Dorothy Marley's Journal

As I have mentioned previously, I’ve been going through the books I selected from my grandmother’s bookshelves after she died. At the back of these bookshelves, among the hodgepodge of books Grandma inherited from her aunts and uncles (including early editions of Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea, and you’d better believe I snapped those up), I found a copy of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman.

At the time, I was still studying history in grad school, focusing on American history around 1900, and this just happens to be one of the most influential books in the time period - perhaps in all of American history. It was a historical romance (in both the old and new senses) which caught the attention of filmmaker D. W. Griffith, who adapted it into the 1915 blockbuster Birth of a Nation, which led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

So of course I took the book, but what with one thing and another I haven’t gotten around to reading it till now. In the intervening period I’ve read a lot of other books from the time period, which helps put it better in context.

In particular, it helps put into context just how racist Dixon was. He’s not merely reflecting the prevailing attitudes of his era (as most writers do, whether they want to or not) but actively arguing that the prevailing attitudes of one of the most racist eras in American history aren’t racist enough.

It would therefore be pleasant to report that Dixon is also a terrible writer, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky who wrote What Is To Be Done?, another book that inspired deadly political cosplay on a vast scale. (Although it occurs to me that I haven’t actually read Chernyshevsky, and in fact may have received this opinion from people who only read it in translation.) But stylistically Dixon is pretty similar to other popular historical romances of the time period. His tale is slower-paced than an adventure story would be nowadays, but in its own literary context it zips along. You can see why a film director would find it attractive. Plenty of incident, and two love stories for the price of one!

This is especially true since Dixon, a devil quoting scripture, presents his story as a variation of that old American favorite, indeed that foundational American myth, that blockbuster gold of plucky underdogs rebelling against tyranny. American colonists against the British, William Tell against the Austrians, Rebel Alliance against the Empire; or (Dixon’s favorite analogy) Scottish Covenanters worshipping in the hills rather than bow to the despotic English demand that they accept the established church.

Dixon’s Southerners are descendants of those Covenanters, fueled by that self-same love of freedom. Like their forebears, they refuse to bow down to the demands of the despotic conquering power, but form a heroic resistance (the Ku Klux Klan by way of les Amis de l’ABC) to the horrors of racial equality visited upon the South by the cruelty of a vengeful United States Congress.

In particular, this policy of racial equality is driven by Senator Stoneman, Dixon’s Thaddeus Stevens expy. In Stoneman, Dixon achieves a surprisingly complex character: a man kindly, even generous, in his personal life, but so politically so driven by his ideals that he will adopt any policy that seems to further those ideals, no matter how terrible the results on the ground.

This is interesting. You’ve got shades here of the French Revolution, idealistic leaders driven by lovely visions of freedom and equality which somehow end in rivers of blood from the guillotine. I was genuinely surprised that Dixon managed to achieve such a multifaceted view of his arch-enemy.

Except it turns out that Stoneman’s apparent complexity is completely accidental: in the last few pages, it’s revealed that Stoneman never cared about racial equality at all! After a Southern raid during the Civil War destroyed Stoneman’s Pennsylvania factories, he was consumed by the bitter desire for vengeance, and racial equality was his weapon of choice against the prostrate Southern people.

This is a very interesting book on what you might call an anthropological level, as a document of a certain kind of southern viewpoint around 1900. It’s also interesting as a piece of historiography, as Dixon has to thread a very fine needle to argue that the South did no wrong in seceding, but having lost is now VERY loyal and has learned to love the noble Abraham Lincoln who by the way DEFINITELY would have been nicer to the South than Congress was, but as Congress WAS mean the South HAD to break the laws, and this definitely doesn’t undermine the fact that the South is now very, very loyal. Very!

And you could undoubtedly write an excellent paper about The Clansman as a (mis)use of classic tropes of resistance to tyranny. For goodness sake, Dixon even throws in a Sydney Carton scene. It’s a fantastic example of how you can keep the outward form of a kind of story intact while completely reversing the meaning.

But for obvious reasons I cannot recommend it as light and agreeable reading.