The United States has never quite gotten over the Civil War. It has never gotten over Reconstruction, either, that brief experiment when people of color tried to exercise full citizenship.
Of course, King has plenty of company in the white nationalist camp. Birthers, appalled at seeing a black man in the White House, still try to delegitimize Barack Obama. Fox News Channel pundits rant about cities with African American mayors being hellscapes of mayhem, while President Trump wishes the United States could receive fewer immigrants from countries such as Haiti and more from Norway.
None of this is new, nor did it arise spontaneously. In fact, King, Trump and the rest of the (white) America First fraternity are borrowing from a narrative popularized by a North Carolina novelist more than 100 years ago. His name was Thomas Dixon Jr., and he was the great-granddaddy of white nationalism. Dixon’s stories of virtuous white people victimized by violent and incompetent black people were not merely expressions of white supremacy but had brutal and deadly consequences.
Dixon was once hugely famous, a celebrity preacher and writer of lurid novels that sold in the millions, despite their frankly awful prose. Born in 1864 into a bookish family, he matriculated at Wake Forest College at age 15; by 19, he was on his way to Johns Hopkins University.
But academic life wasn’t for him. Dixon dropped out and tried acting, law, politics, the church and motivational speaking about such topics as imperialism (he was for it) and women’s suffrage (he was against it). In the 1890s, Dixon’s lecture tours made him rich and famous. Offended by a stage version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” he started writing novels to defend the white South and argue that ex-slaves were savages who had no place in America.
Margaret Mitchell credited Dixon’s books as an inspiration for “Gone With the Wind,” although he’s best known today (if he’s known at all) as the author behind D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” The 1915 film, co-written by Dixon, was based on his novels “The Leopard’s Spots” and “The Clansman” and set in a febrile Reconstruction South.
“The Birth of a Nation” revived white supremacist rage, which had lain somewhat dormant since the passage of Jim Crow laws at the end of the 19th century.
It also inspired the resuscitation of the Ku Klux Klan, which Dixon depicted as a bunch of chivalrous white gentlemen. The first Klan, ex-Confederates who rode around making sure former slaves didn’t try to actually use the citizenship and voting rights granted them by the 14th and 15th Amendments, had all but disappeared by the early 1870s. But in November 1915, a group of white men climbed Stone Mountain in Georgia and declared themselves the new “Invisible Empire,” pledging to “maintain white supremacy” and protect “the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood” from the sexual rampages of Negro men.
Dixon popularized the myth of the “Black Beast” rapist and amplified stereotypes of black men as preternaturally strong, “primitive” and inherently criminal. These fictitious ideas had real consequences. From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th, thousands of black boys and men were lynched for some transgression, real or imagined, against white women.
Both the stereotypes and the subsequent violence waged against black men continue today. In the 21st century, we’ve internalized racial panic so thoroughly that the killers of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott and Philando Castile (among others) never served prison time.
When white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof told the black congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston that they had to die because “you rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” he echoed Dixon, whose novels seethe with black men longing to despoil white “purity.” In “The Clansman,” the “ape-like” ex-slave Gus — a “thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour” — rapes a 15-year-old girl. In “The Leopard’s Spots,” a gang of black Union soldiers abduct Annie Camp, daughter of a Confederate veteran, on her wedding day. The white men riding off to rescue Annie ask her father, “What shall we do, Tom? If we shoot, we may kill Annie.” Tom replies, “Shoot, man! My God, shoot! There are some things worse than death.”
Dixon’s version of history is not dead. It continues to be fed by reactionary historians, despite the truth that Reconstruction was, for the brief period it lasted, quite successful. By the time Dixon published his novels, federal troops had left the South and whites had disenfranchised black men once again.
But the fear of black resurgence remained, and it continues to pervade our political life today. Dixon’s scenes of “carpetbagger rule,” with black elected officials drinking at a bar built under a statue of George Washington and inviting prostitutes into the North Carolina statehouse, call to mind the Internet assaults on Barack and Michelle Obama: the photoshopped images of the White House as a watermelon patch, with the first couple as apes or dressed as African tribespeople or washing their fried chicken down with malt liquor. And just recently, Vermont’s only black state representative resigned after enduring years of harassment at the hands of a white nationalist.
In several of Dixon’s later novels, he imagines Washington taken over by a sinister cabal of Negroes (led by W.E.B. Du Bois), communists and feminists who have listened to too much jazz. Extravagantly weird though this sounds, it’s not far off from the conspiracy theories at Infowars, the Daily Stormer or Sean Hannity’s spittle-specked shows. We’ve already had an African American president. The new House of Representatives, which includes the likes of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Lucy McBath and Sharice Davids — Latina, Muslim, African American and Native American — looks like Dixon’s worst nightmare.
Or, as Steve King put it, “You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men” — the very future Dixon feared.
