The South’s Most Successful Export: Joseph Kelly on the Prehistory of American Fascism

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. History seems to be moving backwards, at least on this show. Yesterday, we did, a show with Anthony Badger, a distinguished British historian of America, called Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt. We had some interesting conversations about the connection between FDR's New Deal and the fascism in Italy, initiated by Mussolini. According to Anthony Badger, there's not a great deal connecting FDR's New Deal with European fascism. But as I said, we're moving backwards because today, we're dealing with a book, about 1818 to 1915, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism. So we're looking at the chapter before, Prosperity Road with my guest, Joseph Kelly. And the subtitle of the book is appropriately, controversial, The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. If, Anthony Badger suggested, Joe Kelly, that, FDR wasn't inspired by Mussolini or there were no connections between Mussolini's Italy and FDR's, United States. Would it be fair to argue in your book that European fascism was in some ways inspired, indebted to the nineteenth century history of America?

00:02:11 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. Definitely. I would probably Nazi Germany more than Mussolini's Italy. And, you know, I wanna caution I'm not an expert on Nazi Germany, but, I do get to some of those connections at the end of the book, which it really takes it beyond 1915. But 1916, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, you know, Hitler declared was, you know, his bible. And, you know, a lot of the eugenicists in the Nazi regime read that book very carefully and took a lot of their ideas from that. But more importantly, I think, Jim Crow certainly inspired the race laws of the American South were in some ways a model. I don't wanna, you know, emphasize that too strongly, but definitely preceded, Hitler's Germany, and he took some lessons from it. The kind of point that I'm trying to make in the book is that, we didn't get our fascism from Mussolini or from Hitler. You know, we— It— It's very much homegrown, and to the extent I would even argue that we invented it back in the nineteenth century, right around eighteen twenty, eighteen that fights over whether to admit Missouri as a slave state or a free state is what really triggered a change in, you know, what we may call the narrative of American history, the way Americans thought about themselves and thought about the republic and established kind of two competing nationalisms in the country, one in the South and one in the rest of the country. So to the degree that we influenced European fascism, you know, I'm not really prepared to make a terrifically strong argument. There were some connections. But, definitely, I think it's a good corrective for us to stop thinking about our fascist tendencies in this country as being imported from overseas. We, you know, we did our own experimenting with that type of government. And, you know, it was a pretty long experiment. 1818, really, you know, in some ways you could say through the civil rights era. We still continued it as long as Jim Crow was going on. So I don't know if that answers your question.

00:04:39 Andrew Keen: Well, it certainly gets the question.

00:04:40 Joseph Kelly: Hope it doesn't sound like I'm evading it.

00:04:42 Andrew Keen: Yeah. No. You're not evading it, and it's a tricky question. And I'm quoting you. You said we invented it. The question, of course, is what is the it? Orwell, you're a professor of, literature, actually, rather than history at the College of Charleston. So you're all too familiar with "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell's famous essay in which he warned us particularly about uses of words like fascism, which is, at least according to Orwell, I think, when he wrote the essay in 1945 [ed.: published 1946], had simply become a form of insult. Now you use the f word, Joe, in your subtitle of the book, the prehistory of American fascism. What do you mean by it? Because, of course, the word fascism itself was invented for better or worse by Mussolini. So there was no— There couldn't have been any American fascism, in 1818 because there was no such word. What do you mean by the word?

00:05:44 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. So, you know, and that's— Everybody talks about fascism begins talking by saying it's impossible to define fascism. Right? Which is a cop-out, I think. It's an ultranationalism, with a base and, you know, an ethnic sense of who the people are in the nation. It is a corruption of democracy. It, you know, Robert Paxton describes what he calls the nine passions that obtained in the fascist society, which I think is a pretty good place to start. He uses a really interesting metaphor. He calls it the, the lava that percolates underneath a fascist society. And these are things like, you know, a tribal identity, thinking of your nation as a, you know, as a tribal connection between people, thinking that tribe is somehow, under siege or is being victimized, thinking, you know, the notion that you're facing replacement. The idea that the crisis that is, that is triggered by this fear of replacement requires activity that is extralegal, violent activity. That violent activity, defines the masculine, image of the people, and that it's beautiful. That violence is beautiful. You know, these are some of the things that, we expect to find in a fascist society. The last two that, Paxton described, had to do with the cult leader of the fascist nation. There has to be somebody who seems to embody the, the ethos or, you know, the spirit of the nation. And that person, you know, peep— People who are in the fascist movement are— You know, regard that person as somebody who they must trust even more than they trust their own reasons. As a matter of fact, it— It's pretty much required that you have to sacrifice your reason to the insights or the, you know, the proclamations of whoever this, cultish leader is. Now those last two did not obtain in the American South, but the other seven definitely did, which is, what I would call it prehistory. Obviously, we— You know, the United States has never, you know, become a fascist country, but I would describe— And this is the point of the book, is that I consider the antebellum South from about '18, I would say, 1822 on, maybe, you know, really definitely by the mid eighteen thirties when the South becomes a police state, up through the New Deal, we are experimenting with an authoritarian and, very fascist-leaning government, and we're going in that direction. And it doesn't get reversed until we get to the New Deal in 1932.

