25. According to Stern, the original prints depicted Gus’s castration by Klansmen. Karl Brown insists that this was untrue. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 131–32.
26. A scalawag was a local Southern white man who collaborated with blacks and the radical Republican regimes.
27. According to Stern, shots “of screaming white women being whisked by Negro rapists into doorways in the back alleys of the town were omitted after the initial showings.” Stern, ‘Griffith: I—The Birth of a Nation’: 66. Evidence from a local Californian newspaper supports this assertion. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 151.
28. It is very likely, according to Cuniberti, that the version of the film shown at its première at Clune’s had the Klan rescue the party in the cabin first and then afterward set off to save Elsie—the opposite order of rescue to that shown in all other surviving prints. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 159–60.
29. It seems clear that the final part of the original print of the film also included a shot referring to the possible “solution” of the race “problem” through a mass deportation of blacks. While this sequence was later lost, its existence was remarked on by several critics. Francis Hackett, for instance, observed that the reference to Christ was preceded by “a suggestion of ‘Lincoln’s solution’—back to Liberia” and W. Stephen Bush noted that The Birth of a Nation “suggests as a remedy of the racial question the transportation of the negroes to Liberia, which Mr. Griffith assures us was Lincoln’s idea.” Hackett, “Brotherly Love,” Bush, “Birth of a Nation,” both in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 162, 178. Also see Rolfe Cobleigh, “Why I Oppose The Birth of a Nation,” in Silva, Focus, 82. Although there was seemingly no actual “deportation scene,” one historian has cited hearsay evidence of a sequence in which the entire black population was lined up in New York harbor for transportation. Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” 42.
30. Silent movie star (and former Griffith actress) Mary Pickford remembered getting “so excited I stood up in my seat.” Pickford, quoted in “Tribune Tip Brings Crowds,” Daily Tribune [Chicago], June 24, 1915, David W. Griffith Papers, 1897–1954, microfilm edition (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1982), Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (henceforth DWGP).
31. Hackett, “Brotherly Love,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 162.
32. Brown, Adventures, 94. Several other sources claimed that during the Klan’s final ride to the rescue, a shot was made of their horses jumping over the camera. See Aitken, The Birth of a Nation Story, 53; Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, 146; Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, 109. There is no shot of this kind in any of the surviving prints.
33. Brown, Adventures, 95. For another recollection of the enthusiasm of the première audience, see the recollections of Joseph Henabery in Slide, Before, In and After Hollywood, 82.
CHAPTER 2
1. North Carolina had been one of the last states to secede from the Union. Only with the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for volunteers in April 1861 had the state—together with three other slave states (Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee)—finally chosen between the Union and the new Confederacy. At that point, with considerable reluctance and by fairly narrow margins, all four states passed ordinances of secession and threw in their lot with the South’s bid for independence.
2. Raymond A. Cook, Thomas Dixon (New York: Twayne, 1974), 143, n. 1. Cook had earlier produced a longer biography of Dixon: Fire from the Flint: The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1968). I have preferred to rely on Cook’s two volumes in reference to Dixon’s earlier life. Anthony Slide’s recent, well-received study of Dixon, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon, summarizes Dixon’s early career very briefly before concentrating its attention “on Dixon as a member of the film community” (11).
3. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 21–22.
4. Hugh Talmadge Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina: The History of a Southern State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 460.
5. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 22–23.
6. The only ex-Confederate state to avoid radical Reconstruction in 1867 was Tennessee, which had already accepted the Fourteenth Amendment defining former slaves for the first time as citizens of the United States. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 261, 276.
7. Foner, Reconstruction, 273–77.
8. Cited in Cook, Fire from the Flint, 12.
9. Lefler and Newsome, North Carolina, 491–92, 495–99; Foner, Reconstruction, 440–41. Thomas Dixon would later assert that his uncle, Colonel Lee Roy McAfee, had moved the motion for Holden’s impeachment. According to Lefler and Newsome, this was actually done by Frederick M. Strudwick. See North Carolina, 498. Dixon also claimed that during his own short career as a lawyer, Holden had requested his help (which Dixon refused) in petitioning the legislature for the restoration of his state citizenship. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 37.
10. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 23–24.
11. Ibid., 25–26.
12. Ibid., 26–28.
13. Ibid., 28–31.
14. Ibid., 32–34.
15. Richard T. Ely, Ground under Our Feet: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 99.
16. Shaw, Diary (D-4), January 11, 1882, Shaw Papers, New York Public Library. On Adams and his views in general, see Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876–1901: As Revealed in the Correspondence of Herbert B. Adams, ed. W. Stull Holt, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 56:4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938).
17. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 34–35.
18. Ibid., 35.
19. Ibid., 36–38.
20. Ibid., 38–39.
21. Ibid., 40–41.
22. Ibid., 41–44.
23. Ibid., 44–50.
24. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 157–58. F. Garvin Davenport Jr. argues that Dixon’s defense of the South was part of his wider sense of “mission”: to save white Anglo-Saxon civilization in America. Davenport, “Thomas Dixon’s Mythology of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 36, no. 3 (August 1970): 350–67.
25. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 51.
26. “The key to the novel’s convulsive power,” Linda Williams has written, “is Stowe’s interweaving of a conventional sentimental story of youthful female suffering on the model of Dickens (Little Eva’s death by consumption) with a more distinctively American story of a racialized Christlike passion ([Uncle] Tom’s death by beatings from his white master).” Williams, Playing the Race Card, 47.
27. Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 164–65, 183–84, 339, 341. The quotation from Lincoln is on 314 and 344. The Harriet Beecher Stowe website, in slightly different phrasing, has Lincoln greeting Mrs. Stowe with the words “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!” (http://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/life/#war [accessed April 2, 2007]). The quotation, which may be apochryphal, apparently came from Mrs. Stowe’s daughter (who was not present at the meeting with Lincoln) and who was “probably repeating what her mother said to her.” Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 314.
28. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 260–62, 266, 268, 269–70, 272, 275, 277, 283. Also see Williams, Playing the Race Card, 82–83.
29. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 367–68, 370–71.
30. Ibid., 268–69, 274–75, 278–79, 368–69, 372, 377–78.
31. Ibid., 260.
32. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 65–66; Williamson, Crucible of Race, 157–58. The story of the acceptance of The Leopard’s Spots may have been more complicated than this. Page apparently sent the manuscript to be read by novelist Frank Norris, who urged that it not be published. It is unlikely that Page allowed his frie
ndship with Dixon (they had both been members of the Watauga Club in Raleigh, dedicated to the establishment of a state industrial school) to influence his decision. The Leopard’s Spots, with its combination of melodrama, sex, and racism, had clear commercial possibilities. But Page, according to his biographer, did not have a high opinion of Dixon’s abilities as a writer and would later be embarrassed that he had subordinated his own moral principles to the desire for profit. John M. Cooper, Jr., Walter Hines Page: The Southern as American, 1855–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 69–70, 168–69.
33. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900 (London: Doubleday, Page, 1902), 84–91, 109, 113–17, 132–33, 144–50, 161–62. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has republished The Leopard’s Spots and Dixon’s later novel, The Clansman as part of its digitization project, Documenting the American South.
34. Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 86–88, 105–106, 138, 144–46, 151–52, 154.
35. Because Augustine St. Clare and his only child, the saintly Eva, both die in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bob St. Clare would have to be the son (or grandson) of Augustine’s harsher brother, Alfred. See Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 211, 312–13.
