The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

by Thomas Dixon Jr.

Book Overview

"The first thing to be said in discussing Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s novel The Clansman is that no person of critical judgment thinks of it as having artistic conception or literary craftsmanship." - Historian Thomas D. Clark

The year was 1865. With the close of the Civil War, there began for the South an era of even greater turmoil. In The Clansman, his controversial 1905 novel, later the basis of the motion picture The Birth of a Nation,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813101263
• ISBN13: 9780813101262
• Release Date: December 1970
• Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
• Length: 392 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 7.7"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Laughably dated novel, badly twisted history, fascinating reading

As literature, this novel (the source of "The Birth of a Nation", the first feature-length motion picture) is laughably dated by its flowery romanticism. As history, its twisted adoration of the Klan, highly-colored and cynical condemnation of Northern abolitionism, and even fallen-hero worship of Abraham Lincoln as the would-be savior of the defeated south is execrable. But as social history (and part of "The Novel as American Social History" series from the University of Kentucky Press) it is fascinating reading. Dixon was no wild-eyed radical, either. He was born in Shelby, NC, graduated from Wake Forest University when it was actually in Wake Forest, NC, and rose to prominence in the Democratic Party, eventually being appointed a Federal judge in eastern NC and living and dieing in Raleigh. So his fictional insight into the mind of the white Southerner is frighteningly clear. All white Southerners were heroic knights (Lincoln, when met by the mother of a Southern boy, was declared to be a Southerner because no Northern man could be so wise and gallant), all white Southern women were saints (never more so than when they were sewing 400,000 white sheets for the Klan in total secrecy!), and of course the villain of the piece is a Northern businessman and factory owner. Freed slaves are never more than pitiful, pitiable, ignorant, fawning pawns in his game, characterized as animals with yellow eyes and thick lips. Given these characterizations, should it be surprising the positive light Dixon casts on the foundation of the Klan, and the rightness and righteousness of its purposes by any means? In the end, given the constraints of the genre and the language prevalent at the time (1905) Dixon was writing, he actually did a serviceable job of weaving his twisted history into readable fiction. The introduction points out that the book had modest success that was fading and would have been forgotten had Dixon not been asked to write the script for his novel for what was to become the first feature length movie, and one of the most famous ever made.

The truth always hurts

I picked this book up out of curiosity. Although it has a slow start it soon has you hooked. I appreciated the author's use of historical fact to provide the backdrop for the story. Having watched numerous documentries on the whole reconstruction era as well as reading about it, I don't think the author took many liberties with documented facts. Having read all the other reviews, I am amused by the righteous indignation displayed by those who have had their warped view of history challenged. This book was written 40 years after the war and even less time had passed since the end of reconstruction, so the accounts of this period were still fresh in peoples minds who had lived through this era, and I seriously doubt that it would have become as popular as it did had it been lies. The southerners were and still are a proud bunch and they would not have endorsed a fantasy as fact. I have far more faith in the record of events as told in the novel than I do in revisionist ramblings of modern liberal historians who are bent on recreating history, 150 years removed from the events. The comments I have read prove how the modern American mind has been brainwashed into believing the dilusional revision of American history. Anyone who has any doubt about the behavior of the "freedmen" in this book need only look at Africa in 2007, and they will realise that if anything the author downplayed their behavior and actions. The biggest problem that most of the reviewers have with this book, is that it wasn't written in a world ruled by the PC police, and it gets under their skin that there is nothing they can do about it.

A Fascinating, Important Reading of History.

This novel is important reading--not as a lesson in historical fact, but rather to understand and envision the power (and inherent violence) of a white supremacist worldview in American history. Dixon is careful to detail many facts about historical figures, particularly President Lincoln and Republican Congressman Thad Stevens, including many actual quotes and near-quotes of these men in their dialogue; he is meticulous and masterful with so many aspects of this novel. The Clansman (and Dixon's later novel, The Traitor) are virtually the only works of popular American literature to render a sympathetic, insider view of the Ku Klux Klan. Dixon includes so many rich and rare details of history that it's no wonder readers have been persuaded (and still are, apparently) that this is a complete and accurate picture of what is perhaps the single most tumultuous period of American history.But it would be a gross error to assume that Dixon's portrayal of race relations is at all accurate. Dixon makes it appear that southern whites were made vulnerable (by the federal government, by military rule, and by the ravages of war) to the attacks of an animalistic race of out-of-control freedmen, but nothing can be further than the truth. White southerners inflicted violence upon blacks to maintain their brutal control over social relations and labor--and then generated a powerful, lasting mythology of black criminality and brutality to perpetuate this violence and justify it. Any reading of first-hand accounts of black freedmen during Reconstruction is alternately chilling and saddening--particularly the Congressional testimonies of freedmen about the race riots of Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. Throughout the South freedmen were coerced into slavery-like labor; they were prevented from migrating elsewhere by vigilante groups (in many cases, the KKK); often the Freedmen's Bureau and military officials sided with the unjust practices of white planters; and Republicans in Congress seemed to manipulate freedmen's vote only to benefit themselves and turn a blind eye to the interests of freedmen. White men and women in the South had it hard after the Civil War--but black men and women, by and large, had it far harder.Any scholarly history of Reconstruction written after 1950 (after Americans got over a long period of racist and xenophobic hysteria) will elaborate on the above details... particularly the work of Eric Foner, or the excellent account of The Trouble They Seen. Pick up one of these books as a reading companion to The Clansman!Dixon may not accurately represent the FACTS of history, but he does accurately represent the EMOTIONS of history--the many emotions of southern whites about a newly freed population of black men and women, particularly their fears and their psychological/sociological need to keep ex-slaves in a subordinate social position--to separate black and white in a society that coexisted a little too close for comfort.It's a fasci

Possibly the greatest book written in the 20th Century

Read this book! It is not as fictional as most people think

I got insights into history that had been censored by school

This novel was the inspiration for D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation. I got insights into American history which never could have been had by any standard high school textbook. Today, it would probably be rated as the epitome of a politically incorrect story. In a society where all views are supposed to get a fair hearing, this novel tests the principle