The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

The Clansman

Authors	Thomas Dixon Jr.
Language	English
Genre	Lost Cause myth, pseudohistory
Publication date	1905

The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905, the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr. (the others are The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor). Chronicling the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from a pro-Confederate perspective, it presents the Ku Klux Klan heroically. The novel was adapted first by the author as a highly successful play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. W. Griffith in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.^[1]

Dixon wrote The Clansman in support of racial segregation, as it showed free blacks turning savage and violent, committing crimes such as murder, rape, and robbery far out of proportion to their percentage of the population. He claimed that 18,000,000 Southerners supported his beliefs.^[2] Dixon portrays the Radical Republican speaker of the house, Austin Stoneman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, from Pennsylvania), as a rapacious, vindictive, race traitor, mad with power and eaten up with hate. His goal is to punish the Southern whites for their revolution against an "oppressive" government (the Union) by turning the former slaves against the white Southerners and using the iron fist of the Union occupation troops to make them the new masters. In Dixon's characterization, the Klan's job is to protect white Southerners from the carpetbaggers and their allies, black and white.

The book and its stage and film adaptations were highly controversial in their time, and continue to receive criticism for their espousal of racist and Neo-Confederate sentiments. In addition to concerns that The Clansman would stir up political and racial tensions in the South, Dixon's portrayal of the Klan as chivalrous freedom fighters was ridiculed as absurd.^[3]