglo-Saxon progress, the Negro, Dixon claimed, is ashamed of his heritage; the Negro does not want to be a Negro. For such a reason, Dixon's Negro characters try to exploit any physical similarities they might share with the white race, the most common example being the disdain lighter Negroes have for coal-black Africans. Of course, Dixon also maintained that a large component of the Negro race's dream to be white was his sexual lust for the white Woman.(140)
The twin themes that arise from the pages of this graphic novel are the inevitability of miscegenation in an America of two races and the specification of the mulatto as the agent for America's doom. The mulatto, particularly the mulatto woman, possessing some benefits as a result of the white blood of intellect in her veins, is in essence the vanguard sent forth by the Negro, intent on destroying Anglo-Saxon civilization by destroying the institution of marriage and corrupting the morality of white society.(141) Dixon's argument was based on a genetic interpretation of life, albeit one not fully accredited by modern science. Negro blood was a dangerous disease, one that could quickly spread to epidemic proportions; furthermore, only a few Negroes could begin the process by which the entire white race would be polluted. Furthermore, he saw white traits disappearing as miscegenation went on for generations, while he also proposed that a reversion to Negro-ness could occur at any time, no matter how little Negro blood is pumping through a baby's veins. It is this stress on the hereditary nature of Negro traits and the possibility for primitive reversion no matter how far removed from Africa that Dixon made into a racial crime. Dixon presented the figure of 90% to explain just how much of an individual's characteristics are inherited from his ancestors, thus further bulwarking his argument that only one Negro progenitor can destroy generations of whites.
Central to the interpretation of The Sins of the Father is the point that Dixon for the first time was showing the mulatto as consciously striving for amalgamation, not for the lust which arguably had led full Negroes to rape white women in the South of the 1890s but rather as a means by which to seize control of society for the yellow race. The mulatto was the real threat to America's future, especially given her indeterminable nature. As always, the South felt sure it could handle the Negro, but the cunning mulatto who could often "pass" as a white was literally a "whole new animal." The seeds of this national crisis had been sown in the antebellum South, where society was significantly integrated. Race mixing was instigated by Southern mavericks exploiting their power over the female Negro slave. Some owners went so far as to provide for their black mistresses, but the main point was that the white man almost exclusively was to blame for America's first generation of mulattoes. Racial boundaries were being pulled down before the outbreak of the War Between the States. In that era, the small but increasing mulatto population grew, having by 1861 reached suitable numbers to self-perpetuate. One common mode of thought held by Southerners in the grips of social upheaval during Reconstruction and the years after it was one in which the mulatto was thought of as human kind's mule, the offspring of two different species who was unable to bear young. The mulatto, though, did not die out but rather kept increasing in number. By the time Dixon was writing, the mulatto did pose a threat. It was the mulatto who led the Negro population in the push for civil rights at the start of the century. Negroes like W. E. B. DuBois were white enough to "pass" over the racial line if they so chose. The Negro in the form of the elite guard of light-skinned mulattoes was in essence performing covert operations; one had to make sure of a lover's lineage before deciding to wed, so deep was the threat of the "invisible Negro." On top of this, the mulatto had a reason to push for the end of white power; rejected by their former paternalist allies (and fathers) after the war, they found themselves having to live now as Negroes. Social equality would give them free reign over their private lives.
It can be argued, as Dixon himself did, that the mulatto was especially ashamed of the Negro heritage he carried; wanting to be white, they wish to marry a white or mulatto like themselves. This intellectual preference for the white race, coupled with the animalistic lusts associated with their Negro blood, led to a widespread conscious effort on the part of the mulatto to seduce the white individual. This was Dixon's argument in this novel. A Negress such as Cleo has nothing to lose in loving a white man, leaving her free from violent punishment should she attempt to seduce any such man. This is not so much the case for the mulatto male, for the Victorian ideal of Womanhood still proved a major force in Southern society. The white males had in fact turned more to the protection of their women after the war, substituting what they could not manage to do in terms of provision for their families by physical protection. Ku Klux Klan activities and widespread lynchings of black men perceived as or charged as rapists arose out of this exaggeration of the white man's role as protector of white Womanhood.
Dixon argued for Negro repatriation by purporting that the mulatto had as a conscious goal the defilement of pure white blood. Due to the new threat of the mulatto as an "invisible" agent able to function undetected in the white world, Dixon argued that segregation by itself was no long-term solution to the Negro problem. In the black world itself, restructured by the depoliticalization of the Negro in the disfranchisement movement in the turn-of-the-century South, a black middle class was beginning to develop out of the colored masses by 1910, one good example being the founding in Durham of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company. The organizers of this successful enterprise, led by John Merrick, were formerly active in the fusionist political campaigns of the 1890s, in which Negro Republicans and poor white farmers in the guise of the People's Party, or Populists, joined forces. The Democratic counterattack to this mobilization of lower class persons of both races had been a fierce campaign based almost exclusively on the issue of white supremacy. The majority of Negroes were disfranchised in the aftermath of the 1900 elections. Booker T. Washington had recommended vocational work and political uninvolvement for the Negro. Dixon in his sermons of the late 1890s had called for the same response by the Negroes. The Negro must go into business and earn a place for himself in the economic sphere rather than blindly putting his faith in politics. Of course, by 1905 Dixon had come to denounce Tuskegee's president for what he now interpreted to be subterfuged desires for racial amalgamation. In the first year of the twentieth century, the Negro's successful ventures into the economic realm began to antagonize and frighten some white leaders because important successes were coming about. Political power as an expedient toward the winning of social equality had been blocked by disfranchisement. The Negro had not given up his dreams, though; he merely sought a new road toward the establishment of an integrated society by way of economic power and influence. This growing economic nature of Negro life frightened Dixon, for he read it as a means by which the Negro goal of amalgamation would be realized. In The Sins of the Father, Cleo frankly tells Norton that the Negro race, via the instrument of the mulatto population, was lying silent while slowly gaining economic power; she prophesies that once sufficient influence and power have been achieved, the Negro race will demand and receive social equality from the white man in America.
CHAPTER V
AN HISTORICAL APPEAL
Having put forth his argument for solving the Negro problem by repatriating the Negro in Africa via what he calls "friendly colonization" Dixon was far from the end of his efforts. His racial paranoia was ever increasing as he tried to prove his case to an American public that had moved away from him. He published a string of biographical novels in the second decade of the century, his goal in such being to convince his reading audience of the evils of miscegenation he had laid out in The Sins of the Father; his plan was to portray heroes of the past as Dixonian thinkers in regard to the Negro question and its possible solution. As throughout his literary career, he tried to link the North and South as one common force for Anglo-Saxon supremacy, even in part during the fighting of the Civil War. Dixon's argument is to a significant degree based on an assumption on his part that slavery would have ended of its own accord; this argument seemingly blames the North for instigating the Civil War needlessly. He absolved the South of virtually any guilt by identifying these "rebel" states as forced into a position where war inevitably resulted as the South stood firmly behind the words of the federal Constitution. The South was thus the haven for American democratic tradition, and here the ideals of the Founding Fathers were defended with the lives of millions of noble men.
Dixon interpreted the Constitution as a document containing no provisions for racial equality. He claimed that slavery as an institution was not formally included in the Constitution because the Founding Fathers, reflecting a strong Southern bent, knew that it would not survive permanently in America due to its very nature. Dixon interpreted the fact that no provision was made in the document for the Negro after slavery to mean that they had seen no place in America for the Negro as an equal member of society.
Dixon at times seemed ambivalent toward slavery, claiming to hate it as an ungodly system while also praising its positive, civilizing effects. It was at this point in his literary career that he tried to cast slavery in a positive light. His method was similar to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, bringing a Yankee into the system and recording his reactions. Of course, the two authors posited entirely different interpretations. Dixon saw himself as a messenger to the North, a prophet who would correct the false perceptions that had run rampant in Northern literature concerning the Civil War and, more importantly, Reconstruction, with a focus on social conditions before and after the war. Slavery in Dixon's description was an economically inefficient system, due in large part to the upkeep of nonproductive slaves. Dixon took a critical stance toward the Northerner, whom he characterized as misinformed at best and ignorant in general concerning the Negro. Only the Southerner showed an interest in blacks as individuals.
The Negro slave described in Dixon's run of biographical novels is a happy, contented servant to an acknowledgedly superior white race. The slaves of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are especially happy on the antebellum plantation. For these slaves, the separation of family members is an unknown concept. Punishment is only meted out when absolutely necessary; a flogging is by no means a common occurrence. Dixon also showed the white overseer to be a rarity, blacks usually holding the position of foreman. All in all, the Negroes are happy. If they were mistreated, Dixon logically said that they should have rebelled and stood up for their rights as men and as a race. He contended that Confederate manpower would have been insufficient to put down any such uprising while engaging the Union forces. In the hands of Dixon, the Civil War is used to show the inherent lies espoused by Abolitionists. The Negro, not yet developed enough to provide for his own needs beyond the level of an animal, was groomed for higher culture by the civilizing aspect of slavery. In the urban setting of his own time, Dixon saw countless blacks left to die in the streets, whereas in the antebellum era they would have been taken care of by their masters. In such a context slavery is interpreted as an educational system occupying a middle ground between African barbarism and Western civilization.
