The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
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| Authors | Thomas Dixon, Jr. |
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| Language | English |
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Publication date
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1905 |
The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905. It was the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. that included The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor. It was influential in providing the ideology that helped support the revival of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK or The Klan). The novel was twice notably adapted, immediately by its author as a play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. W. Griffith in the groundbreaking 1915 silent movie The Birth of a Nation.
The play, being concerned with the KKK and Reconstruction, is adapted by the second half of The Birth of a Nation. According to Professor Russell Merritt, key differences between the play and film are said to include that Dixon was more sympathetic to Southerners' pursuing education and modern professions, whereas Griffith stressed ownership of plantations.
Dixon wrote The Clansman as a message to Northerners to maintain racial segregation, as the work claimed that blacks when free would turn savage and violent, committing crimes such as murder, rape and robbery far out of proportion to their percentage of the population. He claimed to write for 18,000,000 southerners who supported his beliefs, though that many never joined the Klan. Dixon portrays the speaker of the house, Austin Stoneman, as a negro-loving legislator mad with power and eaten up with hate. His goal is to punish the Southern whites for their revolution against an oppressive government by turning the former slaves against the White Southerners and use the iron fist of the Union occupation troops to make them the new masters. The Klan's job is to protect the White Southerners from the carpetbaggers and their allies, Black and White.
In addition to criticism that The Clansman would stir up sentiment in the South, Dixon's argument that the Klan had saved the South from negro rule was ridiculed by some as absurd.
In The Clansman, Reconstruction was an attempt by Augustus Stoneman, a thinly veiled reference to Thaddeus Stevens, to ensure that the Republican Party would stay in power by securing the southern black vote. His hatred for President Johnson stems from Johnson's refusal to disenfranchise whites. Stoneman's anger towards former slave holders is intensified after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, where he vows revenge on the South. His programs strip away the property owned by whites, in turn giving them to former slaves. Men claiming to represent the government confiscate the material wealth of the South, destroying plantation owning families. Finally, the former slaves are taught that they are superior to their former owners and should rise up against them. These injustices are the impetuses for the creation of the Klan.
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