Remembering Thomas Dixon Jr.

Thomas Dixon Jr. was a committed White Nationalist who worked tirelessly to promote race realism and white solidarity. At various points in his life, he was an attorney, a legislator, a Baptist minister, a lecturer, a novelist, and a filmmaker. He is best known as the author of the screenplay for D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, and of the 1905 novel The Clansman on which the film was based. In his lifetime, however, Dixon’s influence extended far beyond one novel and one film, even though the film in question was the most famous of its era. But after his death, Thomas Dixon did not receive the recognition that he deserves.

In 1968, Biographer Raymond A. Cook wrote that Dixon was “today unknown to 99 per cent of our present population.”[1] And in 2004, film historian Anthony Slide referred to him as “relatively unknown.”[2] However, critics of Dixon’s views have occasionally conceded his significance. In 2006, the Louisiana State University Press released a collection of essays titled Thomas Dixon Jr. And the Birth of Modern America. And in 2019, the Washington Post published an article titled “Thomas Dixon Jr: The great-granddaddy of American white nationalism.” This was not meant as a compliment, but I think the notion that Dixon is one of the foremost proponents of post-Civil War White Nationalism in the United States is justified.

Thomas Frederick Dixon Jr. was born in North Carolina in 1864. The elder Thomas Dixon was a Baptist preacher, and he married Amanda Elvira McAfee, the wealthy daughter of a prominent planter and slaveholder. Before the outbreak of war, Reverend Dixon had opposed secession.[3] The young Dixon grew up poor during Reconstruction, and the family was twice forced to move because they could not afford to keep their home. Both his father and his uncle became members of the Ku Klux Klan.[4]

Thomas and Amanda Dixon had five children, including Fundamentalist minister A.C. Dixon and Elizabeth Delia-Dixon Carrol, a physician and advocate for women’s suffrage. “The Dixon children” writes Anthony Slide “were exceptionally intelligent, charismatic individuals and would often correspond with one another in Latin or Greek; they were all subjects of entries in Who’s Who in America prior to their thirtieth birthdays.”[5] After graduating “with more honors than any other student before him” from Wake Forest University in his native North Carolina, Thomas continued his studies in Baltimore, Maryland, and at Johns Hopkins University where he became friends with future president Woodrow Wilson.[6]

The two decades between Dixon’s graduation from Wake Forest and the publishing of his first novel were full of action. He married Harriett Bussey, with whom he had three children. While a short-lived attempt at an acting career ended in failure, the young man succeeded in just about everything else that he attempted. Stephen P. Smith, in his review of Dixon’s autobiography, recounts Dixon’s many professional triumphs:

By 1886, Dixon was a twenty-two-year-old newlywed, a practicing lawyer, and a state legislator. A political career, in which he might redress the wrongs done to the South by the Radicals, seemed to beckon. Yet he was still restless. In the autumn of that year, he resolved his inner tensions by resigning from the legislature and entering the Baptist ministry, fulfilling a wish of his father. After brief pastorates at Goldsboro and Raleigh in his home state, he found his way north once again, first to a Baptist pulpit in Boston, then to a pastoral appointment at the Twenty-Third Street Baptist Church in New York. In the metropolis, Dixon, never known for modesty or thinking small, began to dream truly grand designs. So that his audience could expand beyond one congregation of one denomination, he conceived of a non-denominational “People’s Church,” housed in its own commercial-office building and offering a wide range of social outreach programs to the city’s teeming millions. He boldly approached John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and gained the backing of “the Oil King” for his idea. But the jealousy and obstruction of rival ministers frustrated his plan, and it never came to fruition. Also while in New York, Dixon tackled the Tammany machine; both sides notched some victories in their mismatched war.[7]

According to Slide, no Protestant preacher at the time had a larger congregation than Thomas Dixon. He “quickly became noted as a flamboyant and sensationalist preacher” and “was very much the social crusader, taking on issues with the intensity that anyone of a liberal persuasion would admire” which included criticizing the city government, advocating for the poor, and supporting Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain.[8]

In 1898, Dixon left his church and began traveling across the country to deliver public lectures. He quickly gained a reputation as a superb speaker. As Raymond A. Cook describes:

Persons who heard Dixon lecture were enthusiastic about his ability as an orator, in a day when people placed more importance upon oratory than they do now. He was repeatedly referred to as “the best” lecturer in the country. During a four-year period, Dixon was heard by more than five million people, an unusually large number when it is recalled that his lecturing career occurred before the day of radio and television. For a program of two hundred lectures a year, Dixon’s audiences averaged more than six thousand listeners on each occasion.[9]

During his time living in the North, Dixon became incensed on two occasions upon hearing what he felt were unfair condemnations of Southern whites. The first took place in Boston, where Dixon listened to a speech about the so-called “Southern Problem” and the second came in New York when he saw a stage production of Harriett Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.[10] To counter the negative perception of the South held by some Northerners, Dixon wrote a trilogy of novels which portrayed the Reconstruction years from the perspective of Southern whites. These were The Leopard’s Spots, The Clansman, and The Traitor.

The Leopard’s Spots depicts the life of the fictional hero Charles Gaston as he spends his childhood impoverished living under the Yankee occupation but ultimately marries the beautiful daughter of a Confederate general and is elected governor of North Carolina. Gaston’s political platform is centered upon the disenfranchisement of blacks, and his views on race are learned from minister John Durham, who wishes to deport the black population of the state back to Africa. The Leopard’s Spots was intended as a rebuttal to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and two of the villains from Stowe’s novel reappear in Dixon’s book, but as wicked abusers and exploiters of whites rather than of blacks. The Clansman is about the misfortune that befalls the whites of a South Carolina town when Radical Republican leader Austin Stoneman moves in. Stoneman, who is modeled after Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, organizes a black militia that terrorizes local whites. These efforts are thwarted by the Ku Klux Klan, headed by Confederate veteran Ben Cameron. In The Traitor, John Graham, the head of the North Carolina Klan, attempts to disband the organization believing that it is no longer necessary. However, against Graham’s wishes it is reorganized under the direction of Steve Hoyle. Hoyle is a younger, more impulsive leader who engages in cruel abuses of power. A local Republican judge is assassinated by a rival within his own party who commits the deed while disguising himself as a Klan member, and Graham is put on trial for the murder. With the assistance of the dead judge’s daughter, who improbably falls in love with Graham, the real killer is finally exposed, and Graham’s innocence proven.

In each of the novels, blacks are depicted as unintelligent, violent, and incapable of responsible government. Whites who back the Reconstruction regime, be they Northern “carpetbaggers” or Southern “scalawags,” are vindictive and contemptible.  Dixon sets out to convince his readers that racial equality is absurd, that integration is doomed to fail, and that miscegenation is an evil that should not be tolerated. These messages are constantly present throughout the trilogy. The novels were undeniably commercially successful. According to Cook, The Leopard’s Spots ultimately sold more than one million copies,[11] The Clansman “far beyond one million copies,”[12] and The Traitor “nearly a million copies.”[13]

Capitalizing on the popularity of his works, Dixon adapted The Clansman and The Traitor into dramatic form, and the works were performed on stages across the country.

Though The Birth of a Nation is notorious for its positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan, and the secret order is shown as a positive force in The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, it would not be accurate to label Dixon as an unqualified Klan apologist. In his trilogy, the Klan is indeed shown as heroic when led by wise and experienced Confederate veterans. However, when it falls into the hands of younger men chasing danger and excitement, it swiftly devolves into a force for evil and a powerful tool misused for settling personal scores and harming innocents. The Traitor shows this most clearly, as elder statesman John Graham struggles in vain to combat Steve Hoyle’s revived version of the order.

For Dixon, the original Klan was a justifiable reaction to wrongs committed against Southern whites during Reconstruction, but it should not have stayed in existence a moment longer than was necessary. Furthermore, Thomas Dixon was a harsh critic of the Second Ku Klux Klan, which gained influence after the First World War as a populist vehicle for white Protestant identity politics. Though Dixon was himself a former minister and very much a populist, he fiercely attacked the new Klan. Here is Dixon quoted by the New York Times in January 1923:

“When organized a few years ago, this modern Klan sent me an invitation to join,” he said. “I promptly declined, and in my letter warned the organizers that if they dared to use the disguise in a secret oath-bound order today, with the courts of law working under a civilized Government, the end was sure-riot, anarchy, bloodshed and martial law. We have already reached the point of riot and bloodshed, and unless this thing is throttled promptly we are in sight of martial law.”[14]