The legend of John Brown also largely influenced Dixon. Along with a novel devoted to Brown, The Man in Gray, Dixon also wrote a stillborn play, "The Torch," on Brown's famous raid. Brown is shown by Dixon in a less than favorable light, the violence of his character standing out especially in comparison to Dixon's portrayal of Lee and Davis as genuinely good, nonviolent men. Dixon went so far as to paint Brown not as a fanatic but rather as the epitome of the narrow-minded Abolitionist. The South's error was in failing to recognize President Lincoln as a Southerner. Dixon now extended his acerbic attack, once more calling up the spirit of Thaddeus Stevens, this time to engage in a public flogging of the Great Commoner. In 1905's The Clansman Stevens, as portrayed in the character of Austin Stoneman, had been a misguided idealist corrupted by his wily mulatto mistress Lydia Brown. Now Stevens was portrayed as a "radical fanatic" whose guided purpose was the destruction of Southern white civilization. His plan had been to give the land to the Negro, then set himself over a Southland now turned into a major military district.(142) Dixon by now saw no grain of decency in the man who had driven Radical Reconstruction down the throats of Southerners.
The Northerners Dixon now brings into the South to record their actions all oppose the Radical Reconstruction plan to make of the South a large "negro territory" under military control. They easily observe that such a farce has no relation to the Democracy upon which the American Republic had been founded. The Negro needs more training before he can become an active, competent voter, these Northern men attest. Certainly nothing of the sort would have been tolerated in the North. They even conclude that the Ku Klux Klan was justified in its actions because the black man in his inferior character and irresponsible nature had called forth this White Beast from the dark netherworld; such racial violence is condoned in these novels as being only a necessary reaction to Negro lawlessness. To dignify and condone this white reaction in the form of Klan violence, Dixon utilized the noble character of Governor Cartaret in The Sins of the Father. His tolerant, wise nature and his call for reason over fanaticism in dealing with the racial conflict help to show the white man as the agent of Right, lifting the White Beast's actions above the level of sexual mixing on the part of the white man.
In the 1870s a racial armistice had been reached and Reconstruction brought to a close. In such a compromised world, the South endured twenty years of relative peace. It was the events of the 1890s that stirred up the feelings of Dixon and his fellow Radicals because in this decade the Negro threat was brought once more to the forefront of society's problems, not by the Negro but by the Populist, organized in this time of economic hardship to fight the authority of the upper-class whites. To have any impact on politics, these white men set aside racial prejudices for class demands and allied themselves with the Republican Party in a combined effort to steal power away from the Democrats. To Dixon, such a threat could only be judged as a push for the return of "Negro domination." Certainly Dixon saw the Populist revolt as a very ominous omen for the future of the land. Elements of the white race were actually putting class issues over racial ones. The true white Southerner, Dixon proclaimed, rose up in passion over such a threat and kept power in the hands of those descendants of the Founding Fathers. The victory of Charles Gaston in The Leopard's Spots showed this very thing. Appalled at the momentary break in white racial unity, the Democratic Party worked quickly to disfranchise the Negro and set up a permanent one-party South. In short order the Jim Crow laws were instituted and the Negro's dream for political power removed. The Sins of the Father dealt in part with this rebellion of certain white men, which in essence was a precursor to the Socialist threat Dixon feared. The hidden ties of Socialism and race one can read into The Sins of the Father would ultimately be dealt with in the grand culmination of Dixon's literary career in 1939.
This fall from grace of the Southern white man depended much on the work and influence of Booker T. Washington in the late 1890s. Despite an initially positive response to his work at Tuskegee, Dixon came to see the Negro leader as a great threat to the South's effort to keep the Negro in an inferior position. In effect, the white ranks now split once again, quickly on the heels of the refutation of the Populist challenge, over the issue of the Negro's proper place in society. Dixon saw matters as leading to a society in which the Negro was not relegated to menial servitude. It was this turn of events that had led him into a writing career, for he saw the promise of economic equality for the Negro to be an even larger threat to the foundation of Southern society than had been the threat of political equality during Reconstruction. Once the Negro achieved an element of economic self-sufficiency, social equality could not be far behind; in Dixon's mind, this meant amalgamation. Thus had his crusade begun, spurred on by the fear that the South would lose the ability to deal with the Negro labor problem.
The most dangerous advantage Booker T. Washington's forces enjoyed was the support of liberal whites for their cause. Even Dixon, far from being a liberal, had initially seen Washington as a good man, until he came to believe the Negro leader secretly wanted amalgamation and nothing less. The quintessential example of such a liberal is seen in Professor Magraw, a character based significantly on John Spencer Basset of Trinity College, a Southerner well known for his liberal racial philosophy. Basset was known for calling Washington the second greatest Southerner of the nineteenth century, surpassed only by Robert E. Lee.(143) Magraw, when he visits the office of Major Norton to elicit support for his liberal cause of Negro education, puts Washington in the seat of preeminence over even the South's gentleman leader.
Dixon was suspicious of the Northern philanthropist of the late nineteenth century, considering his actions to be far from humanitarian in purpose; rather, he believed such philanthropy to be a conscious attempt to subvert Southern whites into liberal racial thinking. Particularly was this felt to be the case in terms of education. Dixon feared that the young minds of the future generation would be corrupted by demented policies belittling the notions of racial purity and the paternalistic duty of the Southern Anglo-Saxon toward the inferior Negro race. There was room for hope, though, for Dixon viewed the Democratic reassertion of political power and the disfranchisement victory as signs of the white man coming to recognize the extent of the Negro threat. The aura of peace and national reconciliation following the Spanish-American War served to weaken greatly the civil rights struggle on a national level. It was in this fertile ground of reunification and common sense that Dixon had tried to plant his seeds for a repatriation campaign as a means by which permanent victory could be assured.
The initial stage of Dixon's literary career was one in which he attempted to show the Negro as incapable of participating fully in the political process in America. The Trilogy of Reconstruction was devoted to this cause. The second stage consisted of his historical and biographical novels of the 1910s, beginning with The Sins of the Father, the purpose being to prove innate, irreconcilable differences between the Negro and white races. Apart from necessary cultural differences, Dixon stressed the existence of a racial chasm four thousand years in the making, millennia in which Anglo-Saxon progress was matched in Africa by stagnation. The Negro is genetically incapable of performing any but the most mundane of tasks, he argued. He is a simpleton, whose ignorance of modern complexities is matched only by his appalling laziness. A heathen until brought to American shores, the Negro has no understanding of the Protestant work ethic. This message of Negro indolence was aimed at the Southerner rather than the Northerner, for Dixon felt the North to be more racist in sentiment than the South due to a large degree of isolation from contact with the inferior race. The South, built on an integrated foundation in antebellum days, still did not recognize how useless the Negro was for the economic progress of the New South. Dixon distinguished himself from other right-wing racial extremists by arguing that slavery was an inefficient system that actually held the South back economically while benefiting the Negro by introducing him to Christianity and civilization.
At the heart of Dixon's racial warnings was his insistence upon the deep-rooted savagery of the Negro, a primeval force that could spontaneously reawaken in even the simplest, most faithful Negro. This held for the white-skinned mulatto as well as for the coal-black West African. For four thousand years Negroes had been led by the cerebellum while the cerebrum had failed to be develop. The most refined American Negro could never dissociate himself completely from his arbitrary passions and instincts. The sexual instinct ran stronger, making the threat of racial mixing a permanent part of American life. Continued contact did little to improve the hereditary makeup of the Black Beast because four thousand years of stagnation could not be overcome overnight. What is possible, though, in Dixon's psyche, is that the white man, being a weak-willed creature himself, can be tempted and degraded by the continuous temptation offered him in the form of the immoral Negro woman.(144)
In order for his argument to stand, Dixon had to characterize the Negro as inferior to even the poorest class of white men. There was of course the problem of the lower-class white often living at a level more degrading than that of the Negro, particularly in the antebellum South. Dixon skirted this dilemma by specifying grand differences between racial heritage and social condition. One's quality of life was determined by chance; one could be born into poverty or wealth, with no connection to racial makeup. Social conditions and not racial inheritance determined one's class. Fully recognizing the threat of the Populist-Republican alliance of the 1890s as one empowered by a blending of race and class issues, Dixon set out to extinguish any perceived ties between race and class. In many instances, Dixon even went so far as to blame white poverty on the Negro. Tom Camp feels this way in The Leopard's Spots. He cannot stand the Negro and never could. In trying to explain this natural aversion, he tells Rev. Durham, "Somehow [I] always felt like they was crowdin' us to death on them big plantations and the little ones, too. And then I had to leave my wife and baby and fight four years, all on account of their stinkin' hides, that never done nothin' for me except make it harder to live. Every time I'd go into battle and hear them Minie balls begin to sing over us, it seemed to me I could see their black ape-faces grinnin' and makin' fun of poor whites."(145) The fact remained that the Negro was a serious economic competitor for jobs. This added support to Dixon's crusade against economic equality as a corollary to his opposition of political equality. By demanding the Negro hold no job above the level of menial service, Dixon appealed to the common white man as well as the aristocrat.
