The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915

Welcome to the new book's network. Hello, GreenOne, and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and host, Dr. Christina Gessler, and today I am so pleased to be joined by Dr. Joseph Kelly, who is the author of The Biggest Lie, the prehistory of American Fascism from 1818 to 1915. Welcome to the show, Professor Kelly. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with your audience. I am so glad that you're here and we're going to dive into this topic. To start us off, would you please tell us a bit about yourself? Yeah. I studied in graduate school at the University of Texas. I started that program way back in 1984. After two years, I got my masters. I was in a bit of an anti-intellectual stage at that point. And I should say, too, I was not in history at the time. I was an English major. And I went and lived in Charlottesville for a year to write the Great American novel, which I did. Nobody else sort of recognized it. Didn't go anywhere. And I did a lot of waiting tables and that set me back to graduate school. I finished my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992. I did my dissertation was on James Joyce and the reception, maybe the afterlife of his book Ulysses, his reputation, how it was manipulated in the 20th century, especially how it was used in the United States during the Cold War. And that turned into a, well, I graduated in 1992. My first job was at the College of Charleston, which at the time was very much a teaching college, 4/4 teaching load, with two comp classes as a survey, and then an upper division English class. And I'm still at the College of Charleston. So that was my first job and really my only tenure track job. 1998, so six years into that, my career as a teacher here in Charleston, my dissertation, you know, augmented by more research, was published as a book by the University of Texas Press. I did a lot of the research in archival library at UT Austin. And same year, my twins were born. I had a son who's nine years older than them, but then we had twins in 1998, same time, my book came out. So it's probably not surprising. It was more than a dozen years, about 15 years before my next book came out. And in that interim, I kind of moved out of writing about writing literary criticism. You know, I put my heart and soul into the Joyce book, and it sold somewhere between 500 and 1,000 copies, and I'm guessing about 90% of that was to libraries, just on standing orders. So I was very interested in writing for a wider audience. And I had also tried to start publishing fiction again, so I had started querying agents. And while I didn't get anyone to bite on fiction, I discovered that what literary agents were really interested in was narrative history. So that combined with my thinking about what I could do, what kind of original research I could do with a very young children. I knew I was not going to be able to get an NEH and go to Ireland for a year or something like that. So I researched here, you know, I got into the archives here in Charleston and started writing about slavery. So my first history book, which came out in 2013, is kind of an intellectual history of the idea of slavery with a focus on Charleston, which is really kind of, you know, the birthplace of the Confederacy. And so that was my first foray into writing narrative history five years later. My next book came out, Maroon, which is really based on a class in the honors program that I taught three times here at the college, team taught with a colleague in the history department. It was called Maroon. It was about the experience of being cast away and rebuilding civil society and suggested that that was an alternate national myth to the Exodus myth that is the core of the Pilgrim story. So it was kind of trying to restore to national consciousness the notion of what happened in Jamestown as being a true founding of the nation. And then since then, I've been more or less working on the project that ended up in the biggest lie. I really set out to write a book on the 1920s and 1930s, what I pitched to Bloomsbury, who's my publisher. And by the way, I'm on the trade side in Bloomsbury, which is an interesting experience from an academic point of view. I'm not on the academic side of Bloomsbury, they have both. But it's a very different experience writing and working with editors on a trade side. I don't know if you want me to kind of elaborate on that. I won't go into it right now, but certainly if you're interested, I can talk more about it. But I pitched a book on the 1920s and 1930s, and that's basically what I sold to Bloomsbury. And the first chapter was going to be a trying to establish the notion that liberal democracy was not. United States was not really yet in liberal democracy right after World War I. And as a matter of fact, it was really headed towards an ethno-nationalist system. And most of the way there probably headed to autocracy. Jim Crow was going to expand out of the South and take over the whole country. So the first chapter was sort of supposed to establish that as the baseline. And I was writing that first chapter. Instead of writing forward in history, I started writing backward, because the story was really fascinating to me. How we got to 1919. A place where I think that the country was really democracy was really in a pretty bad spot in the United States. So I was also very fascinated by the notion of lying and public life. And the 1920s and 1930s, I was going to be a story about how we institutionalized telling the truth and finding the truth in the courts, in academia, the establishment, for example, of academic freedom. And peer review, et cetera, et cetera. Really comes around World War I and afterwards. But then I became fascinated. How did the United States, how did we as a country, we as a nation, learn to lie? And I traced it back as I was writing backwards. As I said, I really went all the way back to the Declaration. The subtitle of my book says 1818. And that's because that's a particularly important moment, I think. And the public narrative about the Declaration of Independence. So even though the book starts really with the Declaration, I think the start of this trajectory towards an autocratic one party, ethno nationalist society begins in 1818. So that's why I have that in the subheading of the book. But that pretty much brings me up to the present. I do want to circle back for a moment and talk about this being on the trade side. This seems like a book that is part of public history should be written for the public. But as you've mentioned with publishers, they make a decision. Is this more an academic book? Is this more a trade book? Meaning it would have appeal to a general audience that someone would pick it up in an airport or a museum gift shop. And they would feel like it was written for them as opposed to an academic book which is written for other specialists in your field who would be comfortable with jargon and things like that. And so for this