When innocent people are brutalized, villains go unpunished, and corrupt police fail to act, a hero must rise to save the country he loves. His secret identity hidden behind a mask, the Grand Dragon leads his team of loyal companions in a battle to restore law and order.
This plot structure is familiar to anyone with a passing awareness of superhero formulas, but the specific hero, the Grand Dragon, is unknown except to readers of Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s once bestselling novel, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. Dixon, while claiming to have taken no “liberty with any essential historical fact,” recounts a version of the post-Civil War period in which the heroic Klan rescues the victimized South from the villainy of “Negro” rule. Although Dixon is “relatively unknown today,” and “no longer deserving of respectful prominence in the history of American popular culture,” biographer Anthony Slide likens him to John Grisham as an author who once commanded a major American audience. Dixon’s 1905 novel became the source for D. W. Griffith’s more enduring but equally racist adaptation, The Birth of a Nation, a film so influential that it incited the reformation of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) with its 1915 release. Although both Dixon and Griffith’s white supremacist rewriting of history is now reviled, their masked vigilantes entered the American consciousness as admired figures, and the Klansmen’s characteristics—as introduced by Dixon, adapted by Griffith, and also emulated by actual KKK members across the U.S.—shaped comic book superheroes.
Working in a different medium more than three decades after Dixon, Siegel and Shuster, two young urban Jewish men of immigrant parents, were anything but sympathetic to Klan ideology. But by the mid-1930s, KKK hero tropes had been absorbed into popular culture, distanced from their white supremacist roots, and reproduced as generic formula in pulp adventure fiction. Ben Cameron, a.k.a the Grand Dragon, represents the earliest 20th-century incarnation of an American vigilante hero who assumes a costumed alias to hide his identity while waging his war for good—the formula adopted by Siegel and Shuster, the creators of Superman.
Dixon did not invent the figure of the costumed superhero, but the character type—as traced from The Clansman through The Birth of a Nation and the second Klan to pulp fiction and early comic books—was popularized by Dixon’s vision. The superhero, despite the character’s evolution into a champion of the oppressed, partly originated from an oppressive, racist impulse in American culture, and the formula codifies an ethics of vigilante extremism that still contradicts the superhero’s purported social mission.