The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

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The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905, the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr. (the others are The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor). Chronicling the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from a pro-Confederate perspective, it presents the Ku Klux Klan heroically. The novel was adapted first by the author as a highly successful play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. W. Griffith in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation. Dixon's novel portrays free blacks engaged in massive violent crimes against whites. He later claimed that 18,000,000 Southerners supported his beliefs. Dixon portrays the Radical Republican speaker of the house, Austin Stoneman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, from Pennsylvania), as a rapacious, vindictive, race traitor, mad with power and eaten up with hate. His goal is to punish the Southern whites for their revolution against an "oppressive" government (the Union) by turning the former...

Read on Wikipedia · Image published by Doubleday Page 1905, Public domain