The ultimate purpose of Dixon's writing was to offer a workable solution to the Negro problem. He had shown the differences between the races and expounded on the dangers of coexistence in an American Democracy; he followed his argument to a logical conclusion by presenting his findings and suggestions to the public. He was writing to inspire action, not mere contemplation. Disfranchisement he favored, in that it blocked the path by which social equality could be reached by way of political equality. Legislation limiting civil rights, he warned, was only a temporary solution, though. He truly feared that the South and nation itself wrongly felt the Negro question to have been solved. This was a common sentiment in the North following the victory of the Union forces, but Dixon sought to prove that the real Negro problem, that of "Negro domination" and insolence, only began with the Emancipation Proclamation. The ultimate Democratic refutation of the fusionist threat of the 1890s, carrying into law a policy of Negro disfranchisement, had led even many Southerners to see the Negro problem as a danger of the past; this was particularly the case when the Jim Crow South has been created by 1905. Dixon insisted that such naivete was wishful thinking. The Negroes will not disappear if you ignore him, he told racial optimists. General Worth in The Leopard's Spots typifies this policy of cultural isolationism, hiring only white men to work in his mills. Certainly this policy did to a large degree limit interracial contact, but it also left the blacks free to group together and work toward securing a degree of economic power for themselves. Disfranchisement was only the first step in dealing with the real race problem.
Dixon always remained in the role of propagandist, becoming more and more desperate to correct the South's mistakes. The South was trying to ignore the Negro because its citizens were weary of racial conflict and shamed by certain behavior by elements in their own ranks--the Wilmington Riot of 1898, the Atlanta Riot, the number of lynchings in the South, etc. The South now wanted peace. Thus, Dixon after 1905 began to see lynchings decrease in number and watched his reactionary rhetoric fall out of favor. As the White Beast returned to its state of hibernation, the fear of miscegenation gradually destroying civilization became Dixon's obsession. He became more desperate as his work drew a smaller and smaller audience, retreating further into himself and adopting even more reactionary ideas.
In writing Man in Gray and The Southerner, Dixon brought facts and statistics into his argument, although the truth of these declarations was far from unimpeachable. Robert E. Lee, he argued, had harbored serious doubts about the South's peculiar institution. Dixon often would lead the reader to believe that no white Southerner had supported slavery. Subjecting himself to fervent criticism and ridicule, he blamed not just the Civil War but also the preservation of slavery on the North . Every respectable historical character Dixon brought into his fictional universe supports Negro repatriation as the only possible solution to the Negro problem, most particularly Lee, Davis, and Lincoln. In The Southerner, not only does Lincoln describe his Emancipation Proclamation as simply a war measure designed to cripple the vulnerable South economically, he even goes so far as to ask for Negro volunteers to colonize a Negro nation in Central America.
As Dixon entered the 1920s he was virtually a forgotten man. His popularity, disregarding that afforded him by the release of Birth of a Nation, was almost nonexistent. What publicity he did receive was negative, especially regarding the spontaneous formation of a new Ku Klux Klan, which many accused Dixon of having influenced. It is true that Dixon glorified the Klan of Reconstruction days, but he also cursed its recklessness. The new Klan actually pointed to Dixon as an influence, principally referring to the heroic role given the Invisible Empire in Birth of a Nation. This stigma has led many historians up to this day to dismiss Dixon as a rabid racist in large part responsible for the spontaneous generation of the Klan in the twentieth century. The truth of the matter was that this reckless movement appalled Dixon, for it was an element he would condemn as a resurrection of the White Beast, the very organism he feared for its primitive and violent nature more strongly than even the individual crimes of the Black Beast, for the roar of the White Beast was an animalistic roar for racial degeneration and moral degradation. Evidence for his outspoken condemnation of the bastard Klan can be found in his 1924 novel The Black Hood, the purpose of which was to express the dangers of lawlessness and mob justice.
After the publication of The Black Hood Dixon fell virtually completely into a world of anonymity; this man who had been a success his whole life now had to abide an extended period with no real successes. There is no evidence that he took an active part in spreading his reactionary message in this decade of silence, apart from his unsuccessful lobby to the North Carolina legislature in 1938 to at least support in theory his recommendation for Negro repatriation.(146) By the mid-1930s Dixon admitted what he had long known--he was a defeated man, by now far removed from the currents of modern thought. He simply could not accept the great changes in race relations since 1902. His failure to adapt to ideological progressivism painted Dixon as a more conservative thinker of the New South mode. With the desertion of his audience, he moved ever farther to the political right. Certainly he now saw the Negro as a permanent fixture in American life. The proud genius became a pauper in the 1930s, losing all his money in a real estate venture. Although now an old man upon whom death was beginning to cast its grim shadow, he put all of his remaining energy into one final project, the culmination of his life's work. This novel, though, would be a huge failure, a conclusive sign that Dixon even before his death in 1946 had become a forgotten man in history, a social anachronism.
* * * * * * *
Dixon's self-appointed messianic role was evidenced in 1910 by his creating the drama "Sins of the Father." In the novel based on this play, Norton's words are put forth as the obvious equivalent of Dixon's personal mission: "He had begun his work at the beginning. He had tried to do things that were impossible. The minds of the people were not yet ready to accept the idea of a complete separation of the races. He planned for the slow process of an epic movement."(147) With this fact in mind, one can describe Dixon's literary progression as a conscious program by design intended to build in effect and tone. Surely he could not understand the failure of his program, nor did he see a clear way of adapting to changing social conditions. Indeed he introduced the nature of the Negro problem in The Leopard's Spots, then put forth his own proposed solution in The Play That is Stirring the Nation. All that remained was for him to prove his points, to convince the doubtful public that the Negro indeed did pose a great treat to society by his presence alone. By the time he was ready to attempt this mass conversion, American thought had shifted out from under his feet. A volksgeistian conservatism(148) had emerged as the segregation of the races was carried out. Dixon by his own fault delayed his counter-attack. A stock market fiasco had forced him to write The Traitor hurriedly; his commitment to complete his Socialism Trilogy occupied a large part of his time; the dramatic productions also seized large portions of valuable time from him. Five years of growing liberalism--as compared to his own thinking--among Southern whites passed before Dixon could attack this dangerous trend. Intentionally, he made The Sins of the Father a novel of great right-wing ideology, but no degree of controversy or outrage could serve to win back his former audience to his side of the racial question. Throughout the remainder of his life and career he lapsed into a hermit-like stance of increasing reactionary thought, antagonized by the bitterness he held for the American public who had betrayed him. In his last novel, he almost seemed to wish for his predictions of racial warfare to come true so as to teach a lesson to America's traitorous public.
CHAPTER VI
CONDEMNATION
In Dixon's final novel, he was not so much trying to shape the course of America's development as he was trying to prophesy its downfall, the public's punishment for having turned a deaf ear to his warnings. In the words of Stephen Karina, Dixon conceded defeat rather than admit failure.(149) Forgotten by the public, Dixon wanted to assure himself the vindication afforded by time. In a
sense, he wanted to be proven right in his prophecies of racial warfare; the people only deserved such a fate for their betrayal of him decades earlier. This defeat of the Anglo-Saxon race would come about as the dangers of miscegenation and Socialism blended together for a unified attack. His last novel was his final warning, replete with a dark pessimism for the American future. In his bitter final statement, Dixon left only a hint that civilization might yet save itself if the Anglo-Saxon race would only listen to his message and mobilize itself immediately for battle.
