In 1872, the Dixons’ house in Shelby burned down. Faced with this disaster and the still-depressed state of the local economy, Thomas Dixon Sr. concluded that a return to farming offered the best hope of survival for his growing family (another son had been born in 1866 and a daughter early in 1872). On Christmas Eve, the Dixons moved to a farm on Buffalo Creek, some six miles from Shelby. Thomas Dixon Jr. would remember the next three years as unpleasant and difficult. With his elder brother, Clarence, away studying at Wake Forest College, he was obliged to take on many duties around the farm. Dixon hated the monotony and drudgery of farm life. “The deeper I buried my feet in the soil,” he would write many years later, “the clearer became my conviction that the beastly toil of it de-humanized its people.”11
While Dixon respected his father, there were tensions between them during his childhood. Dixon Sr. was a strong-minded man who functioned not merely as a farmer but also as a Baptist preacher. As he had been self-educated, he was determined that his children should have the chance for a higher education. On matters of behavior, however, he was inflexible and stern. His children were prohibited from fighting. When an argument between Thomas Jr. and another minister’s son (over Reconstruction) deteriorated into fisticuffs, he gave his son a sound whipping. The elder Dixon was even more opposed to drinking than fighting since he thought the early death of his father had been caused by alcohol. His mother, who had moved in with the family on the farm, did not share his temperance views. She persuaded young Thomas to buy her some whiskey. Once his father found out about it, Thomas received another whipping. This time, the punishment had dramatic consequences for the whole Dixon family. Grandma Dixon, equally inflexible in her own way, went off to live with another of her children and never returned. Young Thomas’s mother was so furious over the whipping that she insisted on moving the rest of the family back to Shelby immediately. Amanda, pregnant again at the age of forty-three, was also adamant that the family live in her mother’s home while a house was built for them.12
Education
Returning to the town not only released Thomas Dixon Jr. from the drudgery of farm labor but it also allowed him to attend school more regularly than he had done before. At Shelby Academy, he did so well that in 1879—only three years after his arrival and at the age of fifteen—his teachers considered him good enough at mathematics, Latin, and Greek to begin college that fall. His older brother Clarence had already graduated from Wake Forest College and, after further training at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, had embarked on a career as a minister. His father probably expected Thomas to follow a similar path yet also seems to have cherished some doubts about the strength of his younger son’s faith. He suggested that Thomas attend a series of revival meetings he was about to conduct. Despite his initial skepticism, Dixon, caught up in the emotionalism of the revival, experienced what was in essence a religious conversion.13
Like most Southern colleges in the years immediately following the Civil War, Wake Forest College was an impoverished and threadbare institution. Thomas Dixon was disappointed on his arrival in September 1879 to realize that it was much smaller and its buildings less impressive than he had anticipated. Soon, however, he settled down to his academic work and started to build up what, by the time he gained his master of arts degree in 1883, would be the best student record ever achieved at Wake Forest. Dixon also plunged energetically into extracurricular activities. He was an accomplished orator. He additionally wrote for the college newspaper (the first story he ever published dealt with the organization of the Ku Klux Klan). In one respect only can he have been a disappointment to his father and older brother: in his final year at Wake Forest, he developed a great interest in science and, his religious faith undermined by reading the work of evolutionists such as Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer, abandoned the church.14
After graduating from Wake Forest, Dixon was offered a scholarship to do graduate work in political science at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins, opened only in 1876, was a new kind of university. “For the first time in an American university,” wrote Richard T. Ely, who taught political economy there from 1881, “the graduate and professionals schools constituted the center of its activities, and the undergraduate school was but an appendage.”15 With its stress on research, scientific seminars, and laboratories; scholarships for promising graduate students; and the new Ph.D. program it offered, Johns Hopkins was much closer in spirit to the universities of Germany than to any contemporary American institution. Dixon attended the seminar run by Ely and historian Herbert Baxter Adams, both of them German trained. It is likely that Dixon gained much of his later belief in the superiority of white “Anglo-Saxons” from Adams, who was convinced of the special genius of the “Teutonic” peoples for self-government and whose “germ” theory of political development led him to believe that the roots of American democracy could be traced back to the primitive arrangements of medieval German tribes. Albert Shaw, later a well-known expert on municipal reform and long-serving magazine editor, sat to the left of Dixon during his first Hopkins seminar. A few months earlier, Shaw had recorded his “intense interest” in a lecture given by Adams in which he traced the office of New England town constable “back to the ancient Saxon titheing-man”—a characteristic example of the historical approach associated with the germ theory.16
