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58 2 The White Man’s Burden or the Leopard’s Spots? Dixon’s Political Conundrum Thomas Dixon’s first novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865–1900, surprised publishers by becoming an instant success. Published late in 1901, it topped Bookman’s monthly bestseller lists for over a year, leading to a rapid depletion of its first printing of fifteen thousand copies.1 Reprinted every year for the next half decade, Dixon’s first novel was followed by two more top-selling sequels. In its day, The Leopard’s Spots was thus one of the most widely read responses to Kipling’s poem in the United States. A current approach to interpreting Dixon’s novel is to look for and describe gaps, contradictions, and instabilities in Dixon’s definition of whiteness. Scott Romine calls this “a dominant pattern in recent criticism of Dixon’s work that seeks to expose or deconstruct his contradictory, illogical, and fragile construction of whiteness.”2 This trend in Dixon criticism resembles my approach to Kipling, although Dixon’s critics tend to rely on close reading alone rather than reception to make their case. For example, Sandra Gunning convincingly argues that The Leopard’s Spots expresses “a profound anxiety over the maintenance of a stable white identity” and registers “both the complexity and internal contradictions of radical white supremacist thought.”3 For Gunning, this anxiety comes from Dixon’s suppressed knowledge that whites possess the very traits that they have projected onto the black other: the text depicts examples of white male savagery and sexual violence even while it attempts to systemize a racial hierarchy assigning these traits only to inferior blacks. Kim Magowan similarly claims that “in spite of himself, Dixon unravels the very notion of difference upon which his white supremacy is so crucially based. Racist ideology is predicated upon a notion of fixed, stable The White Man’s Burden or the Leopard’s Spots? 59 identity. In Dixon, the white man’s identity, as white, as male, and this as superior, breaks down.”4 Susan Gillman goes further to speculate that Dixon’s failure to maintain in his novel a unified category of whiteness in contradistinction to blackness was an inevitable feature of late-nineteenth -century racial discourse. According to Gillman, the novel functions like other popular racial rhetorics, including Anglo-Saxonism and Kipling’s influential notion of a white man’s burden. Such “central tropes and figures of American racial-national discourse” attempt to systematize difference into clear binaries and oppositions, but in operation they only “reveal the many fissures, shifting alignments, and cross- and countercurrents that form the polarized racial realities of the turn of the century.”5 Refining Gillman’s argument, I see “the white man’s burden” not as one more unstable trope that Dixon couldn’t control but as a central grounding concept that Dixon aimed to reconcile with and anchor a network of other racial and nationalist ideas. In addition to trying to shore up the porous racial categories of whiteness in a culture that was beside itself with contradictory definitions and usages for that concept, Dixon also sought to adapt for his own purposes Kipling’s powerful linkage between unchangeable racial hierarchy and heroic civilizing mission. In this linkage Dixon saw a chance to revise the political landscape and challenge what was for him a troubling opposition in U.S. party politics—the perceived opposition between, on the one hand, the Republicans’ idealistic global mission to spread civilization to the person sitting in darkness and, on the other, the Southern Democrats’ Jim Crow policies of racial segregation and control.6 While Harilaos Stecopoulos has argued that The Leopard’s Spots is Dixon’s attempt to convince Northerners that the experiences of the white South were “an important source of wisdom for white Americans eager to take up ‘the white man’s burden,’”7 I argue that the novel also adapts the highly charged poem to appeal to white Southerners. In other words, Dixon’s goal was nothing less than resolving the political opposition in rhetorics of U.S. imperialism between “the leopard’s spots” and “the white man’s burden.” As a consideration of rhetoric, this chapter focuses less on literary elements of the novel such as plot, characterization, and narrative and, instead , analyzes the racial arguments found in the sermons and speeches of Dixon’s characters and of Dixon himself, placing them in relation to political and...

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