Doubleday, Page, & Co., which had published Dixon's Trilogy of Reconstruction, refused to publish Dixon's political statement for fear of antagonizing the black population. It is fitting that Dixon turned to the South to publish The Flaming Sword, specifically to the small but bold Monarch Publishing Company of Atlanta. The publisher, Edward Y. Clark, was suspected to have committed a number of crimes as a leader of the rebel Ku Klux Klan. Poor marketing, coupled with a theme long out of date, guaranteed the novel miserable sales,(150) one final disappointment for the author, who considered this novel to be his best work ever. Truly it was the perfect culmination of his life's work, for it brought in every major theme Dixon had concentrated on--Negro repatriation, the threat of Socialism, warnings against continually increasing numbers of non-Western immigrants coming to America's shores, the negative social effects of Northern philanthropy, etc.(151) Now Dixon wrote with absolutely no moderation in theme or effect. The all-consuming sexual passion of the Negro was especially exaggerated. Effect overruled even plot. What Dixon considered a powerful final statement on America's most dangerous problems, critics, those few who reviewed it, saw the novel as a trite rehashing of his old arguments, calling his method of sensationalism no more than one of racial slurs and political overstatements. The common assessment in literary circles was that the novel was ridiculous. The common reader failed to interpret Dixon's novel in the way he had intended. The author was trying to prove that the Negro was not yet assimilated into society; as such, the unfulfilled aspirations of his race would in time compel the Negro to take extreme measures in demand of his goals. The impending race war, Dixon insisted, was on the horizon because the Negro had been allowed to stay in America but only as a second-class citizen. The novel opens with an introductory note from Dixon, wherein he sets forth his purpose: "A novel is the most vivid and accurate form in which history can be written. I have tried in this story to give an authoritative record of the Conflict of Color in America from 1900 to 1938. . . ."(152) The action begins at the turn of the century, following the disfranchisement of the Negro in the South. The novel is a loosely-connected sequel to The Clansman; the central character is Angela Cameron, the daughter of Ben Cameron and Elsie Stoneman. Nelse, a long-time faithful slave to the Cameron family, had paid the exorbitant taxes on his former master's estate. Race relations seem to be a nonfactor in this society, as typified by an annual picnic at the estate of the elderly Dr. Richard Cameron. This particular year, seemingly the entire white population is in attendance, including conservatives such as Captain Tom Collier, men opposed to the liberal stance taken by Cameron and many others in the community toward the Negro question.
Class issues are written into the text alongside racial prejudice and conflict. Angela Cameron is being courted by two young men: Phil Stephens, a successful lawyer felt by many to be on his way to the Governor's mansion, and Dave Henry, an ambitious but somewhat ignorant yeoman. Stephens is a liberal in terms of his racial stance, striving to bring about the maturity of the New South, which would be a better world for both races. He has little more than disdain for Henry, yet Angela follows her heart and weds the poor farmer. Phil cannot understand how she could break tradition to marry an "ignorant, red headed animal,"(153) feeling that she is being brought down to the level of the poor mountain boy, speaking as if Dave Henry were no better than a Negro.
The picnic tables are segregated by race. Among the Negroes is Rex Weldon, the mulatto Superintendent of Negro Schools. He fears what might be spoken on this day, especially concerned about being pushed into speaking his support for Booker T. Washington, whom he personally loathes. On the platform Dr. Cameron and Nelse are obviously close friends, with Nelse nonetheless showing a certain servile deference to his former master. When the doctor begins his customary speech, he expresses great pleasure in the continuous improvement of race relations, pointing especially to the great work Booker T. Washington had been doing. The crowd, excepting Weldon and his Negro school teachers, meet Washington's name with a show of enthusiastic applause. Cameron fairly canonizes the man at Tuskegee for teaching the Negro lessons of "industry, thrift, character, and sterling manhood."(154) Consigned to this role, the Negro is effectively told to ignore politics until he is able to prove himself worthy as a race. Washington's contribution to American society is the instillment of hope in the hearts of both races.
Turning to a more negative aspect of things, Dr. Cameron cites from a book presented to him by Captain Collier, warning his guests that the treat yet posed by a certain mulatto professor at Atlanta University, who would yet turn the races against one another. This man is W. E. B. DuBois, a light-skinned mulatto born in Massachusetts. The only knowledge DuBois has about slavery is what he has read in Abolitionist literature, the writers of which Dr. Cameron describes as fanatics who caused the Civil War with their invective rhetoric. DuBois calls the white Southerner uncivilized, a cretin who destroyed the purity of the African by forcefully transporting him to American soil. He blames the white man, through rampant violation of Negro females, for the two million mulattoes in America. Cameron and his audience know this is a bold-faced lie. The doctor summarizes the message of DuBois as "an implied teaching from Frederick Douglass that the solution of the race problem in America will be found in ultimate assimilation (intermarriage) through self assertion and on no other terms."(155) The message of DuBois is seen as nothing less than a call to arms of the Negro race.
Two false tenets purportedly lead DuBois to his radical call for Negro resistance to the white man, Cameron contends. The more dangerous of the two is his belief that "the Negro was torn from a home of freedom and ancient chastity in Africa and sold into a cruel and barbarous slavery."(156) The African life, as Cameron has been told my reputed individuals, was one of polygamy, exploitation of women, etc. Slavery was even more common in Africa than in America, for there five of every six people were slaves, working in much less desirable circumstances than those provided by the Southern climate and conditions. The second lie spread by the Abolitionists is that American slavery was a cruel institution. In point of fact, Cameron retorts, American slavery was by far the most humane system of servitude in history; it was in many ways a school in which the primitive Negro was taught his first lessons in modern civilization.(157) The slave had not risen up in insurrection during the war for the simple reason that he loved his master. The unhappiness of the Negro in the New South is not one borne in a lifetime of servitude, it is his lack of racial advancement in a segregated society.
When Cameron announces that Rex Weldon has actually invited DuBois to speak in Piedmont, the mulatto is left with no alternative but to plead ignorance as to Cameron's charges and immediately withdraw his invitation. Later in the evening, Collier confronts Weldon, accusing him of glorifying Frederick Douglass for the reason that the man had taken a white bride. He lets Weldon know beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is far from ignorant concerning the wishes of the Negro: "The thought which sums up your ideal leader's [DuBois'] teaching is found in the phrase which expresses his solution of the Negro Problem in America--`Assimilation by self assertion and by no other means.' That is to say the making of America Mulatto by the self assertion of the Negro."(158) Sternly he warns Weldon of the futility of such pursuit: "What the South stands for alone against the world is the integrity of the white race. . . . We stand for our racial purity. We have no race prejudices. What fools call race prejudice is the God implanted instinct of self preservation, the first law of nature."(159) Indeed, the South stands constantly at guard, for the reason that nine million Negroes reside within her borders. The Negro can have no equality in politics or social standing. No step can be taken toward social equality, for such a sin would lead quickly to the taking of the Southern virgin in marriage by the Negro brute. Such racial pollution would replace Anglo-Saxon society with a mongrel society built on the ruins of civilization. "A quart of ink can make black fifty gallons of water,"(160) Collier tells him, echoing the words of Major Norton in The Sins of the Father. The Negro, thousands of years behind the culture attained by the Anglo-Saxon, cannot be brought up to the level of civilization; education can only prevent the inferior race reverting to savagery, the likes of which have been dramatically illustrated in Haiti.
Collier's argument is based entirely on his belief in the natural inferiority of the Negro. He agrees with Professor Kelly Miller that the Anglo-Saxon race is "the most arrogant and rapacious, the most exclusive and intolerant race in history,"(161) but he believes the white man has won the right to declare his racial superiority. The African race has contributed nothing of significance to mankind; a spelling book cannot change his color, the thickness of his lips, the flatness of his nose, etc., for they are hereditary traits. The present movement for Negro education has only created a push for social equality, the goal of ninety-nine percent of the Negro race being racial mixing. Assimilation necessitates the racial extinction of the Anglo-Saxon race, and Collier contends that there is absolutely no reason for the white race to commit suicide. He calls for Weldon's resignation. As for Phil Stephens, Collier sees him as a starry-eyed liberal whose movement can amount to nothing. Stephens would work to decrease the number of lynchings, while Collier would concentrate on putting an end to the crimes which invoke the wrath of the White Beast.
The New South is being led into the twentieth century by men such D. A. Tompkins, an expert at building and running textile mills. Money and power begin to return to the long-impoverished South. With this progress comes the realization that slavery had held back just this very industrial progress. As if to make up for wasted time, Southerners begin to fill the landscape with mills. Tompkins, in the vein of General Worth in The Leopard's Spots, is urging men such as Dave Henry to forget politics and enter the business world. Henry takes this advice, quickly beginning to increase his social status in the community. For the first time the common Southern man has the opportunity to win himself a better life.