36. Ibid., 309–11, 385–96.
37. Ibid., 5, 33, 63, 80, 93, 100–103.
38. Ibid., 32, 63, 73, 120–21, 104, 107–108.
39. Ibid., 118–19, 123.
40. Ibid., 89, 113–14, 122–28, 145–52, 159–61.
41. Ibid., 195–96, 241–42, 320, 335, 349–50, 365–75, 377–80, 404, 410–16, 423–29, 433–43, 455, 459.
42. Ibid., 13, 219; Cook, Thomas Dixon, 19–20. Dixon gave his great-grandfather’s name, Hambright, to the principal town in The Leopard’s Spots.
43. Williamson, The Crucible of Race, 158–61; Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 14, 30–32, 52, 284, 254.
44. Ibid., 288–89, 354–60, 404–405, 417–21, 431–32.
45. Ibid., 8, 328–36. Durham’s desperate ride to the local head of the Klan, Major Stuart Dameron (modeled on Dixon’s uncle, Colonel McAfee), for help in restraining some drunken Klansmen is derived from the experience of Dixon’s father. Ibid., 165–68.
46. Ibid., 95, 97, 242, 333, 459. Also see 198, 241, 331, 335, 383, 460.
47. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 25; Cook, Fire from the Flint, 17–19.
48. Cook, Thomas Dixon, 58, 59, 62.
49. Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 405–408.
50. Maxwell Bloomfield, “Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots: A Study in Popular Racism,” in The Negro in the South Since 1865: Selected Essays in American Negro History, ed. Charles E. Wynes (Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1965), 89–90. Charles Gaston, in his speech in The Leopard’s Spots, establishes a correlation between the two (435): “In this hour of crisis, our flag has been raised over ten millions of semi-barbaric black men in the foulest slave pen of the Orient. Shall we repeat the farce of ’67, reverse the order of nature, and make these black people our rulers? If not, why should the African here, who is not their equal, be allowed to imperil our life?”
51. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 5–6, 111, 116, 118, 113–15.
52. For an analysis of the nature of this interracial alliance, see Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 276–306.
53. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 229, 224–25, 164.
54. Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 262; M. B. Wharton, “The Leopard’s Spots,” Atlanta Journal, April 20, 1902, 9, cited in Cook, Fire from the Flint, 114.
55. Nordau to Dixon, June 10, 1902, cited in Cook, Fire from the Flint, 114. Nordau, whose book Degeneration had been published in America in 1894, was probably particularly sympathetic to Dixon’s anxieties over retrogression.
56. At one point in his novel, Dixon has Charles Gaston set forth his own idealized view of women: “Every woman is something divine to me. I think of God as a woman, not a man—a great loving Mother of all Life.” Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 245.
57. Mrs. Stowe saw Eva and Topsy as highly representative of their respective races. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852; reprint, London: David Campbell, 1995), 275–76.
58. Ibid., 187, 314–15, also see 201–202, 349; Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 310, 385–95, also see 313–14, 395–403.
59. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 8, 203, 476–79, 491; Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 438–39, 459.
60. Dixon, The Leopard’s Spots, 46, 95, 97, 242, 262–63, 308, 335, 382–83, 437, 460; Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 8, 239–40, 260, 277, 299, 363, 490–93.
61. Bloomfield, “Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots,” 100; Cook, Fire from the Flint, 112.
62. Bloomfield, “Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots,” 101. Perceiving the “Negro problem” as a national rather than purely sectional one was easier because of the huge migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities that began after Reconstruction and accelerated over time. The first really major commentator to observe that the North as well as the South now had a race problem was “muckraking” journalist Ray Stannard Baker in a series of articles for the American Magazine beginning in April 1907. The articles were later republished as Baker, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908).
63. Dixon, The One Woman: A Story of Modern Utopia (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903); Cook, Fire from the Flint, 122–26
64. Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905), 3–4, 6–8. Phil Stoneman is not only impressed by Cameron’s bravery in leading a doomed Confederate attack on superior Union forces but also by the way the wounded Southerner resembles Stoneman himself (“He is so much like me I feel as if I had been shot myself!”). Ibid., 8
65. Dixon, The Clansman, 6, 8–9, 12–14, 18–55. Besides expressing Dixon’s own fear of a “mulatto citizenship,” Lincoln addresses Stoneman (improbably) by quoting directly from the words of the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural. Additionally, he refers back to, or expands upon, phrases originally used in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. At one point, indeed, Dixon’s Lincoln offers an updated version of his famous “house divided” speech: “The Nation cannot now exist half white and half black, any more than it could exist half slave and half free.” Ibid., 39–55, quotation from 47.
