On page 216 of David S. Reynold's Mightier Than the Sword, the author writes that Dixon, the author of The Clansman (1903), was "disgusted by Stowe." Dixon blamed Stowe for starting the Civil War. In reaction to Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Dixon set out to write the story of the Civl War and Reconstruction from the southern perspective. His view was that Reconstruction was a failure.
Similar to other pseudoscientific thinkers...
On page 216 of David S. Reynold's Mightier Than the Sword, the author writes that Dixon, the author of The Clansman (1903), was "disgusted by Stowe." Dixon blamed Stowe for starting the Civil War. In reaction to Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Dixon set out to write the story of the Civl War and Reconstruction from the southern perspective. His view was that Reconstruction was a failure.
Similar to other pseudoscientific thinkers of the day, such as John Carroll, who wrote The Negro a Beast in 1900, Dixon saw African-Americans as no better than animals, driven by animal-like instincts and possessing little intellectual power. He thought African-American men posed a threat to white women, and Dixon reinforced these ideas in his trilogy about the Klan. The Clansman was one of the novels in this trilogy. In his novel, a white girl is raped by a black man in the presence of her mother, and the girl and her mother kill themselves in humiliation. His novel inspired the D.W. Griffith silent film Birth of A Nation of 1915, for which Dixon was an advisor. This film portrayed the Civil War and Reconstruction as failures and reinforced the Dunning school of historiography, which also publicized the idea that Reconstruction was a failed effort. The film portrayed African-Americans as incapable of leading the south after the Civil War. The film also portrayed the Klan as heroes who restored the south to glory.
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