The Rising Tide of Color. But there were others who took the Negro in dead earnest. Negroes were becoming educated, getting property, leaving the South, and asking for civil rights; they constituted, therefore, a menace. Southern civilization sought to preserve itself by peonage, disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching. The authors aided and paralleled the politicians, who confounded attempts at democracy by dragging the herring of intermarriage over the countryside. In proportion as Negroes showed themselves as seeking economic advancement and civil rights, authors portrayed them as insulting brutes and rapists.
This stereotype shot up to full growth in these first decades of the twentieth century. But the seeds, as we have seen, had been sown long before. Answering abolitionist onslaughts, the Bible Defense of Slavery had “proved” that Sodom and Gomorrah were strongholds of Negro vice, and that “the baleful fire of unchaste amour rages through the Negro’s blood more fiercely....” Hinton Helper, in Nojoque (1867), had set up black and beastly as synonyms. The Negro A Beast (1900) by Charles Carroll which proves the Negro to be “a beast, created with articulate speech, that he may be of service to the White man,” brought this type of book to a rabid climax. As already pointed out, Page in Red Rock and The Negro, The Southerner’s Problem had shown Reconstruction to be a holiday for Negro brutes.
Thomas Dixon. After Page, the best known author of Ku Klux Klan fiction is the Reverend Thomas Dixon. The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots, because of their sensationalism (cf. chapter titles “The Black Peril,” “The Unspoken Terror,” “A Thousand Legged Beast,” “The Hunt For the Animal”) seemed just made for the mentality of early Hollywood, where D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation made for Dixon a dubious sort of immortality, and finally fixed the stereotype in the mass-mind.
The Leopard’s Spots (1902) is Dixon’s masterpiece of hatred. This long novel has its share of sugary love affairs done in the best southern tradition, but is chiefly important for its political bearings. Characters are brought in from Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Legree quits drink for the greater vice of becoming a scalawag and a mill owner. Eliza’s son, George Harris, is educated at Harvard, falls in love with Senator Lowell’s daughter and is ordered from the abolitionist home. Tim Shelby, a silk-hatted Negro politician, boasts that he will one day marry a white woman and is lynched as “Answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to Negro lips that dare to pollute with words the fair womanhood of the South.” Dick, an imbecile, crushes with a rock the head of a white child and then attacks her. The assaulted child and the burning of the Negro are described with gusto. Drunk Negro soldiers drag white brides from their homes; criminal Negroes rove the countryside, forcing whites to take to the cities. Included in the list of hateful outragers of the fair Southland are the Yankee schoolmarms, whom Dixon would like to see shipped back to Boston in glass cages like rattlesnakes. The Negro is not to be educated, not even industrially, for this drives him to crime or suicide. A few Negroes like old Nels obey their white-folks, but Dixon is surprised to find no Negroes in the mob that lynched Dick. Negro “dominion” and the threat that “the South will become mulatto instead of Anglo-Saxon” are overthrown when the Red-Shirts ride.
The Clansman (1905) is another hymn of hate. President Lincoln, considered pro-southern, is fearful lest “mulatto citizenship be too dear a price to pay even for emancipation.” Stoneman, a libellous portrait of Thaddeus Stevens, is shown in the toils of Lydia Brown, a mulatto of extraordinary animal beauty. Other villains are Silas Lynch, a mulatto, “with the head of a Caesar and the eyes of the jungle,” Augustus Caesar, “whose flat nose with enormous perpetually dilating nostrils, sinister head and enormous cheekbones and jaws reminded one of the lower order of animal,” and Yankee soldiers whom faithful ex-slaves obligingly knock down. “A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, became the symbol of American democracy.” Against this reign of terror, culminating in a rape, painstakingly described, the knights of the Ku Klux Klan rise in righteous wrath. Gus, whose image was discovered upon the retina of the dead mother’s eye by strange southern science, is not lynched, but “executed by the Grand Turk who flung his body on the lawn of the black Lieutenant-Governor of the State.” In this way civilization was restored. Reconciliation is exemplified in northern-southern love affairs, but only when the Negro is returned to serfdom can there be true reunion.
The School of Page and Dixon. Emory’s A Maryland Manor (1901) is important only as a sign of the trend. The slaves are shown as lighthearted, needing compulsion to teach them good habits. Chloe, who runs away frequently, is obeying an inherited love for the woods: “It was often the case ... fugitives fled from those they loved best.” From emancipation “the negroes suffered most of all, sinking into a condition little short of their original barbarism.” Caesar is too intelligent to accept freedom, “What you take me fur, anyhow?”, etc. As a reward he is allowed burial in the family graveyard, at his master’s blessed feet.
In The Northerner (1905) by Nora Davis, a reconciliation novel, Falls, a Yankee businessman, establishes the Tennessee Valley Improvement Company to develop electric power in the South, and wins the Alabama belle in the meanwhile. Falls and Watson, a southern aristocrat, battle a mob to save an innocent but craven Negro, who, given a pistol to defend his life, thinks only: “Lawdy, don’t I wisht I had er piece er M’lindy’s cawn bread.” Miscegenation is a great concern of the author, who calls it the “Curse of Dixie,” “The Nameless Shame,” “The Hidden Pain.” Watson, in his cavalier youth, had been seduced by the brown Lesby, “a snake in the grass.” He loathes his beautiful quadroon daughter, Rosebud. Miss Davis has him say: “Every drop of blood in my body turns cold with disgust at the thought—the sight of her!” And to his daughter, before she is relegated to the future in store for one “cursed with the black drop,” he declaims:
You should be just, child, to this man—try to see how he is placed. He has done, and he will do, his duty by you as God gives it to him to see it.... That was a sin of the flesh, you know, and in the flesh will he repay. But in the spirit, in all those things which belong to his higher nature, you can have no part.... He could not love you, cherish you: his very nature would recoil. It is instinct, child, blood!”
Rose meekly concurs. Some comic use is made of Pete, a state Congressman in Reconstruction, now happier as a valet for his white-folks.
Robert Lee Durham is even more concerned over the “Hidden Shame” in The Call of The South (1908). John Hayward, the central figure, is of barely perceptible Negro blood. Of fine ancestry on the white side, he is a first-rate student and athlete at Harvard before he leaves for heroic service in the war in Cuba. Becoming footman for a president who champions liberal democracy, he is thrown in contact with the president’s daughter. After rescuing her from a runaway horse, and revealing his heroic past at Harvard and in battle, he wins her, like a modern Othello, by tales of dangers overcome. They marry secretly, platonically. Up to this point the novelist has been sympathetic toward Hayward’s undoubted abilities and undeserved rebuffs. But the platonic husband and wife, waylaid in a storm, are forced to seek refuge in a hut.