Thomas Dixon Jr.

Biography

American novelist, writer and minister Thomas Dixon was born in Shelby, NC. His father was a Baptist minister and, by inheritance, a slave-owner. As a young boy Dixon helped out on the farms the family owned; although he would later say he detested farm labor, he admitted that it helped him to better understand the life of the working class Southerner after the Civil War. He came to despise what he saw as the collaboration among corrupt local politicians, occupying Union troops and an oppressive federal government that worked to keep down the defeated South. While still a young boy he became aware of the Ku Klux Klan when a local Confederate widow had accused a freed slave of raping her daughter. Getting no help from the authorities, the woman turned to Dixon's family--his uncle commanded the unit the widow's husband served in during the Civil War. The Klan found the accused rapist and dragged him to the town square, where they hanged and shot him. The incident made a deep impression on the young Dixon, who believed that the Klan's actions were justified since the woman--and, by extension, all Southerners--could not trust the governing authorities to protect them. Dixon's uncle and father were both Klan members, who joined because they saw the Klan as the only way to bring order to a South still embroiled in violence and outlawry after the war. However, they saw the Klan eventually turn into the kind of corrupt and brutal gang it was supposed to be protecting people against, and they soon left it. Young Dixon entered the Shelby Academy in 1877, getting his diploma two years later, at which time he enrolled in Wake Forest University. An excellent student, it took him just four years to earn his masters degree in history and political science. After graduation he received a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, where he befriended another student who went on to great success--future US President Woodrow Wilson (I). In 1884 Dixon left Johns Hopkins for New York City, where he intended to have a career as a journalist and also act on the Broadway stage. His acting career was a bust, however, and he soon returned to North Carolina. He enrolled in Greensboro (NC) Law School, and in 1885 obtained his law degree. He then became involved in local politics, and was elected to the North Carolina legislature. However, he declined to run for re-election when his term was up, saying he was shocked and disgusted by the corruption and shady dealings he saw. He then became an advocate for the rights of Confederate veterans, and that gained him a following all through the South. After a short time practicing law, Dixon left the profession to become a minister. In 1886 he was ordained as a Baptist minister and moved to Greensboro, NC, then to Goldsboro. A year later he took over the Second Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC, then later was hired to take over a church in Boston, MA. In 1889 he took a position at a church in New York City. It was there that he ran into the "big time", associating with such well-known figures as John D. Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt (who he helped in Roosevelt's campaign for Governor of New York). However, Dixon eventually tired of what he saw as the corruption of the church, business and politics, and in 1895 he resigned from the Baptist ministry altogether, preferring to preach at nondenominational churches. He began preaching and lecturing all over the country, gaining an even bigger following, especially in the South. At one point he attended a production of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel of the pre-Civil War South, "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Infuriated at what he considered the distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods about the South in the play, he wrote his first novel, "The Leopard's Spots" (1902), which was meant as a refutation of Stowe's novel, and actually incorporated several of that novel's characters, including Simon Legree. If there is one thing Dixon is famous for, however, it is his novel "The Clansman", a heavily romanticized fictional accounting of life in the post-Civil War South, in the period known as Reconstruction. It portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as the protectors of Southern womanhood against the ravages of newly freed black slaves and a force for law and order, instead of the murderous terrorist gang they actually were. The book was turned into a film by famed director D.W. Griffith (I)--the controversial The Birth of a Nation (1915). Thomas Dixon died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Raleigh, NC, on April 3, 1946, at 82 years of age.