book, it seems like something particularly it's published to new book in 2026 that it's something that that people are talking about in the public consciousness. But yet your publisher knew had to sit down and make a decision. Yeah. And actually, it's not so much that we made a decision should this go academic or should this go trade. That's a decision that I made back around 2011 when I was writing that other book to try to pitch it to trade publishers. So that first book that was called America's longest siege, which was about intellectual history of slavery was published by this press called Overlook Press in New York. It has that title because they specialized in what they thought were praiseworthy manuscripts that were overlooked by the main publishers. But it was definitely a trade publisher and I did that on purpose. I wanted to start writing for a general public to, you know, I had enough of an ego to want to want more readers than I thought my Joyce book up. And then on the strength of that really so that you know that book had a modest success, but it was on the strength of that that I pitched this other book about James town in the founding of the country. and by that time I had an agent in. and you know, had several different publishers who were interested in it. And all of those publishers were trades. So it wasn't, you know, already from the beginning for the very first concept of the book, I was already kind of gone over to the trade side. And that is, I mean, it's a big transition for an academic writer. First of all, it was a big transition for someone who writes literary criticism to move over to history because historians dot their eyes and cross their tees in a way that people writing about literature are much looser about that kind of thing. I don't mean that, you know, to writing literary criticism, you're careless or something like that. But historians, you know, you have to have the footnote that establishes that you know the historiography on every little aspect that you're talking about. So, you know, it took some adjustment for me to learn how to write as a professional historian, and then to move from professional historian to writing for a general public. I think that's still a journey. I'm not 100% sure that I've succeeded in doing that. I mean, I've tried to make the book very readable. And as I reread it now that it's bound in a hard cover, I look at a sentence, I go, wow, you know, there's a, that sentence could be about half as long as it should have been, as it ended up being. So, it's a constant battle to be writing in a sophisticated way, writing good history, but writing it for a general audience, and it's not a transition. I think it's partly a transition that takes a whole lifetime to make even, you know, the last book I write before I die, I probably won't feel like I've made it all the way there yet. - And in the acknowledgments, you thank the team at Bloomsbury, and you specifically thank your publisher for the work that the editor did going through all the drafts with you, and you really thank the editor individually. - Yeah, yeah, Anton Muller, who's now retired, just retired, this is one of his last projects. And as I said, this book really took it out of me. There's a big gap, you know, my last book was 2018. As I said, I was, thought I was writing a book about the 1920s and the 1930s, and that's what I sold to Bloomsbury as that idea, and that's what I contracted with. So as I started writing backwards, rather than forwards from 1919, I got really, got very nervous, and the book was developing organically, rather than, you know, from a, you know, a 50-page proposal. So, it was a struggle, and Anton really helped me through that, you know, re-conceive what I was doing, reassure me that, yes, Bloomsbury's still going to be interested in publishing this book, even though, you know, it ends where I was supposed to begin. And I've, you know, it's the first time I've had that kind of editorial experience. I mean, it was really amazing. And I think this is a difference, probably between the trade side, and I'm not even sure that this is really typical of a trade side experience. It's kind of what you read about editors in the 1930s and their relationship to writers. Yeah, he was extraordinarily helpful. We had a number of very long phone calls. I ended up turning in a manuscript that was about 130,000 words, and he made me cut about 30,000 words out of it, and add two chapters at the same time. So, you know, he had a very, a very heavy hand in the creation of this book, and whatever success it meets, I need to credit him quite a bit for it. - The book is called The Biggest Lie, the Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818 to 1915. We like to define terms here. What is fascism? - Fascism is a corruption of democracy. This is one of the things that, one of the things I wanna emphasize in this book, it grows out of democracy. You need to have a democracy in order to get fascism, because a fascist government is going to manipulate certain practices, is gonna exploit certain weaknesses in a democracy, and by exploiting those, it is going to establish an autocratic, one-party government that is typically, an ethno nationalist government. It's going to be people who are no belong to the nation, who are full-fledged citizens, and there's gonna be other people who are living within the boundaries of the nation, who might have been citizens yesterday, certainly a year, maybe five years ago, who no longer enjoy that kind of status. So a fascist government is gonna identify a particular population, and it is going to elevate that population. Say, these are the real Germans, or these are the real Italians, or these are the real Americans. And the others are not, the other people living here are not the real Americans. So that introduces a term of art that is used by historians of fascism that comes out of Nazi Germany. It is a heron-voke nationalism, a heron-voke democracy. And that term was begun to be used in the 1960s, 1970s, and by American historians of the South, to talk about what was going on in the antebellum South, that there was a heron-voke democracy. And that term, it was George Fredrickson, who kind of coined it, or initiated its use. And he knew he was borrowing that from descriptions of Nazi Germany, not so of South Africa at the time, 'cause in comparative histories, the regime in South Africa was being compared to Nazi Germany and was also being compared to the antebellum in Jim Crow South. But one of the things that we need to remember about a heron-voke democracy, a heron-voke, by the way, master race, that's a literal translation, a master race, nation, master race, democracy. And theoretically, at least, and this is the way Fredrickson described it, within the democracy, everybody who's in the in-group, let's say they're Anglo-American. That's what it was in the United States case. If you got to be labeled an Anglo-American, then you have full-fledged citizenship. And if you were not an Anglo-American, you were at