Presidents and Celebrities: Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Dixon Jr. and Birth of a Nation
Thomas Frederick Dixon Jr. was an American white supremacist, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Author Mark Benbow has referred to Dixon as a "professional racist". Dixon wrote two best-selling novels, The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900 (1902) and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Both of these novels romanticized Southern white supremacy, and promoted the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Dixon used his novels to opposed equal rights for African-Americans and to glorified the Ku Klux Klan as heroic vigilantes. The Clansman was made into a motion picture by film-maker D. W. Griffiths and was retitled The Birth of a Nation in (1915). It was controversial even in its time and is credited with inspiring a 20th-century rebirth of the Klan. Benbow states this about Dixon:
Dixon might be best described as a professional racist who made his living writing books and plays attacking the presence of African Americans in the United States. A firm believer not only in white supremacy, but also in the "degeneration" of blacks after slavery ended, Dixon thought the ideal solution to America's racial problems was to deport all blacks to Africa.
Dixon is described as having been a "good friend" of President Woodrow Wilson. In 1887, Dixon was a Baptist minister, preaching at the Second Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. He became a very popular evangelist and was asked to speak at a number of national venues. He was offered a position at the large Dudley Street Baptist Church in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts. As his popularity on the pulpit grew, so did the demand for him as a lecturer. While preaching in Boston, Dixon was asked to give the commencement address at Wake Forest University. Additionally, he was offered an honorary doctorate from the university. Dixon rejected the offer, and instead promoted a man he believed deserved the honor, his friend Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was not yet well-known politically, and when a reporter at Wake Forest who heard Dixon's praises of Wilson, he put a story on the national wire, giving Wilson his first national exposure.
While on a lecture tour that Dixon attended a theatrical version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The play outraged Dixon, who claimed in his autobiography that he literally "wept at [the play's] misrepresentation of southerners." He vowed that the "true story" of the South should be told, and as a result of that experience, Dixon wrote his first novel, The Leopard's Spots (1902). This book, along with its successor, The Clansman, were published by Doubleday, Page & Company and each was a commercial success. The entire first edition of The Leopard's Spots was sold before it was printed. It sold over 100,000 copies in the first 6 months.
Dixon's novels glorified antebellum American white supremacy and racial segregation and strongly opposed universal suffrage and miscegenation. They also supported southern Jim Crow segregation and for American racism in general. His novels depict Northerners as greedy carpetbaggers and white Southerners as victims. In the Clansman, Dixon describes the Reconstruction as an era of "black rapists" and "blonde-haired" victims.
Dixon had been a fellow graduate student in history with Woodrow Wilson at Johns Hopkins University and, in 1913, dedicated his historical novel about Abraham Lincoln, The Southerner, to "our first Southern-born president since Lincoln, my friend and collegemate Woodrow Wilson".
The Clansman was adapted into a silent film by D. W. Griffith, and was retitled as The Birth of a Nation (1915). Its plot includes the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth and the relationship of two families in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras over the course of several years: the pro-Union Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy Camerons. It was the first motion picture to be screened inside the White House, viewed there by President Woodrow Wilson, his family, and members of his cabinet.
Birth of a Nation was shown in the East Room of the White House on February 18, 1915. The screening was attended by President Woodrow Wilson, members of his family, and members of his Cabinet. Dixon and Griffith were both present for the screening. Dixon, in his autobiography, quotes Wilson as saying, when Dixon proposed showing the movie at the White House, that "I am pleased to be able to do this little thing for you, because a long time ago you took a day out of your busy life to do something for me." The quote from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People is included in the film's intertitles:
After the film was screened, Wilson received many letters protesting against his support for the film, including a letter from Massachusetts Congressman Thomas Chandler Thacher. Former Assistant Attorney General William H. Lewis and A. Walters, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, called at the White House to add their protests. Wilson's private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, claimed in a letter he had written to Thacher on Wilson's behalf, that Wilson had been "entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance."
Tumulty's denial on Wilson's behalf is dubious, given that Wilson's knowledge of Dixon's career and of the notoriety attached to The Clansman. It is almost a certainty that Wilson would have had some idea of the general tenor of the film." The movie was based on a best-selling novel and had been preceded by a stage version which was met with protests in several cities. These had received a great deal of news coverage. The Evening Star, at that time Washington's "newspaper of record", had reported in advance of the showing at the White House, anticipating that protests would follow. Three title cards with quotations from Wilson's book were used in the film. They read:
"Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes.... In the villages the negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences."
"....The policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South.....in their determination to 'put the white South under the heel of the black South.'"
"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation.....until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the southern country."
The next day, February 19, 1915, Dixon met with his North Carolina friend, Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy and a fellow white supremacist. Daniels set up a meeting that morning for Dixon with Edward Douglass White, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Justice White had once been a member of the Klan and agreed to a screening of the film for the entire Court. In addition to the entire Supreme Court, in the audience were members of the diplomatic corps, Secretary Daniels, 38 members of the Senate, and about 50 members of the House of Representatives.