Angela is a perfect example of the "New Woman" being created in the New South, devoting her time to social work for less fortunate whites. She works for the founding of schools, especially upon realizing that Negro children are receiving the education that will put them in a place over that of white yeomen. For the first time she begins to wonder how the two races can coexist in a Democracy, as the racial gap appears to be yet widening. The common white man had founded the Republic and was still the nation's spiritual backbone. Her desire to help these people implants in her mind a grand scheme. She plans a big rally for education for the coming spring; some of the South's greatest minds are invited to speak--Edward Alderman, Charles McIver, Charles Aycock, and Walter Hines Page, who is known for his moving speech on The Forgotten Man.(162)
The campaign for white education is not an entirely new concept in the South. As industry had increased following the economic depression of the 1890s, "progressive mill men" had come to see the need for educating their workers in the way they saw fit. Aycock in his successful campaign for Governor of North Carolina in 1900 had called for the education of both races. These gains are not yet sufficient, for Angela sees the Negro being trained for a future push for power while the white is receiving little education even of a practical nature. She sees a dangerous threat, one hidden in humanitarian lies, from the leader of Tuskegee, one Booker T. Washington, whom she believes to be planning a Negro industrialization drive as a means by which to seize social equality.
The rally draws a crowd of some six thousand people; only Aycock and Page are able to attend. Page's message is an argument that the common Southerner has been duped and made to feel good about it; there is no longer a true South, he proclaims. It is Aycock who delivers a stirring speech, commencing his remarks by declaring the South alive and well. Having drawn up the 1900 disfranchisement amendment in the state, he says the white race needs do no more than stand firm. Leave the Negro alone, he says, and he will come to realize the permanence of racial segregation. His solution to the Negro problem is a rather simple one:
The two people may develop side by side but they cannot intermingle. Let the white man determine that no man shall, by act or thought or speech cross this line and the race problem will be at an end. These things are not said in enmity to the Negro but in regard for him. He has always been my personal friend . . . but there flows in my veins the blood of the dominant race. The race that had conquered the earth and seeks out the mysteries of its heights and depths. When the Negro recognizes this fact we shall have peace and good will between the races.(163)
Aycock's speech typifies Dixon's own thinking in 1902, when he began his foray into historical fiction. There is no call for repatriation from Aycock; instead there is implicit in the message the fact that education may be able to play a role in keeping peace at home, provided that all white children are taught the proper responsibility carried by a superior race.
Collier is the next speaker, his message being a reflection of Dixon's views in the wake of his full commitment to repatriation in 1905. Indeed, education is the first step toward achieving racial peace, and he strongly supports the building of schoolhouses in every township, with an accompanying schedule of eight months of compulsory education per year. But he warns the audience that education alone cannot solve the problem. Education in and of itself, with no accompanying moves, would in fact worsen the race problem, for book knowledge cannot make the Negro a civilized human being. Knowledge, combined with the hereditary faults of the Negro, only perpetuates Negro criminality--when he learns to see what he cannot have, the Negro will simply try to seize it. A population of Negroes of such education would be no more than an army of malcontents, ready to fight should the race revolution begin.(164) Educating the Negro with no accompanying measures is thus plotting out the very destruction of the white race.
Welfare work, led by Angela Henry, does more and more for the community while behind closed doors Captain Collier uncovers a plot to intensify racial tensions. He becomes involved in a fight against the call for equal pay to Negro teachers, hiring an Atlanta detective to infiltrate the Negro community and find the source of agitation. He finds it to be a magazine published in the North by a group of mulattoes and whites seeking to undermine the work of Booker T. Washington by provoking race riots. When confronted by Collier, six of the county's Negro teachers continue to subscribe, resulting in a somber mood of race conflict all throughout the town.
Suddenly the novel takes an overwhelming turn. Dave Henry is murdered in his own home by a Negro prowler, the weapon being an axe. Angela is away that evening, but her younger sister Marie is there to look after Angela's infant. The attack comes with no warning. After killing Dave, the brute gags the baby. Marie then enters the room to witness the carnage. She freezes in terror at the sight of the large Negro monster foaming at the mouth in anticipation of the crime he will commit. Marie manages to put up a fight, before slipping and falling in Henry's blood. At this point the Negro pounces on her, ripping off her clothes. Threatening to kill the baby--actually dragging its head through the blood--he is able to quell her resistance to his lustful mania. Dixon has this creature explain the reasons behind his attack: "A nigger in Harlem . . . sent me a little book dat say I got de right ter marry a white gal ef I kin git her. Can't marry her down here, but by God, I got her."(165) He refers to himself as the brother of the infamous Sam Hose, boasting that no white man will lynch him, though.
It is not long before the crime is made known. John Lovelace, a neighbor, is the first to arrive there, finding the baby dead also, having suffocated. He prevents Angela from witnessing the carnage, instead rushing her to her sister. Marie tells the story of what happens and then--mercifully--dies. By midnight, a large force of men has been organized, intentionally excepting the sheriff. In the Negro's discarded coat is found a copy of a poem by James Weldon Johnson entitled "The White Witch." Rising up and uniting for the protection of white Womanhood, the men become a reincarnation of the White Beast, thirsty for the blood of retribution. When the criminal is found three days later, the only response acceptable to the White Beast is mob justice. The crime is not an individual wrong, but rather a symbol of a much larger sin. In Dixon's words, "the deed done was a blow of a race, a challenge to the existence of the white man and his people."(166) The Negro is bound and dragged through the woods. The actual lynching is not so much to punish the Black Beast as it is to send a strong message to the inferior race that such actions would bring a swift, merciless response. As one of the mob leaders announces, "We're going to make this lynching one no Nigger will ever forget."(167) Phil Stephens pleads for legal justice, appraising the act of lynching a disgrace to the Anglo-Saxon race, marking its descent to the same level as the Black Beast. The mob only wants vengeance, not justice. When Stephens argues that half of the lynchings in the South have been for murder and not rape, the crowd sees no difference in them: "The Nigger who kills a white man strikes at our race. He's on the way to rape a white woman."(168) Phil is then taken away and kept form interfering.
The ritualistic murder of the Negro brute begins with emasculation, which brings the first cries of pain from the savage. Then he is whipped unmercifully; when the first man tires, he hands the whip over to the next man. When the Negro loses consciousness, the men throw a bucket of water in his face to revive him. Finally, the deed is ended by burning the animal alive. Collier offers his reflections on the matter. The liberals had said such crimes as that committed by this creature would end with the education of the Negro, and now surely they will see the error of such an optimistic world-view. The Negro had been taught the wrong things; as a result, the end of racial violence is no more than a mirage.
The question on every white person's lips after the incident is: when will this race conflict end? In contradiction of the liberal hoe for peace had come a Negro brute intent on blotting out white civilization altogether. The Negro school has also been burnt to the ground in reaction to the turmoil. Collier advises the Negro teachers to reconvene classes immediately, assuring this fiery situation would in time die down. Angela Henry is now doubtful of even the existence of God Himself. Her friend Ann Lovelace attempts to comfort her:
Man made him [the Negro] a beast by the violation of law. God is law. The violation of law brings inevitable results. The Negro was taken from Africa in violation of the law. God made of one blood all the races of men and fixed the bounds of their habitations [italics mine].(169)
Dixon claims that Hannibal Thomas, an educated Negro, has admitted that the Negro's strong sexual impulse often blinds him of his senses, thus taking him back to his more primitive nature. James Weldon Johnson has identified the Negro sex drive as the root problem of racial friction. In that the African was never meant to be forcefully transported to this continent, his very presence is a violation of God's law, which the South has long been paying for. Ann cites Lincoln's anti-amalgamation views, as well as Thomas Jefferson's belief that nature, habit, and opinion would be permanent racial barriers.(170) She sums up her reactionary view by quoting John Temple Graves' comments at the Montgomery Race Conference:
Separation . . . is the logical, the inevitable, the only way. No statutes will solve the problem. The evil is in the blood of race, the disease is in the bones and marrow and the skin of antagonistic peoples. Religion does not solve the problem. Education complicates it . . . There is not a hope in fact or reason for the Negro outside of Separation.(171)
Angela goes to the Great White Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, dedicating her life to the cause of solving the Negro problem; while there, living virtually free of the Negro presence, she is exhilarated and readied for her life's new cause.
The Piedmont lynching receives national press, and soon the town begins filling with tourists. President Theodore Roosevelt condemns the action but can only agree with the spirit of it. One man from Philadelphia comes with plans to write a book concerning it, wishing to speak with a representative of each mindset. Collier knows the action of the White Beast was done in a moment of temporary insanity and thus tries to pretend the event never happened. He talks to Phil Stephens to hear a liberal viewpoint, but Phil's views have been modified somewhat by recent events. He now thinks attention should be fixed on preventing the crimes that lead to lynchings, which means establishing law and order. He also has new doubts concerning Negro education, for it seems to be failing in terms of instilling a high moral character in the Negro. Education, he now proposes, should be aimed at lifting the lower class whites to a higher cultural level. The reporter meets with little success from anyone in the tight-lipped community. Phil comes to realize by the visitor's features that he must have some Negro blood in him and warns him to leave town immediately. He barely escapes Collier's men when they come to realize the same thing. Phil, having helped him get away, has a verbal clash with Collier, as the older gentleman calls him a present-day Scalawag and warns him that the liberals will bring down the ruin of the Anglo-Saxon race by paving the way for the mongrelization of America. Collier sees any white who will cross the race line to help a Negro to be a "white nigger," and following his lead the community begins to ostracize Phil Stephens. He makes a public apology and is accepted back into the fold. As he sees the lies spewing forth from the mulatto publications of the North, his racial ideology begins to evolve. He comes to see the Negro as lazy and incompetent compared to those of the white race. Even he begins to see the shadow of racial warfare on the horizon.