best second-class citizen, and maybe even worse than that. Certainly didn't have full rights. But even within the in-group, so even if you're an Anglo-American, in order to sustain itself, this kind of fascist regime has to be autocratic within that group. So if you are dissenting and the big issue about dissent that I talk about in my book in the 19th century, dissent in the Antibellum South, especially after 1835, and dissent in the Jim Crow South between 1876 and 1965, really is to believe and to express your belief that all men are created equal. So even if you're in the in-group, even if you're an Anglo-American, a full-fledged citizen, who are arguing publicly that all men are created equal, rather than white people are superior to people who are not white, then you're right. You're going to be stripped of your rights as well. You're going to be, in many cases, you're going to be facing physical violence. You're certainly facing social ostracism. You may be facing lynching. You may be subjected to exile, and there were plenty, plenty of Anglo-exiles living in the north in the United States in the 19th century. - The book has three parts. And across those three parts we have an introduction, 15 chapters and a conclusion. And the first part is the new republic. And in this first section where we have the introduction and the first part of the book, you tell us that this book does not quite fit into the fascist alarm genre. And you point to other scholars who have reignited our interests in the conflict of the 1930s. But as you pointed out in our talk so far, you wanted to go way back. And you take the official starting point is 18, 18 yet, for those of us who have read the introduction in the first chapter, we know you go further back there. We look at the Declaration of Independence being written. We have vivid scenes of Thomas Jefferson, and at his writing desk, staring out the window, trying to figure out what he wants to say in the drafts of that important document. And you tell us that the main focus of your book is a little bit different than some of the other books. One is that you really wanna look at the South. But the others that you want to see, fascism not as something that we study best by looking, as you pointed out at Nazi Germany, at what happened in World War II abroad. But to look at fascism as a native weed, and that's your term, a native weed, a homegrown American phenomenon. And to do that, you take us way back to start. To understand, and how it came about here, how it's a home grown American phenomenon, why we don't have to look abroad to see evidence of how fascism takes root. And as I said, it starts even earlier than the title tells us. And the book is called The Biggest Lie. And in the introduction on page 15, you say white nationalism is the biggest lie in American history. Can you briefly for listeners explain what that means? - Yeah, and this also explains why the book on the subtitles 18, 18, even though if you read chapter 1, we're going back all the way to declaration. So in that first chapter, what I'm trying to establish is that people really did believe in human equality, including Thomas Jefferson. And it's quite clear, I think, convincing that if you look at the founding fathers, even those who own slaves, they truly believed in human equality. Now, what did that mean? Did that mean they thought that black Americans and white Americans were identical? Certainly not. If you look at somebody like Thomas Jefferson, he very openly and wrote about how he thought about racial differences between white people and black people. But what equality meant to them was that every single human being, no matter what race you are, has a right to self-determination. I mean, that's the most important thing. That you have the right to have a say in the government that has authority over you. And that doesn't matter what your color is. That is a civil right that all human beings accept. And that does not deny difference between the races. Essential differences, what we would call, an essentialist attitude today. So even though we can look back at those founders and say, OK, they don't have an understanding about race like we do today, where there's no really meaningful difference between any races. And as a matter of fact, as we know today, race itself is a socially constructed category. It's not really biological category at all. Even though people like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, et cetera, these founding fathers might not have had the exact same attitude towards race that we have in the 21st century. Nevertheless, they never doubt it. They never doubt it. The right of black people to self-determination, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness. And they knew that the American system was abrogating those rights. And that's why they were afraid of a just God. And we're afraid that over time justice would prevail. And maybe visit horrible violence upon the American system. That's what Thomas Jefferson was afraid of. So I call this the biggest lie, because it's around 1818, as I said, that lie starts really getting told. There's hints of it in the first Congress. There's some arguments about equality. But it's really 1818. There's a rather obscure case against a preacher in Maryland who is doing what was quite common at the time. It's kind of like what we would call a revival, tent set up right outside somebody's barn, some guy named Hogmeyer. It was in his barn or right outside his barn. And hundreds of people come to listen to the preaching at this place. And whites and blacks. So planters are bringing their own slaves. The slaves sit behind the stage. The white folks in front of the stage. Of course, the slaves are brought there because the planters are expecting that the sermons are going to encourage obedience to their masters. And there's this one guy, Reverend Gruber, gets up and preaches that you cannot hold the declaration of independence in one hand and the whip of slavery in another hand. And this is coming on the heels of the debate about Missouri. So that's the context. Are we going to admit Missouri as a slave state or as a free state? So this question is very prominent in everybody's mind. What are we 25, 35, 43 years into the republic at this time? And people are saying, well, it's about time. If we're going to abolish slavery, we better start doing something about it. And we have to really grapple with this question now. We're getting into the third generation of the republic. And so Gruber's impatient. And he says, we got to start doing something about this. Now, the planters are so upset about this that they go to the local authorities, and they trump up charges of inciting insurrection. This-- it's entirely bogus. I mean, he was not-- Reverend Gruber was not inciting insurrection. He was saying the same kind of thing. Congressmen were saying in the debate about Missouri. He's saying the same kind of thing that preachers had been preaching for the last 45 years. But what-- something's changing in sort