The following day, Griffith and Dixon transported the film to New York City for review by the National Board of Censorship. They presented the film as "endorsed" by the President and the Board approved the film by 15 to 8. A warrant to close the theater in which the movie was to open was dismissed after a long-distance call to the White House confirmed that the film had been shown there. However Justice White was very angry when advertising for the film stated that he approved it.
Dixon could not understand the criticism of this film, especially by African Americans. He stated, "My books are hard reading for a Negro, and yet the Negroes, in denouncing them, are unwittingly denouncing one of their greatest friends". He believed that the film would held his friend in the White House. In a letter sent on May 1, 1915, to Joseph Tumulty, Wilson's secretary, Dixon wrote: "The real purpose of my film was to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of history that would transform every man in the audience into a good Democrat." In a letter he wrote to President Wilson on September 5, 1915, Dixon claimed: "This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy". Dixon was referring to Wilson's policy of allowing cabinet members to impose segregation on federal workplaces in Washington, D.C. by reducing the number of African-American employees through demotion or dismissal.
In more enlightened times, the film has received significant criticism for its blatant racism. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote:
Certainly The Birth of a Nation presents a challenge for modern audiences. Unaccustomed to silent films and uninterested in film history, they find it quaint and not to their taste. Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early and wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel show or a vile comic pamphlet.
The film is credited with the refounding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. By 1915 the Ku Klux Klan had largely disbanded, but the movie had made heroes of its members, and the reborn Klam adopted the look that had been invented by the film’s set designers, who had used 25,000 yards of white muslin to outfit the cast in pointed hoods with eyeholes. Even the horses in The Birth of a Nation wore them. The movie caused merchandisers to sell Ku Klux hats and kitchen aprons, and theater ushers even dressed in Klan robes for openings. New York society matrons hosted KKK costume balls. Ten years later, in 1925, a “modern” Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington, parading down Pennsylvania Avenue, thirty thousand strong, wearing the white robes and pointed hoods designed for the movie. As recently as the 1970s, David Duke used the film to recruit Klansmen.
But for Dixon, the film did not result in a successful life. Dixon's final years were financially disastrous. He had lost his house on Riverside Drive in New York, which he had occupied for twenty-five years. The money he earned from his books was lost on the stock and cotton exchanges in the crash of 1907. His final venture in the late 1920s was a vacation resort," Wildacres Retreat, in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. After spending a vast amount of money on its development, the enterprise collapsed as speculative bubbles in land across the country began to burst in advance of the crash of 1929. He ended his career working as a court clerk in Raleigh, North Carolina. Dixon died on April 3, 1946.
Dixon might be best described as a professional racist who made his living writing books and plays attacking the presence of African Americans in the United States. A firm believer not only in white supremacy, but also in the "degeneration" of blacks after slavery ended, Dixon thought the ideal solution to America's racial problems was to deport all blacks to Africa.
Dixon is described as having been a "good friend" of President Woodrow Wilson. In 1887, Dixon was a Baptist minister, preaching at the Second Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. He became a very popular evangelist and was asked to speak at a number of national venues. He was offered a position at the large Dudley Street Baptist Church in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts. As his popularity on the pulpit grew, so did the demand for him as a lecturer. While preaching in Boston, Dixon was asked to give the commencement address at Wake Forest University. Additionally, he was offered an honorary doctorate from the university. Dixon rejected the offer, and instead promoted a man he believed deserved the honor, his friend Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was not yet well-known politically, and when a reporter at Wake Forest who heard Dixon's praises of Wilson, he put a story on the national wire, giving Wilson his first national exposure.
While on a lecture tour that Dixon attended a theatrical version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The play outraged Dixon, who claimed in his autobiography that he literally "wept at [the play's] misrepresentation of southerners." He vowed that the "true story" of the South should be told, and as a result of that experience, Dixon wrote his first novel, The Leopard's Spots (1902). This book, along with its successor, The Clansman, were published by Doubleday, Page & Company and each was a commercial success. The entire first edition of The Leopard's Spots was sold before it was printed. It sold over 100,000 copies in the first 6 months.
Dixon's novels glorified antebellum American white supremacy and racial segregation and strongly opposed universal suffrage and miscegenation. They also supported southern Jim Crow segregation and for American racism in general. His novels depict Northerners as greedy carpetbaggers and white Southerners as victims. In the Clansman, Dixon describes the Reconstruction as an era of "black rapists" and "blonde-haired" victims.
Dixon had been a fellow graduate student in history with Woodrow Wilson at Johns Hopkins University and, in 1913, dedicated his historical novel about Abraham Lincoln, The Southerner, to "our first Southern-born president since Lincoln, my friend and collegemate Woodrow Wilson".
