"After his graduation from Wake Forest, Dixon received a scholarship to enroll in the political science program at Johns Hopkins University, "then the leading graduate school in the nation". There he met and befriended fellow student and future President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was also a Southerner, and Dixon says in his memoirs that "we became intimate friends... I spent many hours with him in room." It is documented that Wilson and Dixon took at least one class together: "As a special student in history and politics he undoubtedly felt the influence of Herbert Baxter Adams and his circle of Anglo-Saxon historians, who sought to trace American political institutions back to the primitive democracy of the ancient Germanic tribes. The Anglo-Saxonists were staunch racists in their outlook, believing that only latter-day Aryan or Teutonic nations were capable of self-government." But after only one semester, despite the objections of Wilson, Dixon left Johns Hopkins to pursue journalism and a career on the stage.