Sitting on the right side of Dixon at his first seminar at Johns Hopkins was another young man, Woodrow Wilson, who would have a distinguished academic career after which he would become twenty-eighth president of the United States. Dixon and Wilson became close friends who would, at crucial moments in their lives, help each other with favors. Their friendship would later have some impact on The Birth of a Nation story. As young graduate students, however, they were both interested in politics and political theory—and in the stage. Wilson, at some point in the first term, introduced Dixon to the editor of the Baltimore Mirror, who was so impressed with Dixon’s enthusiasm and apparent knowledge of the theater that he hired him to be the paper’s drama critic. As his obsession with the stage grew, Dixon began to think that he should abandon his studies at Johns Hopkins in order to enroll as a drama student in New York. When Wilson tried to dissuade him, he remained obdurate and, in January 1884, he left Johns Hopkins for good.17
On his arrival in New York, Dixon entered the Frobisher School of Drama, threw himself with his usual commitment into his studies, and went to see as many plays as he could afford. He took what he thought was the first step on the road to becoming an important actor when he was invited to join a company about to tour with Shakespeare’s Richard III. Being inexperienced, he did not think it at all odd that the manager of the company financed it by requiring each of the actors to invest in the production (Dixon’s contribution was $300, which he borrowed from his father and brother Clarence). Predictably, after a performance in upstate New York, the manager absconded with all the money and the company disbanded. Dixon now sought work with another company, but the director, looking at his tall, gangling frame, prophetically suggested that he might be more suited to writing plays than acting in them. Humiliated and disappointed, Dixon abandoned his hopes for a stage career and set off back to North Carolina.18
Just as acting had been a false start (as well as perhaps a youthful rebellion), Dixon now found himself pursuing two other lines of activity that proved of almost equally short duration. Looking for a way to make a living, he entered the law school at Greensboro, North Carolina. Shortly thereafter, his father, perhaps intending to wean him away even further from his interest in the stage, suggested that he run for the state legislature. His two opponents, one of them a cousin, were experienced politicians. But Dixon, mobilizing the oratorical gifts he had first shown in college, defeated them both with ease. Someone then suggested that he run for Speaker of the House; he seemed a serious possibility for election until it was pointed out that he was not yet twenty-one.
When the legislature met, Dixon proved himself
a skillful lawmaker. One successful bill he introduced was the first in the South to provide pensions for Confederate veterans. (Dixon’s speech on his bill was covered in a highly flattering way by Walter Hines Page, then editor of the Raleigh State Chronicle and later the publisher of Dixon’s best-known novels.) In spite of such successes, the young legislator rapidly became disenchanted with the corruption and wheeler-dealing that characterized politics and did not seek reelection.19
Dixon as Minister
In 1885, Dixon gained his law degree and started to practice. Yet law gave him no more satisfaction than politics had done. His forensic skills helped him to a number of courtroom victories, but they left him with little sense of personal fulfillment. After one case, in which he had successfully prosecuted a man for burning a mill, Dixon publicly confessed that the prosecution had been a mistake and led a campaign for the man’s release. The one bright spot during this period was his attraction to a minister’s daughter, Harriet Bussey. When her father opposed the match, the couple eloped to Montgomery, Alabama, where they were married in March 1886. Now Dixon had someone with whom to share his doubts over a legal career. Sometime that summer, standing on the beach at Wilmington, he had a mystical experience somewhat reminiscent of his earlier “conversion.” This time, interpreting it as a call to a new way of life, he told his father that he intended to enter the ministry.20
In October 1886, Dixon received his first call to a Baptist church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. His reputation as a minister grew rapidly: six months later he accepted a call to a church in Raleigh, and six months after that to a church in Boston, Massachusetts. While in Boston, he was invited to deliver the commencement address at Wake Forest College. He used the opportunity to persuade the board of trustees to offer an honorary degree to Woodrow Wilson. A journalist, hearing Dixon’s praise of Wilson, reported it to the national wire services. The publicity that ensued gave Wilson his first taste of the limelight and helped launch his career. Later, as president of the United States, he would repay Dixon’s assistance by granting his old friend’s request to show The Birth of a Nation in the White House.21
After less than three years as a minister, Dixon received a call to the Twenty-Third Street Church in New York City. On his arrival in New York in August 1889, he was at first depressed by the seeming alienation of city dwellers from the churches. By focusing on local issues in his own sermons, however, and making sure his preaching was fresh and relevant, he was able to attract increasing numbers to his own services. His success drew him to the attention of John D. Rockefeller, a fellow Baptist. Rockefeller went to hear Dixon preach, was impressed, and invited him to dinner. Dixon by this stage was dreaming of a great temple in Manhattan with a huge auditorium that would allow him to reach the masses of the city. When he confessed this, Rockefeller offered to pay half the cost of building such a temple (which Dixon estimated at a million dollars) if Dixon could raise the balance. Dixon hoped to raise much of this money from his own congregation, but found them too cautious and conservative. His scheme, moreover, was opposed by other Baptist churches, which were jealous of the large sum Rockefeller had promised. The whole experience seems to have convinced Dixon that to reach the masses, he would have to establish a new church that would be attached to no single denomination. In March 1895, he resigned from the Twenty-Third Street Church and in April inaugurated his “People’s Church” in New York in the huge hall of the Academy of Music.22