of, I don't know, the zeitgeist of the south at the time. And these planters are tired of being told that slavery is a sin. So they go to court. And they're basically lying, saying he's trying to stir up the slaves to slit the throats of their masters and rape the white women in the big plantation house. And there's a trial. There's a trial for it. And Roger Tawny is the defense lawyer, younger defense attorney. And he very ably defense Reverend Gruber, who is exonerated. They win the case. And part of that case is about free speech. Do we have the right to say in public that slavery must be abolished? Or is it going to be categorized as inciting insurrection? So from this moment-- so right at that moment, the spirit of 1776 prevails, you can still preach that you must either believe in the declaration or you must take up the whip, but you can't be holding on to both of those things at the same time. It's an internal contradiction. But beginning there, that's the beginning and public discourse of people telling lies, not only about the founding, and they're going to be telling one of two lies about the founding, either that all men recreated equal was that the founders didn't really mean what they said when they said all men are created equal, what they really meant was all white men were created equal. Or they could argue, OK, the founders wrote that, but they were wrong, they were benighted, they were idealists, they were romantic idealists. And the real truth of the matter, if you look at things squarely, is that all men are not created equal. White people are superior to black people, and that's manifest. So that's where both of those lies begin in public discourse in America after 1818. And they grow fairly quickly. They're aided by a couple slave insurrections. One, actually, I believe, was not a slave insurrection at all. It's kind of-- this is a matter of controversy among historians, the Denmark Visi, uprising in 1822 in my hometown of Charleston. And then, of course, the Nat Turner rising in 1831, which is going to lead to some important debates in the Virginia legislature. But in the 1820s and then very much really picks up speed in the 1830s, we see certain group of elites who are trying to change the national narrative, trying to move the country away from a belief and equality towards a belief and inequality. And if we go back and really look at what those folks were doing, we can see that they were either out and outlying about, for example, what happened at the founding. There was a senator from South Carolina who's the first who really made this argument in Congress that slavery is a good thing for black people. It's a positive good. That term is going to become current in the 1830s. But it's first argued in Congress by a guy named William Smith in 1820. And he's lying about the founding. He's saying the founders could never have met all men are created equal, because they didn't free their own slaves. So how can they must have been hypocrites to do it? Well, we know that they were hypocrites. And as a matter of fact, 1820, Thomas Jefferson was still alive. You could have asked Thomas Jefferson. And some people did, and even after the Missouri debate, professed his belief in that slavery was a horrible evil, even though he despaired to be able to solve this problem. So we can see from 1818 on, and there's certain points. 1835 is a big year. Then, of course, the Civil War is supposed to settle this. And at least not through oral argument, but through force of arms. settles the matter saying, no, all men are created equal. That is the truth upon which this nation is founded. And that's why it is written into the three Civil War amendments or sometimes called the Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, 14th of 15th Amendments. Make it unambiguous. Everybody is equal before the law, slavery is abolished. Nobody can be denied the right of self-determination on the basis of color. Black men can have the vote just as well as white men can have the vote in the 15th Amendment. So that's supposed to have settled the question. But then again, in 1876, we have an inflection point where that gets rolled back. 1896 with plus E.V. Ferguson. Then one of the biggest inflection points that we could talk about is the Spanish-American War in 1898 that are going to-- we can see in these moments the lie expanding, the lie of white supremacy, expanding, the lie of human inequality, expanding and taking hold. So that's what the book is about. It's really, again, it's kind of a history of ideas. And the idea is that all men are not created equal. The first part of the book is called the New Republic. Chapter one is the idea of equality. Chapter two is the origins of inequality. And we've dipped pretty liberally into that section of the book as you were introducing it to us. And I'd like to dig into a little bit of what you outlined for us. So in chapter one, it's laying out the idea of inequality and really kicking the tires of the idea, did the founding fathers believe inequality? Did they just say they did? And that's some of what you've been grappling with for us already. And so one of the things you do is you consider what Jefferson was reading at the time. What thinkers he was considering who had influenced him and you point to Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. But you also talk about that the Declaration of Independence went through drafts. They were trying to get all these different signers to agree to sign it. And they did not want any of the colonies to drop out. On page nine, you say probably congressmen were willing to sacrifice principle to accommodate South Carolina and Georgia because they thought they were merely postponing the inevitable reckoning. Right then, in 1776, they had a war to fight. They would deal with slavery sometime down the road. The idea of kicking the can down the road as surfaces throughout this whole first section of the book. And it continues to surface right up until about the 1950s when they're not really kicking the can down the road, they're actively divided and verbally fighting and fighting in other ways as well. And then we get to the Civil War and it's all out fighting. But this idea that slavery could be more definitively decided, meaning how would it formally and what would happen to the formerly enslaved people, was a matter that could be postponed, that they could take one key pressing thing at a time. It seems to have planted some of the seeds that ended up blooming into fascism because we had these unsettled matters. - Yeah, and I'm not so sure it planted. The seed would be the right metaphor, but it certainly made the ground fertile when the seed does get planted, right? So this is clearly a moral failing of the founders that they did not squarely deal with a gigantic injustice that they recognized as a gigantic injustice. One of the things that we need to recognize is the pecuniary interest in that injustice. The reason it was perpetuated is because of the planter class in South Carolina and Georgia. And