SOURCE: McGee, Brian R. “Thomas Dixon's The Clansman: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Anticipated Utopia.” Southern Communication Journal 65, no. 4 (summer 2000): 300-17.

In the following essay, McGee examines the discourse used in The Clansman, arguing that the novel uses the language of both dystopia and utopia.

Whenever lists of the cinematic canon are produced by film scholars, D. W. Griffith's early masterpiece, Birth of a Nation, invariably appears. Griffith's first film has received no shortage of academic attention. Not only was this epic a remarkable technical accomplishment, but those studying the Ku Klux Klan movement have devoted considerable time and effort to chronicling the use of the film by William Joseph Simmons as a recruiting tool for the 20th-century Klan (e.g., MacLean, 1994; Wade, 1987). Given the academic attention paid to Birth of a Nation, one would expect the novel (and the play based on it) that inspired the movie also...