Abstract
Abstract: This essay argues that novelist Thomas Dixon Jr’s portrait of the Reconstruction Klan was heavily influenced by college fraternities, particularly the Kappa Alpha Order. Founded by Confederate veterans in 1865, Kappa Alpha fused ritualistic fraternalism with the myth of the Lost Cause. Dixon’s continued involvement with the Kappa Alpha Order, long after his college days, provided philosophical and aesthetic inspiration for his portrait of vigilante terrorists as white-robed Christian Knights. In his trilogy of Reconstruction novels— The Leopard’s Spots (1902) , The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907)—Dixon seamlessly assimilated the iconography and culture of white college fraternities, thereby underscoring the power of these organizations as repositories for white supremacy and Confederate memory in the wake of the Civil War .
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