The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905. It was the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr. that also included The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor. It presents the Ku Klux Klan heroically. The novel was twice notably adapted, immediately by its author as a highly successful play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. W. Griffith in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.The play, being concerned with the KKK and Reconstruction, is adapted in the second half of The Birth of a Nation. According to Professor Russell Merritt, key differences between the play and film are that Dixon was more sympathetic to Southerners' pursuing education and modern professions, whereas Griffith stressed ownership of plantations.Dixon wrote The Clansman in support of racial segregation, as it showed free blacks turning savage and violent, committing crimes such as murder, rape, and robbery far out of proportion to their percentage of the population. He claimed that 18,000,000 Southerners supported his beliefs. Dixon portrays the Radical Republican speaker of the house, Austin Stoneman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, from Pennsylvania), as a rapacious, vindictive, negro-loving legislator, mad with power and eaten up with hate. His goal is to punish the Southern whites for their revolution against an "oppressive" government (the Union) by turning the former slaves against the white Southerners and using the iron fist of the Union occupation troops to make them the new masters. The Klan's job is to protect the white Southerners from the carpetbaggers and their allies, black and white. In addition to criticism that The Clansman would stir up feelings in the South, Dixon's argument that the Klan had saved the South from negro rule was ridiculed as absurd.