Phil finds Angela in California and asks her to marry him, but she is devoted to a new life's purpose, that of colonizing the Negro elsewhere. Her words show her to be a wholehearted Dixon Radical:
The Negro race, in culture and character, is thousands of years removed from ours. Our physical contact is a threat to the existence of the nation. This is the sin of sins, the crime of crimes that must be atoned for. This is the first wrong that must be righted. We owe a debt of gratitude to the majority of the black race. I am beginning to believe that we must give them a nation of their own.(172)
She has no ready plan, but she feels repatriation can be accomplished. She begins studying the problem, including personal research on the streets of Harlem. Phil follows her to New York and begins work with the Negroid Junta there, working to improve the lots of both races. He in his own mind begins to contrast Booker T. Washington, a Negro with all the typical markings of racial inferiority, with W. E. B. DuBois, a man of very light skin hue who could pass for a white man; nonetheless, it was DuBois who was leading a violent crusade against the white race. In time Phil finds himself a member of the newly-created Inter-racial Commission.
Interestingly, Dixon writes himself into his social history of the nation; although never mentioning himself by name, the release of his Birth of a Nation stirs up unrest. Angela praises the movie's message as a God-send, an instrument of "flaming propaganda for racial purity that will sweep America."(173) All efforts to censor the controversial movie fail, in large part due to Woodrow Wilson's viewing of it in the East Room of the White House. Phil meets with a small circle of DuBois followers totally committed to suppressing the picture; he informs them that the more controversy they stir up, the more people will go see it. He then works with the New York Police Department to outmaneuver the protestors.
Angela continues her work, spending a good deal of time studying the primitive way of life of Harlem Negroes. She notes the Negro's hypersexuality, his natural pull toward alcoholism, his superstitions, etc. No matter the dress of the individual Negro she sees his mind as still one rooted in savagery. The race faces a harder life up North than they had in the South, for crowded urban conditions foster the spread of diseases. Also, the crime rate of the Northern Negro is very high.(174) Angela sees the great migration of the Negro to the North to have accomplished them nothing. In point of fact, the economic competition they had to face for Northern industrial jobs had placed them in an even more precarious position than they had faced in the South.
She found Harlem to be a conglomeration of all sorts of people, including white female prostitutes selling their bodies to Negro men. Such a sight Angela feared as a sign of things to come should the national struggle against amalgamation fail. She feels there are as yet two different directions the Negro race can take. Were he to move toward Democracy as taught him in American society and politics, a new linkage must be formed between the races. Should the white man fully alienate the Negro, he will surely turn to Communism, for this Marxist doctrine promises him full social equality, including the right to intermarry with whites. Thus, the Communist threat is intensified exponentially when linked with the Negro question; the two grand fears Dixon warned America of he now melds into one huge threat to civilization.
Not every Negro is supportive of Communism and amalgamation, although such individuals are not great in number. One such man is Rev. David Stephens, now David the Apostle, a former slave of Phil Stephens' family. Now in New York, the preacher fearlessly leads a crusade against alcoholism, dancing halls, and the sins involved in such debauchery. He breaks up one such house of sinful delights, which it turns out is run by his own daughter. The establishment had been a hellish example of sin for all mankind, whites and Negroes alike. In this den of evil, one was only allowed to dance with a member of the opposite race, and each couple must kiss at the end of each song. The condemnation spewed forth from the lips of the Apostle are more than a match for even the most impassioned response of a white supremacist:
You white men and women have tonight come to mix wid my people. On your lips are words of friendship. But you come here to drag men down ter perdition. Shame on you. The curse of Gawd on you! If dis is de social equality some of our people is ravin' about Gawd save de equality. I want my people to have equal rights and equal justice in all dat can lift their souls and bodies. I want no equality that drags both races into the mire.(175)
The Negro preacher is essentially condemning the actions of the white race involved in this sinful activity. He understands the sometimes all-consuming sexual passion of the Negro, but the white race is supposed to hold in check such sinful desires. The sound of blasphemy from his corrupt daughter's mouth results in the Apostle giving in to his own passions, the result of which is his daughter's death by his own hands.
This daughter had earlier married a rich son of white parents liberal in thought; he was now in an insane asylum, his parents having been horrified by his marrying a Negro. Phil, already set to defend David Stephens in court, refuses to help this couple; they are responsible, he frankly tells them, for his action, for it was their influence that instilled in him the belief of total social equality. Dixon himself has little patience for the hypocritical Northern liberal. The court case is a national sensation. Phil describes it as "a challenge of the black race to the ruling whites."(176) The Negroes, even those from the Apostle's congregation, take the side of the murdered daughter, whom they exalt as a Negro heroine, having won a white husband and great wealth. Now these same Negroes accuse the Apostle of adulterous behavior with female mourners. The preacher never doubts that what he did was right and just, and he is convicted of second-degree murder, sentenced to ten years of hard labor. He accepts this fate, asking only to be allowed to preach to the inmates there.
The escalation of the European War in 1914 stirs up racial tension in America, while Woodrow Wilson seeks to maintain America's isolation. Negroes pointed to large forces of Africans and Indians fighting and killing white men. Blacks now demand the right to fight in the American army. As this racial tension builds, riots begin to break out. The steadily increasing Negro population in the North exerts a strong influence on national politics. The nature of American sedition laws allows a man like W. E. B. DuBois to speak his mind on the issue of war while Eugene V. Debs is arrested for the same thing. The Negro soldiers who see action in the Great War, mainly in France, return home with an indolence not seen in America since the dark days of Radical Reconstruction. The campaign for social equality renews itself, now employing violence as its main weapon. Race riots spring up in record numbers; whereas the South had traditionally regretted its actions in the aftermath of a riot, the Northerners in no way back down from the Negro threat. The Negroes turn to legal battles designed to reinstitute martial law in the South, which fail only as a result of a Southern filibuster in Congress.
Through Phil, Angela meets Tony Murino, supposedly a big man in organized crime. He makes his money exploiting the new laws of Prohibition. Angela never sees him as a criminal. He tells her he loves her the night they meet; he is married but offers to "keep her." Angela as a "New Woman" is not recoiled by the thought of being his mistress but she does not consent to such an arrangement, either. Her first interest in Murino concerns the possibility of him knowing some information that could help her mission of maintaining racial purity. Soon she begins to fearfully visualize what would happen if organized crime, with all its wealth, weapons, and manpower were employed in a large-scale Negro insurrection.
Angela proceeds to begin an intensive study of Communism now. She soon learns of a new racket in Harlem involving the sale of white "slaves" for the exclusive use of Negro men. A friend of hers is kidnapped, and Murino rescues her from one of these slave houses for two thousand dollars. The girl has been badly mistreated, and within two hours of gaining her freedom she kills herself. Clearly, Dixon still believes there are some things worse than death. Murino suspects there might be a political motive is behind the beginning of these slave houses; he informs Angela that the Communists are running an intense campaign in Harlem and plan to nominate a Negro for Vice President. Things are worse than that because white women are actually volunteering in sufficient numbers to provide companionship to each Negro politician in the city. Angela manages to meet one of these girls. Mona, a member of "The Sacred Order of Monna Vanna," is committed to the cause. She is not solely for the use of one Negro, for she could be sent anywhere in the country at a moment's notice. As it turns out, she is presently with Piedmont's own Rex Weldon, who is now an active extremist. From Mona, Angela learns of the Negro Junta's plans for a major movement in the South, catering especially to mill workers.
