American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon

2. Southern History on the Printed Page

SOUTHERN HISTORY ON THE PRINTED PAGE 25 2 Southern History on the Printed Page While on one of his lecture tours, Thomas Dixon witnessed George L. Aiken’s stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had first been published in serial form in the antislavery newspaper the National Era, and in book form in 1852 as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. An ardent abolitionist , Harriet Beecher Stowe argued that tacit support of slavery by the Northern states was immoral, and it is generally accepted that her novel was a primary factor in bringing about the Civil War. “So this is the little lady who made this big war,” said Abraham Lincoln upon being introduced to her. Of Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the characters in Dixon’s first novel, The Leopard’s Spots, comments: “The picture of that brute with a whip in his hand beating a negro caused the most terrible war in the history of the world. Three millions of men flew at each other’s throats and for four years fought like demons. A million men and six billions of dollars worth of property were destroyed” (pp. 404– 5). “If ever a book proved that politics and literature are inextricably bound, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is it,” wrote Vivian Gornick in the AMERICAN RACIST 26 Los Angeles Times (December 15, 2002), upon publication of a new edition by Oxford University Press. Her comment might equally apply to Dixon’s Reconstruction Trilogy. Both Yankee and Southerner chose to view Uncle Tom’s Cabin as political propaganda. But, as W.J. Cash wrote in 1941, “Mrs. Stowe did not invent the figure of Uncle Tom, nor did Christy [with his minstrels] invent that of Jim Crowe—the banjo-picking, heelflinging , hi-yi-ing happy jack of the levees and the cotton fields. All they did was to modify them a little for their purposes. In essentials , both were creations of the South—defense mechanisms, answers to the Yankee and its own doubts, projections from its own mawkish tears and its own mawkish laughter over the black man, incarnations of its sentimentalized version of slavery.”1 Dixon was obviously aware both of the novel and of its impact , but it was the play that upset him so much that he wept at its misrepresentation of Southerners.2 He determined that he would write a sequel to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, featuring one of Mrs. Stowe’s most prominent characters, Simon Legree. The impetus for Dixon’s career as a writer may have been Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but the literary formula was provided by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewewicz (1846–1916), winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize for Literature and best remembered today for Quo Vadis? (1896). Dixon greatly admired Sienkiewewicz’s trilogy on Polish history, With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Pan Michael. Although he did not admit it in relation to the writing of The Reconstruction Trilogy, Dixon equally admired British novelist Hall Caine (1853–1931). There are a number of similarities between the two men, both being propagandizers with a strong sense of morality and a sentimental attachment to the area about which they wrote. For Dixon, it was the South, and for Caine it was the Isle of Man, off the northwest coast of England. Hall Caine knew as much as Thomas Dixon about self-promotion, at one point describing himself as “the Shakespeare of the novel.” Caine’s 1894 novel The Manxman broke the formula of the three-volume novel popular up until that time. It was filmed in 1929 by Alfred Hitchcock SOUTHERN HISTORY ON THE PRINTED PAGE 27 as his last silent film, and, again as with Dixon, many of Caine’s novels later became motion pictures, most notably The Christian (1897) and The Eternal City (1901). On publication of The Manxman, Dixon wrote: “The marvelous power of this book is something immortal. I have never read a book of more resistless power. No man can write the truth and not preach. Talk about preaching! I try to preach, but when I read such a book I think I would crawl on my hands and knees around the world if I could write one like it. When a thousand preachers shall have died and been forgotten that book shall preach to generations yet unborn , preach to millions unchanging...