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Dixon’S The Leopard’S Spots: A Study In Popular Racism, Maxwell Bloomfield

Scholarly Articles

The first fourteen years of the twentieth century constituted a major reform period in American history. In politics, economics and the arts new ideas and practices emerged to shatter nineteenth-century pre- conceptions. Crusading journalists led the way in calling for a revitalized democracy to bridge the dangerous gulf separating the very rich from the very poor. Increasingly public opinion was directed toward the elimination of class barriers by absorbing laborer and capitalist, immigrant and old-stock native, into an expanded form of democratic state which should minister to the welfare of all.

Yet during these same years, when mass audiences responded …