if you look at Madison's notes on the constitutional convention, for instance, or if we look as you alluded to the draft of the Declaration of Independence, there was a very key clause, the ultimate clause. It was kind of the, if you read the Declaration of Independence, we usually skip over the grievances for the really poetic, beautiful language in the beginning and the end, but in the middle are the grievances against King George that is a inductive argument proving that he is a tyrant. And the most important proof, at least according to Jefferson, when he wrote the first draft, was that George established and maintained the slave trade, which was a clear injustice in kidnapping people from Africa, bringing them to a strange country and making them labor under slavery. So in the Declaration as the committee, not just Thomas Jefferson, but Benjamin Franklin and John Adams as well, wanted Congress to sign, was a very forthright indication of the immorality of slavery and how inconsistent slavery was with the principles of a republic. But it was removed. That clause does not, if you look at the text of the Declaration of Independence, it was actually signed, you see no mention of that. And the reason was because of the influence of the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina. Now, one of the things I want to emphasize here too, is that the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina weren't really representing the whole people of Georgia and South Carolina. Obviously, they were not representing the black Americans living in those colonies, but they weren't even representing all of the whites. They were really very much the representatives of the planter class, and they had in mind the interests of that planter class in South Carolina, the main other sort of white faction were called mechanics. What we would think of as work in class white folks, and they had, they're interested not really coincide with the planters. Now, this is not to say that they would be you know, 21st century non-racist people, if we looked at them, they probably believed in differences between the races, but they did not have any great interest in perpetuating slavery. It was not how they identified themselves, and they did not think of South Carolina and their logic. This is defined by being a slave society. They didn't own slaves themselves. So it was the influence of this tiny minority, but a very wealthy tiny minority that got this concession in the declaration, and then it rears its ugly head again in the constitutional convention in 1817, '87, and gets the notorious slave clauses put into the constitution. These are compromises that the rest of the country against their own hearts, their own heart of hearts, allow in order to keep the country unified, in order to keep South Carolina, Georgia, and by the time we get to the constitution, North Carolina as well, to keep them in the union. But they genuinely thought, and this is probably what, you know, most people who were not steeped in this kind of history know that the founders thought that slavery would naturally kind of dissolve under the acid or the wonderful water of a republic, that it couldn't survive in a republic and within a generation or two it would kind of die out. And we tend to think of that, or I think that the general attitude towards the founders is that they were very naive, but in a way they weren't really naive. And from one perspective, we could say that slavery would have died a natural death in the republic if nature had been allowed to run its course. But there's a very small minority of people living in the South that work very, very hard to perpetuate slavery. So a good example about this is Thomas Jefferson, who as we know he never, he didn't free his slaves. As a matter of fact, he took a conky bind who was a, you know, really a girl who an enslaved girl who was under his dominion and you know, they become a couple and have children and you know, in many ways he's kind of the textbook case for the horrible slave owner. But on the other hand, what he was doing personally at Monticello was what a lot of people across the South were doing was that they were trying to, the term that he uses is modify slavery. He's trying to make it more tolerable, less, less offensive. He, in lieu of actually writing a law that abolishes slavery, he's trying to dissolve it at the edges. And there's many people who are doing that. And there's manumissions, you know, people manument their slaves. They are, they're, you know, the general public view is that we've got to get rid of slavery eventually. And that is the, you know, it's a genuine sentiment in the first generations of the Republic. But then, through the work of just a really small minority of people, that starts to change. And probably the biggest tool that they use to make that change is that threat of a slave in correction, the notion that having black people live among white people is an inherently dangerous thing and that we have to have the police state that is a slave society. In order to protect white people to keep them from being replaced. I mean, this is an early version of the replacement theory that we have a lot of talk about right now. I mean, you see people like Tucker Carlson touting replacement theory and actually calling that replacement theory, we're getting replaced by people who are not real Americans. That's the kind of the lever that is used after those first couple generations. And that's, you know, through the 1830s, 1840s. One of the things that I think we need to remember about the old South, the antebellum South is that it was not, it was not the picture, at least the entire, you know, from 1776 through 1865, it was not what you see and gone with the wind. You know, we picture slave society in the antebellum South as this place where everybody believed in slavery. They, I mean, all the white folks believed in slavery. They, you know, they believed in that this was a good institution for black people and white people together. But really that's an attitude. That attitude only obtained after 1835. And we have a generation right before the Civil War that I would make comparison to the Nazi youth where, you know, people growing up, people like Mark Twain, I talk about his childhood in the book. And he talks about his childhood and his autobiography. How never did he hear anyone indict slavery? Certainly, and quite the opposite. Every public utterance about slavery that they ever heard growing up including preachers who would quote Bible verses to prove the point, slavery was good, slavery was good for black people. But it was really only that last generation before the Civil War that we have people growing up in that kind of indoctrination. So that, you know, from, you know, anyone who's born after 1835 and before reconstruction, they are gonna get steeped in this culture where, you know, that is promoting the idea of inequality of white supremacy. And anyone who descends from that, you know, that official doctrine is gonna be driven