Chapter III: Thomas Dixon

Although Thomas Dixon’s new novel, _The Black Hood_ (1924), is a story of the Ku Klux Klan of 1870, and so a companion volume to _The Clansman_ (1905), it is customary to speak of _The Leopard’s Spots_ (1902), _The Clansman_, and _The Traitor_ (1907) as a trilogy of the Reconstruction period at the South. Of those who admired this series perhaps the best known and certainly the most unqualifiedly enthusiastic was Max Nordau, who hailed the novels as undoing the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and giving the deferred answer to _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Similarly, _The One Woman_ (1903), _Comrades_ (1909), and _The Root of Evil_ (1911) are grouped together as a trilogy of Socialism, pleading for the development of individual character and opposing the Socialistic remedies for the ills of society.

Thomas Dixon was born at Shelby, North Carolina, 11 January 1864, the son of the Reverend Thomas Dixon and Amanda Elizabeth (McAfee) Dixon. The father was a Baptist clergyman. At 19 the son was graduated from Wake Forest College, North Carolina, with a scholarship admitting him as a special student in history and politics at Johns Hopkins University. A year later he became a student at the Greensboro (North Carolina) Law School. About the same time he was elected to the North Carolina legislature. He got his law degree, dabbled in politics, was admitted to practice in the North Carolina and United States courts, including the United States Supreme Court, had a part in two conspicuous murder trials of the day, and then, before he was 23, and some months after marrying Harriet Bussey, of Columbus, Georgia, resigned from the legislature to enter the Baptist ministry.

He held a pastorate for a year in Raleigh, North Carolina, and for a year in Boston before coming to the People’s Temple in New York. He preached in New York for ten years, 1889-1899. At the same time he became a lyceum lecturer and he continued to lecture until 1903. His outspokenness in the pulpit was coupled with a certain disregard of clerical custom; for example, he enjoyed going hunting. He began to publish books of sermons at least as early as 1891. He was 35 when he quitted the pulpit and turned to fiction.

Three of his novels are centered upon outstanding figures of the Civil War. _The Southerner_ (1913) is constructed about Lincoln, _The Victim_ (1914), about Jefferson Davis; _The Man in Gray_ (1921), about Robert E. Lee. _A Man of the People_ is a Lincoln play; _The Fall of a Nation_ depicts the conquest of the United States by the Imperial Nation. Such a novel as _The Way of a Man_ is more or less related to the novels dealing with Socialism; _The Sins of the Father_, a study of the results of miscegenation, belongs with _The Clansman_ group.

It was in 1915, ten years after the sensational success of _The Clansman_, that David Wark Griffith produced his film based on the novel under the title, “The Birth of a Nation.”

The new novel of the Klan, _The Black Hood_, is concerned with the time when the original Ku Klux Klan had accomplished the work for which it was organized and was becoming more or less of a menace to the liberty of the Southerners among whom it flourished. Mr. Dixon’s hero opposes the Klan’s methods as being false to the spirit in which the Klan was founded. He is successful in his stand after many exciting adventures. There is a romantic interest interwoven in the story.