Soon Phil and Angela attend a speech made by Marcus Garvey, the noted black patriot causing a rift in Negro circles with his "Back to Africa" campaign. Garvey, being a nationalist, opposes any and all racial mixing. Furthermore, he even blames the Negro for slavery's long existence. Because the Negro can never be a majority in this nation, he calls for the building of an African nation for themselves. Like Dixon himself, Garvey fears for the Negro's future in America: "There is no other way to avoid the threatening war of the races that is bound to engulf all mankind."(177) His proposal calls for assistance from the white man in establishing the Negro race on its proper continent, Africa. Phil personally sees Garvey's campaign as a futile one, while Angela agrees that colonization of the Negro is the only possible solution to the race problem in America. She points out to him such a plan's practicality:
A hundred million dollars from our treasury would start the movement and settle the first contingent on African soil. Another appropriation would move the four million Negroes Garvey has enrolled. In a hundred years we could help the Negro build a nation of his own in Africa. The races can not live here in physical touch with one another. It's a violation of law. God's law--who made of one blood all the races of men and fixed the bounds of their habitation. . . . We could establish a colony of half a million Negroes in two years. They could lay the foundations of a Black Republic which would solve the problem on the only rational basis--friendly colonization.We owe this to the Negro. We're deceiving him and allowing him to deceive himself. He hopes and dreams of assimilation. Our attitude of hypocrisy is inhuman and brutal toward a weaker race.
No longer can the American public see Sambo when they look at a Negro, for Sambo was sacrificed by his own people after the shackles of bondage had been hammered off the feet of all Negro chattel, freeing not their souls but their aggression, as well. The Negro is not a white child in a black body; he is a fully grown creature capable of destroying the white man in America. Education cannot help him, for only time can allow him to develop himself, and this must be done on his own, not while riding the coat-tails of a superior race; the white race cannot transport the Negro three thousand years to white civilization.
Angela asserts that the Anglo-Saxon race is civilization, any Negro accomplishment, and they are rare, coming about via the instruction of a white man. Progress lies only in the white race. The Negro's desire to destroy the color line and make of mankind one race is an insane proposition, for the Negro necessarily relies on the white man to train him for any worthwhile purpose. The warning she gives is a timeless one--do not allow barbarians to undermine and destroy the empire. She has three racial axioms: "1st, The white race has founded all civilizations. 2nd, The white race, remaining white [italics mine], has never lost civilization. 3rd, The white race, become hybrid, has never retained civilization."(178) Three thousand years have passed since the collapse of the Egyptian Empire, while "Negroid Egypt" has known no progress at all in those millennia. A single drop of Negro blood like a sponge absorbs any progressive element in society.
She says that it is not the fault of the Negro race that it has destroyed empires with a single touch; the culprit is time itself:
long continued race contact, throughout human history, is written large in one word . . . AMALGAMATION. The Negro problem is not essentially that of Slavery or Freedom, but one arising from the physical presence of the Negro. Slave or free man, there will always be a Negro problem so long as the two races remain together . . . It is not the subnormal white man, sinking to the level of the Negro in producing Mulatto offspring, who gives the greatest impetus to race amalgamation, but the abnormal sympathizing whites who encourage them in this degradation.(179)
Angela contrasts the two American continents: South America, ninety percent colored, has a dependent culture on the brink of ruin, while North America, ten percent colored, has a vibrant economy and advanced civilization.
It is the divine mission of the South, Angela says, to lead the fight for racial purity while at the same time working to undo many of the wrongs done the Negro race in centuries of bondage. The North will follow the South's lead. What is needed is boldness of action; the leaders of the repatriation movement must destroy those race traitors who call for intermarriage and those New South leaders who have accepted the Negro as a permanent fixture in the land. Greed is the real enemy. Greed brought the Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to serve as cheap labor; now greed keeps the Southerner from dismissing the Negro from his shores. Angela even fingers the Christian church as a participant in the movement for amalgamation. Religion should have nothing to do with race relations. One thousand Negro Christians are still one thousand Negroes; religion cannot correct for physical and biological differences in the races.
Phil is dubious of this repatriation scheme, insisting that the Negro is a dependent creature who cannot rule himself; the case of Liberia is a case in point, as chaos reigns in that Negro nation. He then reveals to Angela the existence of a plot to ruin Marcus Garvey, for he or DuBois must stand atop a united race. In short order Garvey is arrested on a trumped-up charge of fraud, then deposited in prison at the hands of Communist opponents. The great lengths taken by the Communists to imprison Garvey show clearly their great power already in the nation.
In Piedmont, the first wave of the Communist invasion takes place. The textile workers in John Lovelace's plant strike; three men are killed when the dispute erupts into violence, on being the sheriff. At this point Collier seizes control of matters, arming every white man in the area. By midnight, the Communist agitators and sixty strikers are in jail and charged for murder. The result is a grave defeat to Communist plans, as they now abandon their aims of organizing Southerners. Instead, they merely continue to inundate the South with Communist leaflets, in preparing for a future return to the area. Only with the Negroes does the Communist Party succeed. The time is a pivotal one in history, as the New South struggles to arise from the ashes of the Old South; any tradition is threatened now. Phil organizes a Patriot Union to work for the preservation of American ideas; its members are secretly trained in preparation for the coming racial conflict. Propaganda is utilized to make this organization appear as a political party, with no hints as to its true, revolutionary nature. This standing army can be mobilized in a moment's notice, if only the date for the next Communist attack can be discovered. Despite Phil's distrust of Murino, his wealth and resources cannot be refused, and the Patriot Union is established.
Angela secretly plans to discover the Communists' date of attack by using Mona to win her access to the Inner Circle of the Party. Upon first meeting John Allen, the Communist chief, she slips into a bitter debate over the effects of Communist rule. Despite this, Allen finds himself in love with her. Having witnessed Mona and her fellow women "slaves" delighting in the company of Negroes, she loses any pity for them, feeling sure they deserve whatever tragedy befalls them. The Communists hold a convention the next week, where they nominate Earl Browder, a white man with a disreputable task, for President and James W. Ford, a Negro, for his running mate. The Communist goal is to lay the foundation for a future revolution by gaining a position of influence in American society. Subtly they began to gain control of communications networks. They gain much, as evidenced by W. E. B. DuBois' turning to the political left in order merely to maintain his political base among those of his own black race. Negro violence increases directly with this movement. In Piedmont alone, fourteen white women are raped by Negro men within three weeks, one of them a twelve-year-old girl. Still America refused to acknowledge the disastrous state of affairs.
It is not long before events begin to come to a crux. Phil leaves his advisory position to the Inter-Racial Commission, seeing DuBois now uniting forces with the Communists. He in fact comes out in demand of a dictatorship of the proletariat in Black Reconstruction in America, a book Dixon describes as "a call to race riot by a man who has become a monomaniac in his hatred of whites. In every line one feels the passionate desire of the author to slit the throat of any white man in the world."(180) DuBois calls slaveholders great sinners and fornicators of Negro women. The time has come, he concludes, to take what is rightly due the Negro, namely the South's land. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People comes out strongly for amalgamation. Even otherwise conservative Negroes point to amalgamation as the nation's future. As an example of this thinking, Dixon offers the words of James Weldon Johnson:
[The result of coexisting races in the same nation will be] the blending of the Negro into the American race of the future. It seems probable that instead of developing them independently to the utmost, the Negro will fuse his qualities with those of the other groups in the making of the Ultimate American people; and that he will add a tint to American complexion and put a perceptible wave in America's hair.(181)
With such statements, the Negro movement begins to alienate liberal men like Phil Stephens.
Matters only worsen, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression. All signs are that a new civil war will occur within a year. Murino himself expresses his belief that America can no longer be saved, no matter what the Patriot Union might accomplish. The Depression is a great boon to Communist ranks, for economic impotence transforms many white men into revolutionaries. Phil, once sufficient funds have been raised, puts in motion his plan, centering on preventing the Communists from completely seizing all means of transportation and communication. Angela manages to accompany John Allen to the meeting of the Communist inner circle on the very night when the vote will be taken to revolt now or continuing waiting. The vote is to act now. Angela, having failed to win over Russia's ambassador to this meeting, finds herself in great danger. The Ambassador orders her shot, for no news of this meeting can be divulged if the plot is to be successfully implemented. John Allen instead is killed for defending her. Mercifully, in the aftermath it is decided to lock Angela up but not to kill her. Having all the information the Patriot Union needs, she finds herself unable to get word to Phil or Murino until she is rescued a week later. The federal government refuses to listen to the Patriot League's warnings. As a result, the Communist takeover of the American nation is achieved with little real trouble. Almost overnight, the nation has been conquered by Communism.
It is somewhat paradoxical that the Dixon finds an ally in the Negro race--Marcus Garvey--while he has much earlier been abandoned by his white audience. The 1930s is a time of great economic hardship, and such economic troubles in American history consistently encourage extremism. Certainly it was a time of great possibility for the Communist Party, but Dixon seems to imply that society still may be pulled toward his call for Negro repatriation. In a sense, Dixon picks up where he had left off in 1915 with Birth of a Nation. His view of Marcus Garvey is quite favorable, for he considers him to be the one man capable of uniting both races in the implementation of colonization. DuBois is characterized as the biggest individual threat to the Anglo-Saxon race. Booker T. Washington's plans had failed, and now Garvey has been stripped of his power. The whole Negro race must now gather around DuBois. One threat DuBois has, and Washington and Garvey had not, is his great speaking ability, which Dixon attributes to the white blood he had.
