American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon

9. Miscegenation

MISCEGENATION 143 9 Miscegenation One twentieth-century novelist for whom Thomas Dixon had great admiration was Gertrude Atherton (1857–1947). The appeal might seem odd in that Atherton’s novels were noted for their eroticism, most notably her 1923 best-seller Black Oxen, and the writer was highly praised for her promotion of the New Woman. But Atherton was also a racist, as is very clear from her 1900 novel Senator North. Like Dixon, Atherton found inspiration in a real-life individual, Senator Eugene Hale of Maine, and, as Dixon would do repeatedly , Atherton warned of the danger of miscegenation. In Senator North, a principal character, Harriet Walker, is the daughter of a white man and an octoroon; she possesses all the stereotypes of the Negro and is advised never to smile, “for her wide grin ‘was the fatuous grin of the Negro.’”1 Senator North was part of Thomas Dixon’s library along with another of Gertrude Atherton’s novels, The Conqueror (1902), in which she displayed almost childlike hero worship for Alexander Hamilton. The reality in the South before, during, and after the Civil War is that perhaps as much as 80 percent of the Negro population had mixed blood. The Southern plantation owners considered themselves white aristocracy and as such believed they had a God-given AMERICAN RACIST 144 right to take advantage of their black female slaves. It is very clear that the “poor white trash” had little, if any, responsibility for the problem of miscegenation. It did not start with Thomas Jefferson and it did not end with Reconstruction. Thomas Dixon had studied Isaac Taylor’s The Origin of the Aryans (published in 1898 by Charles Scribner in the contemporary science series), but he preached racial purity with both a passion and an illogicality that smacks of psychosis. The three immigrant groups that produced his family—the English, the Germans and the French—were the prime examples of the master races. To this group he added the basic Aryan countries, but then his thinking becomes decidedly muddled. Like Adolph Hitler, Dixon despised the Slavic races, the Africans, and the African Americans. The ethnic group now identified as Hispanic was not a part of Dixon’s worldwide Aryan nation. Portugal made the cut, as did, curiously, Japan and Turkey in the 1930s. Dixon described his alliance as the “Christian Commonwealth,”2 but the Jews were equally admitted to membership, as were Native Americans and the great pre-Spanish civilizations of South and Central America, the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Mayans. Dixon’s admiration for the non-Aryans and non-Christians appears based on respect for their racial purity—Jews, for example, did not generally marry outside of their own people. He looked upon the Native Americans and the other very early settlers of this hemisphere as representative of a noble people with praiseworthy cultural traditions. All these groups married their own kind—members of their own tribe—and here is an obvious example of Dixon’s obsession with the threat of interracial marriage. It is no accident that in the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans would often attempt to “pass” as Native Americans. A 1930 feature film, The Silent Enemy, which supposedly documented and consisted entirely of a cast of the Chetoga tribe of Native Americans , included African Americans in leading roles, unbeknownst to its producer. Earlier, African Americans had “passed” as Hawaiians , and a popular song of around 1916 has a Negro woman shout- MISCEGENATION 145 ing at her boyfriend, appearing on stage in a Hawaiian band, “They May Call You Hawaiian on Broadway, But You’re Just a Plain Nigger to Me.” Dixon’s views on miscegenation are made profoundly clear in his first novel, The Leopard’s Spots, in which the book’s only educated black, George Harris, seeks to marry the daughter of his white friend, the Honorable Everett Lowell. Lowell is the stereotypical, almost laughable, white liberal, supportive of the African American cause—provided no Negro seeks to be his son-in-law. As the Reverend Durham warns, “One drop of negro blood makes a negro. It kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions” (p. 242). In The Clansman, Harris is replaced by Silas Lynch, although his desire to marry the white and virginal Elsie Stoneman is not verbalized until the play of...