out of the South so that nobody else can hear those arguments. And of course, that's exactly what we have in a fascist society. Now, go ahead, I'm sorry. - Oh, one of the things that you look at in the book are the features of a fascist society and look at what it takes to develop it fully. And one of them is the suppression of free speech. And that's where we are talking now that people who felt differently or who were working to create difference had to do so quietly because the public voice that was allowed was one that was pro-slavery. - Yeah, absolutely. Robert Paxton, who's really, you know, I would say the dean of fascist studies in the United States, he's in his 90s now, you know, he's very generous. A couple times with me answering emails and that kind of thing in the production of this book, he writes about what he calls the emotional lava that kind of flows beneath the surface of a fascist society, in other places, he calls it the passions that are the foundation of fascism and he lists nine of them. This is not an exclusive list, but certainly this is the fruit of his lifetime study of fascism. And I find seven of those passions, if we call them in the antebellum south and then in the Jim Crow south as well. There's an intense tribal feeling. There's a deep sense of victimhood. That, of course, gets really extenuated after losing the Civil War, that sense of victimhood among white southerners, fear of decline and replacement. And, you know, I talked about the fear of slave insurrection back in the 1820s and the 1830s. That's how whites in the 1870s are going to describe what happened in reconstruction. This is white people getting replaced by black people. It's not a biracial republic giving black people the vote, giving them civil rights is replacing white people. It's not adding black people to the democracy. Distrust in that politics as usual are going to be able to deal with the kind of crisis that they're facing. There's an impulse towards racial purity. We see this, you know, beginning, of course, a definition, you know, the racial divide between white and black, but then we get into very important gradations among white people after the Civil War, who gets to count as an Anglo-American and who doesn't get to count as an Anglo-American. As you said, violence is considered one of the passions that Paxton identifies as this attitude towards violence, that it's a beautiful thing, that it's manly, it's tied to senses, to ideas about masculinity. So it's gonna be a very patriarchal society. And there's a conviction that your own tribe, your own people have a right, a God-given right to rule over other people, that Anglo-Americans by right ought to have dominion over people who are not Anglo-Americans. And really out of all those passions, the only things that we don't see in the antebellum and Jim Crow's South, and maybe these are the most important, is the devotion to what Paxton calls a national chief and the abrogation of your own sense of reason, your own sense of logic. You will trust what that national chief says is true above what you can plainly see through logical reasoning is true. So it's that bowing down to what people who are not in this almost, you know, cult of personality would identify as a lie. People within that cult are seeing this as a gesture of obedience and devotion to a chief. If I'm going to sacrifice my own sense of reason to what the leader, what the national leader is saying, that is a positive declaration of your belonging to this group. So many of those passions, that emotional lava, we see seething in the South after 18 and getting really heated up in that, you know, 25 years before the Civil War. And then animating the redemption of the South, the overthrow of the biracial republic that was reconstruction. And going up all the way up to World War One, and then even in the 1920s, this is beyond what my book is talking about. But that, these passions are certainly animating mainstream America in the 1920s. And we can see it reflected in, for example, the Sakowen-Venzetti trial, the anti-immigration laws that come out in the 1920s. We can even see it, I think, in the scopes trial where you deny, you deny evolution because you're going to throw away logic, you're going to throw away science, and you're going to pay your obeisance to what is the tribal doctrine. The book also shows us growing us versus them mentalities. And as you pointed out that when the founding fathers did not formally and completely end slavery, they decided that it would naturally disappear on its own. And one of the things the story is, is it identified as to why it did not, was this concentration in the hands of a few of wealth. So we saw that there was a planter class, but it constituted less than a quarter of the people of the South, which meant three-fourths, were not. And we see times with concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few. And another time in the book where we see that is chapter nine when we start looking at the Robert Barons and what's often referred to as the gilded age. And in that time period, you say that by the 1890s, 4,000 American families held the same amount of wealth as everyone else in the country. They made up a much smaller portion of the population than the richest 1% who were often vilified today. were the richest three percent of the richest one percent and they spent a lot of their money making sure they stayed on top. The founding fathers had never anticipated this colossus. Did you want to talk more about that please? Yeah so um yeah and I'm glad we haven't even broached this subject yet and we've been talking for a long time so I'm glad you call attention to it. So in the end of the 19th century is of course what we call the Gilded Age now after a term after the title of a satirical novel by Mark Twain and of course the Gilded Age is very much in public discourse today as well. We were recalling what was going on in the 1890s for instance. So and we began our whole discussion where you asked me what is the definition of fascism and I said it was a corruption of democracy. What we see taking place in the Gilded Age of course is an immense corruption of democracy. It makes a mockery of the notion of government of the people by the people for the people. Most of the people in the country are getting abused by this colossus that is the second industrial revolution. The unbridled capitalism of the United States. Now this is not to knock capitalism itself but to knock the kind of capitalism that was going on in the 1880s and the 1890s and the early 20th century. So what those people that we call the robber barons, this 3% of the 1% who own so much of the value and who are running the corporations, the people are working for they buy senators and by buying senators they buy supreme court justices and they buy senators by buying state legislators. This is before the direct election of senators is one of the more corrupt aspects of late 19th century American so-called democracy is that the Senate is populated by people