American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon

12. The Final Years

THE FINAL YEARS 185 12 The Final Years The stock market crash of 1929, coupled with abortive efforts to develop a mountain retreat called Wildacres near Little Switzerland in western North Carolina, resulted in the loss not only of Dixon’s New York home on Riverside Drive (in 1934) but also of the bulk of his fortune. He was philosophical: “I lost my first fortune in the panic of 1907 assisted by the great banker gamblers of Wall Street. The Federal Reserve Act put a period to the era of money squeezing. We never saw the interest on money driven again to 127 per cent. But I still managed to lose mine.”1 With a certain amount of pride, Dixon noted that by 1934 he had lost $1.25 million. The New York Times (April 17, 1934) reported that the author, who now described himself as “penniless,” expressed no regret that he had failed to save any of his income. “That I lived this up and lost the rest of it is beside the question,” he said. “The point is that I made this money in twenty-seven years.” Dixon remained in demand as a speaker. He had campaigned for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, and the following year, he broadcast on WJZ-New York that “the NRA coal code is a Magna Carta of human rights for the sweat-smeared, begrimed, sodden dwellers of the world beneath the earth.” Other aspects of Roosevelt’s New AMERICAN RACIST 186 Deal were less appealing to Dixon, in particular the Federal Theatre, which he regarded as Communist-controlled—and to some extent it was. He argued that participation in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was contingent upon the applicant’s membership in the Communist Party. When Roosevelt came up for reelection in 1936, Dixon campaigned for Republican candidate Alf Landon. Thomas Dixon last received national attention when he appeared in February 1936 at a convention called by Georgia Governor Gene Talmadge and Texan John Henry Kirby and sponsored by the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. As reported in Time (February 10, 1936), the author was “still Ante-Bellum politically”: “Thomas Dixon rose beneath a huge Confederate flag to denounce the New Deal for the Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill (‘the most brazen attempt to outrage states’ rights by placing Federal bayonets at our backs!’) and Mrs. Roosevelt for encouraging the Southern Negro to embrace the tenets of collectivist philosophers .” A photograph accompanying the news item shows a tired and somewhat disheveled old man, wearing what appears to be a dressing gown rather than the jacket and tie favored by the other delegates. In the 1930s, Thomas Dixon returned to North Carolina, no longer a famous and popular author but more a relic of a bygone Southern age. In May 1937, Republican judge, and Wake Forest classmate, Isaac M. Meekins assured him of a small but permanent income by appointing him clerk of the Eastern North Carolina District Federal Court. “As Nathaniel Hawthorne found inspiration in the old Customs House of Salem so I hope to enrich my mind in your courts,” he told an interviewer.2 But there was to be only one last published novel, The Flaming Sword, and it is generally seen as a critical failure. Published in 1939 by the Monarch Publishing Company of Atlanta, with thirty full-page illustrations by Edward Shenton, The Flaming Sword was perhaps not as unsuccessful as was suggested; certainly it went through some four printings in the first two months of publication, June and July. Monarch Publishing was owned by Edward Young Clarke, a white supremacist and THE FINAL YEARS 187 local official of the Ku Klux Klan. He disappeared after promising heavily to promote The Flaming Sword, and Dixon, apparently, was left with several thousand unsold copies. Despite a lack of publicity , Dixon did receive some favorable reviews. The New York Times (August 20, 1939) wrote, “Mr. Dixon is no doubt sincere and earnest in all intention. But the reader will very probably regard his novel as a nightmare melodrama, and will see in it the expression of a panic fear.” The situation in Europe caused the New York Herald Tribune (September 17, 1939) to state, “Whatever you may think of the story, it is not as wildly incredible today as it might have seemed a few short weeks ago.” The Flaming Sword is a sequel to The Clansman...