How does Dixon’s The Clansman describe the social, political, and economic disintegration that plagued the South during Reconstruction? In Dixon’s mind, who is to blame? In what ways is Dixon’s book giving a voice to white supremacy?

Dixon's book describes the South during Reconstruction as overrun by overreaching northerners who, against the doctrine of states' rights and the wishes of the former Confederates, impose the will of ill-educated former slaves on Southern society. The federal government is to blame for these misfortunes, Dixon asserts, as they carry out a plan that puts power in the hands of the inferior black people, and his work perpetuates ideas of black inferiority and white supremacy.
At the beginning of Book 1, in the chapter "The Assassination," Elsie Stoneman, a nurse, is crying over a Confederate soldier who will be put to death for being a traitor. The surgeon says of the young man,"I tell you, Miss Elsie, it's a sin to kill men like that. One such man is worth more to this Nation than every negro that ever set his flat foot on this continent!" The Confederate soldiers are described as dashing, noble, and divinely sanctified. Their lives, according to Dixon, are worth more, as the doctor himself pronounces one white man's life to be worth more than that of every black man.
Dixon asserts that the federal government knows that blacks are not the equal of whites but allows them to gain power nonetheless. Even President Lincoln is shown as hypocritical in his conversation with Congressman Austin Stoneman. Before his assassination, Lincoln is shown planning to expel the blacks after allowing them to be emancipated. He says, "If the Negro were not here, would we allow him to land? . . . . The duty to exclude includes the right to expel." In other words, the federal government is shown as craven and hypocritical. Even Lincoln himself, the Great Emancipator, plans to expel the former slaves and is shown to continue to believe in colonization—removing former slaves from the country to return to Africa.
Dixon portrays the inferiority of blacks and depicts Northerners involved in reconstructing the South as committing great follies. In the chapter "A Whisper in the Crowd," Dixon writes the following:

When demagogues poured down from the north and began their ravening before crowds of ignorant Negros, the plow stopped in the furrow, the hoe was dropped, and the millennium was at hand.

Orators and agents of Reconstruction from the North (known as carpetbaggers) stream south to the place where Austin Stoneman is recuperating in South Carolina. There, the narrator observes that Reconstruction is a failure because former slaves are too ignorant to attend to their affairs, and they do not do any farm work. Instead, black tenants stop working and follow northern orators around with their landlords' mules. Reconstruction is portrayed as harming the society and economy of the South. In addition, black voters are shown as ridiculously ignorant, as they carry around ballots that are actually rat labels that they can not read.
Slaves run amok, and Gus, a former slave, rapes a white woman. Only the Klan can restore justice and order to a society that has become depraved under the rule of Northerners and former slaves. Blacks are, in Dixon's mind, unfit to control political and economic affairs, and whites must resume control. Dixon perpetuates ideas of white supremacy.

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