who are chosen by the state legislatures they're not chosen by the people. So by any measure and this is by no means controversial at all except some real outlier apologist historians today. American democracy was not a democracy in the 1880s, 1890s, early 1900s and these robber barons essentially took lessons that they learned from the Antebellum South and from the Jim Crow South of the 1870s and 1880s and they were applying it to the immigrant populations that were entering into the United States. Of course it's a massive influx of immigrants into the United States in order to do the work of this second industrial revolution and there is a deep sense among people who call themselves Native Americans by Native they do not mean that you know that they were indigenous Americans who were here when Columbus came. What they mean by Native Americans is that their parents and their grandparents and their great grandparents are buried in the cemetery in Kentucky for instance or in Virginia. So you're a Native American if you can trace your generations back essentially back before the Irish Catholics started coming in droves in the 1840s. So if you were a white American before the Irish started arriving then you're a Native American and those as I said you know I've been talking again about this notion there are certain people who count and there are certain people who don't count. Well those rubber barons are very much of that class that we would now call white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and their fear they have a fear of replacement. They think it's already happened in New York where you see Tamini Hall and the immigrant groups have taken over New York City and if they don't take the country back and they don't do something about it the entire country is going to be taken over by immigrants. So this is a very openly anti-democratic way of thinking about things. I mean they talked about the dangers of democracy. We have to have something that is not democracy because if we have democracy then we're going to have Russian Jews and we're going to have Sicilians. We're going to have all sorts of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who are voting and they're going to change the demographic character of the nation. They're going to change our institutions and we're going to get replaced. So those rubber barons, I mean they start openly and purposely subverting the notion of the consent of the governed of people ruling for themselves. By the time the country is getting to a population of 90 million, 100 million, 110 million and the cities are becoming recognizable. Things that we would recognize as cities today, you know gigantic populations with paved over environments. They're the great fear of these gilded age rubber barons is that those millions of people are going to be voting. Those millions of people are going to be deciding about government and the person living in their fake British manor house out on Long Island is going to end up getting ruled by some Italian baker whose father and mother came from Sicily and that is an incomprehensible thing to them. So they'd rather subvert democracy than live in that kind of world and that's what they're actively doing through really through World War One and just beyond. This whole thing is going to change, of course, in the future and this is the book that I alluded to that I originally pitched to Bloomsbury and was going to write was going to be about how liberal democracy actually succeeded in these battles that take place in the 1920s and 1930s. That's a sequel to the book that I've actually just published. I did think you were hinting at a sequel when we found out that this book was not the book you started with. This is the prequel. One of the themes that comes through the book is greed. Early on when we see Jefferson working on drafts of the constitution and we look at the conversations and the objections and things he was looking at the planter class and there's a section of the book called the planter class and he outright is saying the problem here is greed that we have people who have money tied up in the enslavement of other people. They have a contradiction they can't resolve and as a result the rest of us are stymied by it. One of the things you know reading it that I think other readers will come to as well as we see this group of white men with power and privilege trying to amongst them figure out if they can solve what it would mean to free 300,000 people and they have 300,000 people they can ask how would you suggest that we come to a solution and a resolution and so as I'm looking at the conditions that grew fascism I think we can't we see in plain sight what happens by not bringing people to a truly democratic decision making process and one of the other things that we see throughout the book is is the role of a power concentrated in one person's hands and when we get to chapter 10 which is called the white man's burden we see William Randolph Hearst and I wanted to bring him up because one of the things that you're talking about in the book is is lying and a culture of lying and in a democracy people hope that the press the freedom of the press will give them information and they can start to separate truths from lies can you tell us about yellow journalism and and William Randolph Hearst please yeah and of course you know what everybody is I presume we'll already know about this is the the famous telegram you know that William Randolph Hearst sent so you know they've been troubling Cuba for a long time Cuban nationalists were trying to overthrow Spanish rule for for generations really and Americans had a very keen interest in this and and their interest was very much on the side of the nationalists even though you know those nationalists probably would not have counted as Anglo-Americans many of them definitely would not have because they were black so but there's this trouble going on in the 1890s and you know we send the main down into Havana Harbor to kind of strut our stuff and say we are the big the big guy on the block and in the western hemisphere and to protect American interests and and of course the ship sinks and and that gives William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer too who are running rival newspaper empires out of New York City a chance to sell newspapers with what they think of as a good cause which is Cuban nationalism. So they, of course, they blame Spain for the sinking of the main. That's pretty much even then. They knew it was very unlikely that it was an act by the Spanish Empire to sink, you know, this ship, this American ship, because the Spain was very terrified of what America would do and would certainly not make that kind of provocative action. But the yellow journalist, the idea behind yellow journalism is we have a higher truth that we want to get people to believe. So the details don't matter. The real story doesn't matter so long as they get the gist of what's important. And what is important was the villainy of Spain and the