Not only had America failed to solve the Negro problem by following Dixon's plan of friendly colonization, but she had also ignored the intensifying labor problem. Now these two threats have fused into one giant agent of doom. The Communists succeeded because they promised the Negro full social equality. The very promise of sexual freedom, Dixon contends, is enough to attract large numbers of Negro men.(182)
In this final novel, for the first time Dixon includes in story not one "good Negro." Sambo has been laid to rest for eternity. Every single Negro now was dangerous threat to society, longing for power and determined to achieve it, no matter the cost. All the while he continues lusting for the forbidden fruit of White Womanhood. Repatriation cannot be accomplished because the Negro, after several generations, is no longer an African but an American. The Anglo-Saxon had destroyed himself when he turned away from Dixon's reactionary rhetoric; as such, Dixon, instead of promoting a solution to the problem, is expressing all of his vitriolic bitterness by wishing the sinful nation to fall, trusting time to record the accuracy of his prophetic exhortations.
CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSION
History can indeed be unkind to its heroes; it is able overnight to turn a celebrity into a ghost. Thomas Dixon, Jr., was one such man, who found himself tossed into the well of obscurity three decades before his death. Posterity did not wait on Dixon growing old and dying to ostracize him as a fanatic. Dixon had a significant impact on the course of America's progression in a crucial time in her history--namely, the spiritual reunion between South and North made possible by the Spanish-American war, complemented by the South's transformation into an industrialized region, choosing along the way which traditional ideas to keep and which to discard. Through his many works, Dixon spoke to an amazingly large number of people in the nation, leaving his mark on the motion picture industry in his collaboration with D. W. Griffith to film Birth of a Nation. His social impact cannot today be disputed, although it is largely ignored.
Dixon held great trepidation for the future, but the invisible enemy he truly fought was time. His puritan spirit simply could not accept the sweeping changes he witnessed as he grew older. He could do no more than retreat from modernism, finally enclosing himself in a corner from which he could not escape. The result of his increasing extremism was an increasingly explicit and intensified message presented in his novels. Time was directly proportional to the scope of his reactionary rhetoric. Time also led to changes in race relations, which for the most part appalled Dixon. Essentially Dixon grew more radical as the population grew more moderate. Dixon thus serves as a unique measuring stick with which to follow the course of American race relations over the first half of the twentieth century.
It is interesting to compare Thomas and his older brother Clarence, a fundamentalist preacher known on three continents. The two were very different in ideology, particularly regarding race. Clarence was more liberal in his viewpoint, yet still he shows some of the basic ideas espoused by his younger brother. In an article entitled "The Future of the Educated Negro," Clarence provides the scholar a good source with which to compare and contrast the racial views of him and his brother. Clarence praises Booker T. Washington as the Negro race's greatest man, echoing his views that education for the Negro can provide him a place in the nation, but not a leading role in government affairs. Clarence sees vocational education in terms of the dignity it would bring to the individual Negro worker; rather than enriching and empowering him, education will build his character. The Negro must take pride in his race, but for him to assert and practice the right of intermarriage with whites "is to doom his race to extinction."(183) Thomas of course said miscegenation would doom the white race. He says Frederick Douglass had regretted marrying a white woman because it led to race hatred within the Negro race. Clarence would grant the Negro the ballot, but he would not let his daughter marry a Negro. A battle for social rights and intermarriage could actually result in revocation of certain privileges he already has, thus patience must be a component of positive change. He feels Christianity is the force which can truly unite all peoples.
Thomas's own view of the Negro condition came to be a conclusion that perhaps not even God Himself could lift the Negro out of the cultural mire that is his existence. Such pessimism increased with time, and Dixon became very bitter. Like his brother, though, he always claimed to want that which was best for both races. Such a stance cannot be called race hatred, for it more like paternalistic racism. Inevitably, the issues of race and sex merged into a single threat he saw in the Negro. His doctrine of Anglo-Saxon superiority did not allow for racial degeneration of even a small degree. The black he considered by nature to be a very sexual creature, while the white man was supposedly weak of will, especially compared to the white Woman, and thus always in danger of giving in to temptation. Sexual corruption was not caused by white men, for Dixon came to see the mulatto woman as the source of such sin. When isolated from any temptation, the white man would not have a thought as to crossing racial lines for sexual satisfaction. Dixon called for complete separation of the races because he saw every Negro individual as desirous of amalgamation. If all mulatto women are trying to seduce white men, then the white race has no hope for survival. Only the removal of the Negro would allow for racial peace.
Such inherent danger in the figure of the mulatto woman was the topic of his 1911 novel The Sins of the Father, in which Cleo is portrayed as a sexual creature concentrating her faculties on ensnaring a white man in her sexual trap. The weakness of the white man's soul is downplayed in relation to Cleo's conscious and manipulative plan. To some degree, Dixon forgives the white man for his sexual transgression, as he can be made powerless by the constant bombardment of temptation by the ever-present mulatto woman. Such thinking marks a distinction in Dixon's form of Radicalism, traceable back to 1909. While the majority of Radical leaders are speaking about Negro men raping white women, Dixon has turned to the view that the Negro female is the true source of racial poisoning. Rape does little to bring about amalgamation, serving only to widen the chasm already in existence between the races. The seduction of white men is in some ways a covert operation, where Negro blood is being passed on to the next generation without even the mulatto's knowledge, should she be white enough to see herself as purely white. The white race could fight the Black Beast, but it would be hard pressed to defeat the cancerous growth of Negro-ness caused by "invisible Negroes."
Dixon's work culminates in The Flaming Sword, wherein he combines his two biggest fears of Socialism and the Negro problem. He gives the reader an account of the race war he has predicted for decades. A bitter tone runs through the novel, as Dixon's bitterness about being cast away by society leads him to almost wish the racial conflict would materialize and conquer the men who ignored his warnings. He is saying that the race war will come, and that the white race will deserve everything that happens to it. Only in such manner can Dixon, finally admitting to himself if not anyone else that his thinking has been flawed, vindicate himself and purge his system of the bitter rancor accumulated for decades. The Flaming Sword is Dixon's last Will and Testament.
SOURCES CONSULTED
Primary sources
Published works:
Dixon, Thomas, Jr. Living Problems in Religion and Social Science. New York: Charles T. Dillingham, 1889.
________. Dixon's Sermons. Delivered in the Grand Old Opera House. New York: F. L. Bussey and Co., 1899.
________. The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden--1865-1900, Ridgewood, New Jersey: The Gregg Press, 1902 (1967).
________. The One Woman: A Story of Modern Utopia. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1903.
________. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1905 (1970).
________. "The Play That is Stirring the Nation." New York: The American News Company, 1905.
________. The Traitor: A Story of Fall of the Invisible Empire. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1907.
________. The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912.
________. The Flaming Sword. Atlanta: Monarch Publishing Company, 1939.
Miller, Kelly. "As to The Leopard's Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr. Washington, D. C.: Howard University Press, 1905.
Unpublished works:
Amzi Clarence Dixon Papers. Southern Baptist Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.
Dixon, Helen A. C.: A. C. Dixon: The Romance of Preaching. Manuscript at Southern Baptist Archives, Nashville.
Secondary sources
Published works:
Allan, Mansfield. "Thomas Dixon's `The Leopard's Spots.'" Bookman XV (July 1902).
Cook, Raymond Allen. Fire From the Flint: The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: John F. Blair, Publisher, 1968.
________. Thomas Dixon. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1974.
Crowe, Karen, editor. Southern Horizons: The Autobiography of Thomas Dixon. Alexandria, Virginia: IWV Publishing, 1984.
Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1913.
________. The Victim: A Romance of the Real Jefferson Davis. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1914.
________. The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1921.
Karina, Stephen Joseph. With Flaming Sword: The Reactionary Rhetoric of Thomas Dixon. Ph. D. dissertation to University of Georgia, 1978.
Weathers, Lee B. "Thomas Dixon: North Carolina's Most Colorful Character of His Generation." An address, ca. 1940.
Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. New York: The Free Press, 1980.
________. The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Wright, James Zebulon. Thomas Dixon: The Mind of a Southern Apologist. Ph. D. dissertation to George Peabody College for Teachers, 1966.
Unpublished works:
Flewelling, Roy Stanley, Jr. Three Voices of Race: Thomas Dixon, Marcus Garvey and Lothrop Stoddard. Unpublished M. A. thesis to University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1971.
Harris, Max Frank. "The Ideas of Thomas Dixon on Race Relations." Unpublished M. A. thesis to University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1948.
Mencke, John German. Mulattoes and Race Mixture: American Attitudes and Images From Reconstruction. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation to University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1976.
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