11. The entertainment media championed the Lost Cause of the Confederacy
Following Reconstruction, the former enemies of the North and South still regarded each other with distrust. Especially in the defeated South, resentment festered. The way of life which had preceded the war was destroyed. So was Southern pride. Reconciliation, especially with the advent of Jim Crow laws, was difficult. Around the turn of the century, a new movement arose in the former Confederacy, which sought to address the causes of the war as centering on the issues of state’s rights and the preservation of the antebellum South. An almost mythical South arose, which was presented first in books, plays, and short stories.
Thomas Dixon Jr. was born in North Carolina, raised there during Reconstruction, and educated at a Baptist school which later became Wake Forest University. A failed actor, he became an ordained Baptist Minister. Long a white supremacist he viewed the new South with disdain, supported Jim Crow laws, and lectured extensively on the subject. In 1902 he wrote a trilogy of novels covering the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction. He compared the poor condition of blacks in the latter period to their happy existence in the antebellum period in the third and first books respectively. In the middle volume, The Clansman (1905), he wrote of the South’s attempts to resist the “wrongs” of Reconstruction. All three books were bestsellers, especially in the South.