heroism of Americans and the great pluckiness of the Spanish, of the Cuban nationalists. So that's a story that gets told. And of course, it excites the nation. They, you know, these newspapers start trumping up things where the Spain is thumping its news at the United States. It's insulting us. It becomes, as I said, you know, when I was talking about those, the emotional lava or the nine passions that that Robert Paxton identified. And one of them is that politics as usual can't deal with this crisis and violence is a good, manly masculine thing. So this is what's behind Lynch law as well, which is basically, you know, the foundation of Jim Crow, the notion that the proper manly thing to do is to take things into your own hands and don't trust to the, you know, the standard machinations of justice. Because that's too slow and too uncertain. So if we're sure that Spain has insulted us, then by God, let's, you know, challenge them to a duel and let's get to it. So that's, you know, that, and the great telegram that I alluded to, you know, of course, is when Remington, the great artist, you know, the cowboy artist was sent by Randolph Hurst to Cuba and charged with finding things that are going to, you know, incite the United States to go to war against Cuba. And he got, and the, and he writes back, he, Remington telegraphs back. Everything's fine here. There's no war coming. Everything's quiet. And, uh, Hurst telegraphs back, um, stay there. You supply the pictures. I'll supply the war. That's a paraphrase. I forget exactly how it goes, but that's what kind of, you know, the, we all remember that as a, as the cautionary tale about yellow journalism. But one of the things we need to remember is that, uh, we even know about that anecdote, that story of this telegram, which may or may not actually have taken place. But the story was first told by somebody who's writing a book about what a great guy William Randolph Hurst was. And here's an example of how great a guy was. This telegram was being used as an example of great journalism. So we're talking about, you know, when they're selling newspapers in the industrial age of the 1890s and early 1900s to millions of people trying to sell newspapers to a million of people a day, two million people a day, unheard of, you know, in the days before the second industrial revolution. This is mass communication, the kind of mass communication that we associate with fascism. This is all before the professionalization of journalists before, you know, that the great rubric that all professional journalists subscribe to now, the rule number one is seek truth and report it. So that moral imperative to seek truth is something that a true journalist is going to observe today. But in the 1890s, that was not, that was not until 1923 that that gets established in writing as a professional journalist code of ethics. So we're living in the days when an institution like journalism is still, I don't know, a slave to the lie where lies are still to the point where someone praising William Randolph Hurst will tell about this great lie, you supply the pictures, I'll supply the war, I'll create the war and then we'll report it, right? He's not seeking truth and reporting it. He's trying to instigate a war and then report that war. As I've mentioned, the book has 15 chapters in introduction and a conclusion. Part one is called the New Republic and that's where we get a lot of the founding fathers and the problems that they decided would have to be handled after the constitution was written. They left some things unaddressed, believing that time itself could help solve them. Part two is called the second republic and it takes us through much of what we're talking about with the lead up to the Civil War and the aftermath. Chapter seven in that section is called lying about Black folks and there's a riveting story of Ida B. Wells and the railroad magnets and her lawsuit. Chapter three is called the American Empire and that takes us more into the modern era and the lead up to the outbreak of World War II and that's really where the book leaves us in the conclusion is that World War II has happened and part of the presidential election is hanging on. Will who we elect keep us out of World War I and Wilson is elected and of course we end up in World War I as well. And that book ends where you had originally intended to start. We're coming to the close of our time together and I want to ask you what do you hope this episode will spark for listeners? The main thing that I hope listeners are going to take away from this talk and if they actually pick up the book and read it is the notion that fascism is not some exotic plant that that gets transplanted to America from Europe. As I say in the introduction there's a lot of a lot of books about fascism about you know that are really warnings about how we're moving towards fascism in American society today and my book is not you know it's not a one of those alarm bells I'm not talking about contemporary times right now but one of the the things that we get from those books which I think are great and I owe a great debt to all those people like Jason Stanley wrote how fascism works and Madeleine Albright on fascism you know these remind us about what was going on in the 1920s and 1930s and I think just about every American who you know reads a newspaper is engaged in the news today probably has images now in their mind of those fascist rallies of the German Bund in Madison Square Garden in the late 1930s where you see tens of thousands of people in uniform declaring themselves to be American fascists there wasn't a consciousness about that maybe 10 years ago 15 years ago now there definitely is but one of the ideas we can get about fascism which I think is is a little dangerous is that fascism has to look like the Nazis if it doesn't look like the Nazis it's not fascism right what I hope people to take away from this talk in the book is to recognize that fascism was incubated in the American South that the Antebellum South that last generation and a half before the Civil War was a police state in the South it was an ethno nationalist regime one party regime and then it gets restored even though there's a brief moment during reconstruction where we actually have a biracial republican removing towards genuine democracy it gets restored in 1876 and then it gets expanded out of the South and starts taking over the entire country so those fascist values the fascist the techniques that fascists use especially the violence involved in politics and elections those are all those are homegrown we things don't have to look like the Nazis for it to really be fascist so that's what I you know if we're thinking about a lesson that this book learns it's to recognize these fascist elements in our own past thank you so much for being here today professor Kelly and sharing from your book the biggest lie the prehistory of American fascism 1818 to 1915 I'm Christina Gessler you're listening to the academic life please join this again (gentle music)