Dixon also opposed the immigration restriction as espoused by the Klan:

Our fathers who landed before the Revolution blazed the way through the wilderness for the trembling feet of liberty. They built a beacon on these shores, flashing its rays of hope to all the oppressed of the earth. Shall we, their sons, meet the humble immigrant of today at the water’s edge with a mask and dagger and push him back into hell? If this is 100 per cent. Americanism, I for one spit on it.[15]

In evaluating this statement, it should be kept in mind that “the humble immigrant of today” that Dixon referred to in 1923 was arriving from Europe. Dixon, as a staunch racial separatist, would have viewed non-white migrants quite differently.

On the other hand, Dixon apparently saw Jews not only as white people, but as the best kind of white people. This attitude seems closely connected to his Christianity. As the same Times article reported, the devoutly Christian Dixon was extremely pro-Jewish, and condemned the Klan for excluding Jews:

Dr. Dixon said that the Klan’s proscription of the Jew was a curious revival of a malignant form of mob insanity. “Why should any man attack the Jew in this country, the home of the free and the refuge of the oppressed?” he asked. “There are but 5,000,000 Jews in this country, half of them in New York. Jew baiting has always been a form of idiocy. Jesus Christ was the son of a Jewish mother. From Jesus Christ down the ages to the last philosopher and thinker, the greatest ones have been Jews. The Jew is the greatest race of people that God has ever created.”[16]

Dixon was a constant promoter of white unity in the United States and sought reconciliation between its Northern and Southern sections. Though Reconstruction was certainly a divisive topic, his novels place the blame upon Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens and on opportunistic bureaucrats. He does not disparage Abraham Lincoln, who he counted as a fellow White Nationalist, and authored biographical novels celebrating the lives of both Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis. To Dixon, the War Between the States was a dispute over the meaning of the Constitution fought between two honorable armies.

Dixon stressed the duty of wealthy whites not to look down on or engage in the exploitation of their poorer kinsmen and, despite his origins as the son of a minister in the Anglo-Protestant South, did not harbor biases against Roman Catholics. Regional, class, and sectarian strife among white Americans had no place in Dixon’s vision of racial solidarity. However, plenty of White Nationalists today could quite reasonably see his “big tent” approach as too broad. Limiting immigration from other white countries to give newcomers time to assimilate is a sensible position, and Dixon’s pro-Jewish remarks foreshadow the Christian Zionist dogma that has played such a key role in corrupting America’s foreign policy.

Thomas Dixon Jr. continued to write novels until he was in his seventies, with his final book being The Flaming Sword, a plea for racial separation which celebrated the program of Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey.[17] He tried his hand at filmmaking in California and started his own studio. After Harriet Dixon died, Thomas married actress Madelyn Donovan in 1939.  Dixon’s creative output was simply incredible, consisting of no fewer than eighteen novels, twelve plays, and eighteen films.

He died in his native North Carolina in 1946, at the age of seventy-eight.

Dixon’s life story should serve as an inspiration to all who speak on behalf of our race. This creative genius was born into poverty and spent his childhood under military occupation, part of a people who were hated and humiliated.  Yet, he overcame these challenges, fearlessly spoke what he believed to be the truth, and in the end his words and ideas were communicated to millions.

Notes

1. Raymond A. Cook, Fire from the Flint: The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem: J.F. Blair), 1968, viii.
2. Anthony Slide, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press), 2004, 3.
3. Cook, 5.
4. Ibid., 14.
5. Slide, 18.
6. Ibid., 18-19.
7. Stephen P. Smith, “Southern Horizons,” Abbeville Institute, March 20, 2018.
8. Slide 20-22.
9. Cook, 103.
10/13Ibid., 105.; Ibid., 112.; Ibid., 131.;Ibid., 152.
14. “KLAN IS DENOUNCED BY ‘THE CLANSMAN’; Thomas Dixon Blames It for Riots and Bloodshed and Demands It Be Throttled.” New York Times, January 23, 1923.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976), 352-54.

Dave Chambers
https://counter-currents.com/2026/01/remembering-thomas-dixon-jr/