The Flaming Sword.

The Flaming Sword. By Thomas Dixon. With an introduction and notes by John David Smith. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2005. Pp. xxxii, 453. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8131-9129-7.) In returning this obscure novel to print, John David Smith has provided a valuable service to scholars interested in the intellectual history of racism in the twentieth century. Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946) is best known for writing the vehemently racist best-selling novels The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 (New York, 1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1905). But Dixon remained a prolific writer and an unwavering racist throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The Flaming Sword, his final novel, was published in 1939, and while it had none of the success of his early novels, Dixon saw it as the culmination of a lifetime of work. He intended it "to give an authoritative record of the Conflict of Color in America from 1900 to 1938" (p. xiii). The book chronicles the defeat of the United States by an alliance of foreign communists and American blacks, and Dixon uses the tale to denounce many of the black intellectuals--such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, and James Weldon Johnson--who had criticized him during the preceding decades. Smith's introduction and his judicious notes throughout the text deftly provide the context needed to understand the novel.