Mr. McReynolds’ appreciation by the President would have been further displayed by his appointment as United States District Judge to succeed Judge Hammond, had not a technicality involving residence interfered.
THOMAS DIXON, JR.
Thomas Dixon, Jr.
One of the most picturesque and dramatic figures in the limelight of to-day is the Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., a man who has at his age probably succeeded in as many different lines of endeavor as any other man of the times.
An intense product of the new South, Mr. Dixon speaks his opinions on his section’s great and peculiar problems with an incisive virility and a fearless conviction, and with his novels, “The Leopard’s Spots” and “The Clansman” has gained a popular audience for the Southern point of view, before unreached. He has also illumined the divorce evil and the subject of socialism in his dramatic story, “The One Woman.”
Born in North Carolina just forty years ago, and educated at Wake Forest, a Baptist denominational school, Mr. Dixon has in rapid succession essayed the fields of law, the ministry, lecturing and authorship, and has been prominently identified with each. He was a member of the North Carolina legislature at one time and is said to have essayed the histrionic for a brief spell.
First attaining more than casual prominence as a Baptist minister in New York, Mr. Dixon felt the opportunity of a non-sectarian evangelist fraught with higher possibilities in the metropolis and more in keeping with his temperament and convictions, founding a popular church wherein as a religious and civic free lance he attracted a large and influential hearing.
On the lecture platform he found a broader and more congenial labor still, and from lecturing he took to literature, to which he is now devoting his time exclusively. He has planned a trilogy of novels in exposition of the negro question, the second of which, “The Clansman,” takes its text from the vital role played by the Ku Klux in the redemption of the South from the triple scourge of the carpet bagger, the scalawag and their irresponsible tool, the ignorant African.
Mr. Dixon’s late successes have constituted him a man of affairs and he now resides upon his extensive Virginia plantation, where he does much of his literary work and incidentally lives the life of the Virginia planter and gentleman of the olden day.