The Ku Klux Klan and the birth of the superhero

Thomas Dixon Jr’s Ben Cameron, aka the Grand Dragon, represents the earliest twentieth-century incarnation of an American vigilante hero who assumes a costume and alias to hide his identity while waging his war for good – the formula adopted most famously by Siegel and Shuster for 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 – is dependent on Dixon’s vision. The superhero, despite the character’s evolution into a champion of the oppressed, 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.