The Clansman was adapted into a silent film by D. W. Griffith, and was retitled as The Birth of a Nation (1915). Its plot includes the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth and the relationship of two families in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras over the course of several years: the pro-Union Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy Camerons. It was the first motion picture to be screened inside the White House, viewed there by President Woodrow Wilson, his family, and members of his cabinet.
Birth of a Nation was shown in the East Room of the White House on February 18, 1915. The screening was attended by President Woodrow Wilson, members of his family, and members of his Cabinet. Dixon and Griffith were both present for the screening. Dixon, in his autobiography, quotes Wilson as saying, when Dixon proposed showing the movie at the White House, that "I am pleased to be able to do this little thing for you, because a long time ago you took a day out of your busy life to do something for me." The quote from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People is included in the film's intertitles:
After the film was screened, Wilson received many letters protesting against his support for the film, including a letter from Massachusetts Congressman Thomas Chandler Thacher. Former Assistant Attorney General William H. Lewis and A. Walters, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, called at the White House to add their protests. Wilson's private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, claimed in a letter he had written to Thacher on Wilson's behalf, that Wilson had been "entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance."
Tumulty's denial on Wilson's behalf is dubious, given that Wilson's knowledge of Dixon's career and of the notoriety attached to The Clansman. It is almost a certainty that Wilson would have had some idea of the general tenor of the film." The movie was based on a best-selling novel and had been preceded by a stage version which was met with protests in several cities. These had received a great deal of news coverage. The Evening Star, at that time Washington's "newspaper of record", had reported in advance of the showing at the White House, anticipating that protests would follow. Three title cards with quotations from Wilson's book were used in the film. They read:
"Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes.... In the villages the negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences."
"....The policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South.....in their determination to 'put the white South under the heel of the black South.'"
"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation.....until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the southern country."
The next day, February 19, 1915, Dixon met with his North Carolina friend, Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy and a fellow white supremacist. Daniels set up a meeting that morning for Dixon with Edward Douglass White, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Justice White had once been a member of the Klan and agreed to a screening of the film for the entire Court. In addition to the entire Supreme Court, in the audience were members of the diplomatic corps, Secretary Daniels, 38 members of the Senate, and about 50 members of the House of Representatives.
The following day, Griffith and Dixon transported the film to New York City for review by the National Board of Censorship. They presented the film as "endorsed" by the President and the Board approved the film by 15 to 8. A warrant to close the theater in which the movie was to open was dismissed after a long-distance call to the White House confirmed that the film had been shown there. However Justice White was very angry when advertising for the film stated that he approved it.
Dixon could not understand the criticism of this film, especially by African Americans. He stated, "My books are hard reading for a Negro, and yet the Negroes, in denouncing them, are unwittingly denouncing one of their greatest friends". He believed that the film would held his friend in the White House. In a letter sent on May 1, 1915, to Joseph Tumulty, Wilson's secretary, Dixon wrote: "The real purpose of my film was to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of history that would transform every man in the audience into a good Democrat." In a letter he wrote to President Wilson on September 5, 1915, Dixon claimed: "This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy". Dixon was referring to Wilson's policy of allowing cabinet members to impose segregation on federal workplaces in Washington, D.C. by reducing the number of African-American employees through demotion or dismissal.
In more enlightened times, the film has received significant criticism for its blatant racism. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote:
Certainly The Birth of a Nation presents a challenge for modern audiences. Unaccustomed to silent films and uninterested in film history, they find it quaint and not to their taste. Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early and wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel show or a vile comic pamphlet.
The film is credited with the refounding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. By 1915 the Ku Klux Klan had largely disbanded, but the movie had made heroes of its members, and the reborn Klam adopted the look that had been invented by the film’s set designers, who had used 25,000 yards of white muslin to outfit the cast in pointed hoods with eyeholes. Even the horses in The Birth of a Nation wore them. The movie caused merchandisers to sell Ku Klux hats and kitchen aprons, and theater ushers even dressed in Klan robes for openings. New York society matrons hosted KKK costume balls. Ten years later, in 1925, a “modern” Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington, parading down Pennsylvania Avenue, thirty thousand strong, wearing the white robes and pointed hoods designed for the movie. As recently as the 1970s, David Duke used the film to recruit Klansmen.
But for Dixon, the film did not result in a successful life. Dixon's final years were financially disastrous. He had lost his house on Riverside Drive in New York, which he had occupied for twenty-five years. The money he earned from his books was lost on the stock and cotton exchanges in the crash of 1907. His final venture in the late 1920s was a vacation resort," Wildacres Retreat, in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. After spending a vast amount of money on its development, the enterprise collapsed as speculative bubbles in land across the country began to burst in advance of the crash of 1929. He ended his career working as a court clerk in Raleigh, North Carolina. Dixon died on April 3, 1946.