SOURCE: Oakes, Frances. “Whitman and Dixon: A Strange Case of Borrowing.” Georgia Review 11 (fall 1957): 333-40.

In the following essay, Oakes's close textual reading of The Clansman reveals substantial similarities between Walt Whitman's and Dixon's descriptions of Reconstruction-era Washington, D.C.

One of the strangest cases of literary borrowing can be found in Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, a novel of somewhat dubious artistic merit which, nevertheless, has a place in American literature as a result of its widespread popularity. Written in 1905, and later rewritten as a script for D. W. Griffith's first great movie, The Birth of a Nation, The Clansman portrays life in the South during the reconstruction period. Extolling the virtues of the Ku Klux Klan and decrying the evils of the ex-slave and carpetbag government, Dixon appealed directly to popular sentiment and to the romantic concept of Southern life. In spite of its melodrama and its...