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.