As a preacher and speaker, Dixon had the ability to play on the emotions of his hearers. He did not shrink from controversial issues: he adopted clear political stances, attacking both the corrupt Tammany Hall machine in New York and William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic and Populist parties’ candidate for president in 1896. He was in favor of Cuban independence from Spain and supported the war with Spain in 1898. Subsequently, he supported Theodore Roosevelt, now a war hero, in his successful campaign to become governor of New York. Dixon campaigned constantly against the saloons—and on behalf of the poorest members of society. He produced three books dealing with religion that combined social sympathies with a fervent defense of conservative religious values. He also found himself in increasing demand as a lecturer. Eventually, his health broke down, and on the advice of his doctor, Dixon moved away from New York. He bought a house on the coast of Virginia and settled there with his wife and three children. For a time, he commuted back to New York on weekends to preach or speak. It became increasingly clear to him, however, that the People’s Church was never going to fulfill the hopes he had entertained for it and he resigned his ministry there early in 1899.23 If Dixon’s health had not been undermined and he had remained a successful minister and guest speaker, it is likely that he would never have written the novels and play that would become the basis of The Birth of a Nation.
Dixon as Novelist
After his retirement from the ministry, Dixon earned a considerable income from lecturing all over the United States. During one of his lecture tours, in 1901, he attended a stage production of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Shortly after his arrival in Boston, fourteen years earlier, Dixon had listened to a lecture on the “Southern problem” at Tremont Temple. Offended by the speaker’s description of the South as an enduring threat to the nation, Dixon had jumped to his feet and attacked both the accuser and the accusation, coming close in the process to causing a riot. After this incident, he later claimed, he had studied the Civil War and the Reconstruction period with the hope, at some stage, of telling the true story of the South.24 Seeing Uncle Tom’s Cabin acted as the catalyst for this ambition. Angered by what he perceived as its unjust view of white Southerners and its misapprehension of the true nature of blacks, Dixon left the theater resolved to tell the “true story” of the South’s postwar history. The best way of doing this, he thought, would be in a novel.25
Dixon’s previous careers—as actor, lawyer, politician, minister, and lecturer—had focused, with varying degrees of success, on reaching and influencing people. The novel he planned and researched in the remaining months of 1901 was intended to do this on a broader scale. Dixon hoped to convince Americans generally that the view of the South and of race relations presented in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was completely ill founded. In the process, he was attacking one of the best-known icons of American culture. Blending a fervent critique of slavery with sentimental romanticism, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a best seller almost as soon as it was published.26 It probably had a major effect in turning Northern opinion against slavery during the 1850s and thus helped drive the sections further apart (Lincoln supposedly once greeted Mrs. Stowe as “the little lady who made this great war”). The popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a novel, however, endured long after the Civil War and the final abolition of slavery. It was still, as late as 1899, the book that was most frequently checked out of the New York Public Library. A year earlier, novelist and critic William Dean Howells had hailed it as “the great American novel.”27
The number of people reached by Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a novel, however, was greatly exceeded by those who saw it as a play. For each individual who read the novel, perhaps fifty would eventually attend the play. Shortly after the book was first published, stage adaptations began to appear. Because of the absence of copyright law, directors, writers, and actors could make whatever changes they wanted to Mrs. Stowe’s story. Some adaptations changed or omitted characters; others modified the plot to produce a conventional melodrama. At times, the book’s antislavery line was softened. Yet the play proved a landmark in the history of the American theater. It attracted members of the middle class who had hitherto, for religious and moral reasons, looked down on the theater. It also appears to have presented antislavery views to working-class theatergoers, in many cases for the first time.28
The popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a play grew in the decades after the Civil War. As it became more and more distanced from the reality of slavery, formally ended by the Thirteenth
Amendment in 1865, it took on increasingly the character of a history lesson (children made up a rising proportion of the audiences). Already, by the early 1880s, large numbers of companies were touring the United States, exclusively devoted to what were coming to be known as “Tommer shows.” (One Detroit newspaper in 1881 complained of being “tortured with an invasion of Uncle Toms!!!!!”) This, however, proved only a prelude to what was to come. By the 1890s, there were around five hundred touring companies producing Tommer shows. As the twentieth century dawned, what had become a craze showed no sign of diminishing: one 1902 reviewer estimated that in that year alone, the play would be seen by one in every thirty-five Americans.29
D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Page 5
