Thomas Dixon and the Superhero Tradition

When I started looking at what I have since called the paramilitary action-adventure genre I was struck by its novelty in historical terms, certainly as long-running writer on the foundational Executioner series Michael Newton described it in the book that first got me thinking about the matter, How to Write Action/Adventure Novels (1989). Why, I wondered, did Newton describe the genre as having appeared in the 1960s (indeed at their very end, in Don Pendleton's 1969 War Against the Mafia) and not before? After all, adventure--and at least in a broad sense, action-adventure--stories are as old as storytelling itself, aren't they?

If Newton conveyed a sense of the genre's history he didn't bother much with its roots, but I later concluded that the claim for the genre's novelty was a strong one after all, resting on its tales being set not in the historical past or some exotic, remote, location but in the here and now in the very center of our civilized, urbanized world, in which there were those prepared to imagine that due to the failure of constituted authority to defend the order of things self-selected heroes had no choice but to do so in its place. A product of the social stresses of the long twentieth century this sort of genre really came together in that period, but was not without antecedents--one of which was Thomas Dixon's romanticized portrait of the Ku Klux Klan in the era of Reconstruction in his epic of post-Civil War North Carolina The Leopard's Spots (1902), and subsequent novels that focused more fully on the Klan's activity, starting with far and away the most significant of them, The Clansman (1905)--the book that inspired the milestone of cinematic history that was D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), and through it, the rebirth of the formerly Southern Klan as the nationwide "Second," Klan which was to wax so powerful in the reactionary, xenophobic 1920s.

All of this, of course, aligns with the more socially critical view of the genre as a right-wing celebration of vigilantism, and the identification of fictional angry men with guns as a hysterical middle class person's fantasy of latterday Freikorps slaughtering rebellious minorities, out-of-control youth and radical leftists in the streets. Still, if the connection with paramilitaries was what was most on my mind as I delved into that literary current I have since found myself thinking more about Dixon's Klansmen as having been precursors of another popular adventure genre--that of the superhero who conceals their everyday identity behind a visually distinctive costume, their real name behind a code name, as they act to uphold order where Authority has failed through physical action, which the Klan most certainly do in Dixon's depiction of them. Of course, the general expectation is that alongside the voluntary character of this action, the secret identity, the costume, the protagonist has powers beyond the ordinary--"super" powers. Dixon can at times seem to think that mere Southern-ness is itself a super power (bringing with it a superhero-like "genius for command . . . deep sense of duty and honour . . . deathless love of home . . . supreme constancy and sense of civic unity"), but as it happens he even offered what would be more broadly recognizable as superhero capacities in The Clansman by way of that important member of the organization Ben Cameron, who has, via the European education he had in preparation for his successful career as a physician, a scientific prowess extending to optography, and mesmeric abilities he uses in the course of the novel to subdue an enemy and later force a confession from him critical to the advancement of the plot. Indeed, along with the fact that Cameron is in the tale a wealthy landowner and "pillar of the community" in his normal, everyday life, he can seem like the Batman of the Reconstruction-era South.

Even acknowledging that I think it would be a mistake to on this basis alone try and draw a line running straight from the Klan to DC Comics (as some have indeed done). Still, it is fair to say that if the Klan were criminals, terrorists and villains in the eyes of the mainstream today Thomas Dixon made of them figures who can be described as superheroes as we know them. Accordingly, however antipathetic to the politics of a figure like Dixon one may be (and affectionate toward the superhero genre one may be), those concerned for the history of the form should acknowledge the extent to which Dixon's widely and highly influential portrayal of the Klan corresponds to the concept of the superhero, reflects an outlook that finds such figures particularly appealing (the ultra-individualism, elitism and vigilantism on behalf of the status quo of the superhero far better suit the right than the left), and if it did not inspire in the way some suggest still may have played a part in preparing the way for the superheroic figures of later fiction to become such popular, resonant figures--even where these would have a very different politics from the avowedly reactionary and racist Dixon.