[Footnote 1:  Its fundamental assumptions were ably refuted by Edward Atkinson in the North American Review, August, 1905.]

[Footnote 2:  It was reviewed in the Dial, April 16, 1901, by W.E.B.  DuBois, who said in part:  “Mr. Thomas’s book is a sinister symptom—­a growth and development under American conditions of life which illustrates peculiarly the anomalous position of black men, and the terrific stress under which they struggle.  And the struggle and the fight of human beings against hard conditions of life always tends to develop the criminal or the hypocrite, the cynic or the radical.  Wherever among a hard-pressed people these types begin to appear, it is a visible sign of a burden that is threatening to overtax their strength, and the foreshadowing of the age of revolt.”]

In January, 1904, the new governor of Mississippi, J.K.  Vardaman, in his inaugural address went to the extreme of voicing the opinion of those who were now contending that the education of the Negro was only complicating the problem and intensifying its dangerous features.  Said he of the Negro people:  “As a race, they are deteriorating morally every day.  Time has demonstrated that they are more criminal as freemen than as slaves; that they are increasing in criminality with frightful rapidity, being one-third more criminal in 1890 than in 1880.”  A few weeks later Bishop Brown of Arkansas in a widely quoted address contended that the Southern Negro was going backward both morally and intellectually and could never be expected to take a helpful part in the Government; and he also justified lynching.  In the same year one of the more advanced thinkers of the South, Edgar Gardner Murphy, in Problems of the Present South was not yet quite willing to receive the Negro on the basis of citizenship; and Thomas Nelson Page, who had belittled the Negro in such a collection of stories as In Ole Virginia and in such a novel as Red Rock[1] formally stated his theories in The Negro:  The Southerner’s Problem.  The worst, however—­if there could be a worst in such an array—­was yet to appear.  In 1905 Thomas Dixon added to a series of high-keyed novels The Clansman, a glorification of the KuKlux Klan that gave a malignant portrayal of the Negro and that was of such a quality as to arouse the most intense prejudice and hatred.  Within a few months the work was put on the stage and again and again it threw audiences into the wildest excitement.  The production was to some extent held to blame for the Atlanta Massacre.  In several cities it was proscribed.  In Philadelphia on October 23, 1906, after the Negro people had made an unavailing protest, three thousand of them made a demonstration before the Walnut Street theater where the performance was given, while the conduct of some within the playhouse almost precipitated a riot; and in this city the play was suppressed the next day.  Throughout the South, however, and sometimes elsewhere it continued to do its deadly work, and it was later to furnish the basis of “The Birth of a Nation,” an elaborate motion picture of the same general tendency.