66. Ibid., 56, 60, 61–65, 68–69, 71–79, 82–85, 87–89.
67. Ibid., 90–92, 57–58, 93–94. Dixon hints that Lydia Brown and Lynch, unknown to Stoneman, have a secret relationship. Ibid., 94, 99–100.
68. Ibid., 98–99, 101–14, 120–35.
69. Ibid., 136–37, 139–51, 162–63, 152, 156, 165–86.
70. Anthony Slide points out that Dixon changed the Southern setting from North Carolina in The Leopard’s Spots to South Carolina in The Clansman to emphasize the evils of “black” Reconstruction. South Carolina was the only Southern state to have a legislature with a black majority. Slide, American Racist, 37.
71. Dixon, The Clansman, 188–89, 204–36, 247–52, 258, 268, 284, 288–89, 297–99, 302–308.
72. Ibid., 311–36.
73. Ibid., 337–41, 344–46, 349–50, 355–57, 359–61, 365–74.
74. Dixon was criticized, among other things, for his fictional account of Thaddeus Stevens (as Stoneman) and for his unacknowledged borrowings from Walt Whitman. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 126–29, 131. On Dixon and Whitman, see Francis Oakes, “Whitman and Dixon: A Strange Case of Borrowing,” Georgia Review 11, no. 3 (Fall 1957): 333–40.
75. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 131—33, 136.
76. Dixon would later assert that while his novel might eventually have five million readers, “the play if successful would reach ten millions and with an emotional power ten times as great as in cold type.” Cited in Cook, Thomas Dixon, 102.
77. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 136–37.
78.
Thomas Dixon, “The Clansman,” manuscript in D. W. Griffith Papers, Act I, 1–3, 6, 9–13, 18–24, 29, 32–41.
79. Ibid., Act II, 1–2, 8–25.
80. Ibid., Act III, 1, 7–9, 13–31.
81. Ibid., Act IV, 2–4, 7, 10–11, 13–17, 19–29.
82. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 139–45.
83. News and Observer [Raleigh], October 3, 5, 1905, quoted in Cook, Fire from the Flint, 141.
84. Montgomery Advertiser, November 5, 1905, quoted in Cook, Fire from the Flint, 144; News and Courier [Charleston], October 21, 1905, quoted in ibid., 142–43; The State [Columbia], October 23, 1905, quoted in Moore, “South Carolina’s Reaction to the Photoplay, The Birth of a Nation,” 32–33. Even Dixon’s father criticized the play’s highly disparaging view of African Americans. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 149.
85. Virginian-Pilot [Norfolk], September 23, 1905, quoted in John C. Inscoe, “The Clansman on Stage and Screen: North Carolina Reacts,” 144; Twin City Sentinel [Winston], September 30, 1905, quoted in ibid., 146; Charlotte Daily Observer, October 12, 1905, quoted in ibid., 146; Chattanooga Daily Times, quoted in Cook, Fire from the Flint, 144.
86. John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 66–67.
87. Pete Daniel, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 59; Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949), 8. Just over a year earlier (May–June 1905), James R. Gray had serialized Dixon’s novel, The Clansman, on the editorial pages of the Atlanta Journal. Gregory Mixon, The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class and Violence in a New South City (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 21.
88. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 144–46, 148–49. There were, of course, some severe criticisms of Dixon’s output outside the South. Muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker, for example, attacked Dixon’s “incendiary and cruel books and plays” for their encouragement of racial hatred. See Baker, Following the Color Line, 111, 266, 298.
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