00:09:03 Andrew Keen: And even, and I talked to, Anthony Badger about this. I mean, even in New Deal America, of course, FDR cobbled together this remarkable, unholy alliance of Southern racists, segregationist, Jim Crow people, and black Americans and northern liberals, so maybe it didn't even go away in the New Deal. So you've come up with a good definition, and I agree with you. I think one has to— You can't just use the word. You gotta be able to define it. I guess, Joe, there are two ways of thinking about fascism. On the one hand, in historical terms, as I suggested in the introduction, is it was— It came out of a particular series of experiences and, events after the first World War. And on the other hand, there's a kind of universal condition. We did a show with the moral philosopher Susan Neiman, recently. She has a new book out called Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, in which I'm not sure how much she uses the f word, but she certainly connects the idea of evil with Trump and with fascism in broad terms. Some people see fascism as some sort of reaction against modernity. What's your sense? I mean, Mussolini, of course, borrowed the word or invented the word from his understanding of the Roman Republic. What's your sense of this word? Do you use it in a universal sense perhaps to describe evil, or is it some rotten way of responding to modernity? Well, maybe there's a third way or a mix of the two. I don't know.

00:10:48 Joseph Kelly: I think there are ways of being evil that are not fascist, but I don't think there's a way of being fascist without being evil. I definitely think of it as a, form of government that is so pernicious that we must muster all our might and intellect to combat it. Is it modern? Is it a reaction against modernity? It's both at the same time, which is one of the ironies of fascism. It makes it so hard to really pin it down. On the one hand, it is nostalgic, right, which is why we have the fasces, which is why we have the fascination with Germanic knights, which is why we have the fascination in the South with Scottish lairds that, Mark Twain mocked, you know, back in the eighteen eighties. So the symbolism, the iconography of fascism is gonna make use of these nostalgic backward-looking anti-modern primitive, you know, symbols or images, narratives. He's gonna try to, you know, definitely make use of a mythology, you know, that is premodern. But at the same time, it embraces modernity, certainly. Mussolini's, fascism embraced modernity, futurism. You know? The ties between futurism and fascism are well defined. I think we have, you know, our— In our own iconography, we associate fascism with the dive bomber and the panzer tank and the extraordinary, you know, modern technology and accomplishments of Germany in the nineteen thirties, nineteen forties. And the same thing in the South. And we tend to, I think with good reason, define the South in contradiction to the North. The southerners did themselves. Northerners did it, you know, in the eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties. Mark Twain did it in the eighteen eighties. The notion that, the North was the industrial, you know, the part of the country where we're using capitalism and industrialism and, you know, symbolized by the railroad more than anything else and the thousands of miles of track that are getting laid down. And then, in the South, our notion— Or that sort of popular notion is the veranda at Tara, you know, where we have the aristocrats sitting, sipping their mint juleps and that kind of thing. The southerners in both antebellum and post-Civil War, like to think about themselves in those terms, but at the same time, in, you know, the Confederates thought they invented the new modern, civilization for the future. And they want to expand their civilization across the Western Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere because they thought it was the wave of the future. And so they— At one and the same time, you're looking backwards for your images, for your mythology. But on the other hand, you think you've invented the type of government that is appropriate to the modern world. And, I mean, we see this with Mussolini too with him, you know, saying democracies played out. Right? That's an old type of government that doesn't get— It doesn't work in the modern world. It doesn't really meet the, the demands of the modern world. You know, both communist Russia, the Bolsheviks, and the fascists both said that about liberal democracy, that it didn't have what it took to really meet the demands of the modern world. So fascism, you know, you couldn't say it's not a modern thing. It's definitely tied to modernism and the future and notions that, you know, the future civilization is gonna be dominated by this form of government in the United States.

00:14:50 Andrew Keen: I think you're right. It's so— They're so entangled. They're so hard to separate. We did a show recently with the great film critic, David Thomson, who has a new book out, which is actually rather critical of the history of American cinema. And he begins his book with The Birth of a Nation and the history of that movie. Of course, the cinema is supposed to be progressive and technologically innovative, but the first great hit of the movie industry was a Klansman movie. So it's a complicated thing, isn't it, Joe? And you're a literature student, a literature scholar. So perhaps you get that a little more than maybe political scientists or even historians.

00:15:37 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. I think, you know, the way I put it in the book is that nostalgia is a way of being modern. That's—

00:15:43 Andrew Keen: Say that again. Nostalgia. I like that. Nostalgia is a way of being modern.

00:15:47 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. I mean, that's a— You have to be modern to be nostalgic. Right? Yeah. My book ends with Birth of the Nation [as spoken: The Birth of a Nation]. And, you know, I tell the story of the, you know, the writing of the novel, The Clansman, and then Thomas Dixon's selling it to D.W. Griffith and then the making of the film and then the showing of the film.

00:16:07 Andrew Keen: And you'll find the, I'm not sure if you've seen the new book by David Thomson, but I think you'd—

00:16:07 Joseph Kelly: No.

00:16:12 Andrew Keen: —find it particularly interesting and very relevant, actually, in some ways to your argument.

00:16:16 Joseph Kelly: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Especially, I'm intrigued by the notion of starting the book there. That's what— Really, when I set out to write this book, I was not the project I ended up doing was not at all what I set out to do. Birth of the Nation was gonna be the beginning of my book. I was gonna write a book about the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties and, you know, the establishment of those institutions that Jonathan Rauch calls the constitutions of knowledge, a free and objective press. You know, the, the notion that we have of the free press really gets established, you know, around World War I, nineteen twenties, the first code of ethics that says, seek truth and report it. That dates from 1923 [ed.: "Seek truth and report it" is the SPJ code's wording, adopted 1996; the 1923 code was the ASNE's Canons of Journalism]. The academic freedom as we know it in the United States, you know, with the tenure system and peer review and all that is really a— You know, the AAUP begins in 1915, I think it is, and it's really nineteen twenties under John Dewey that gets established. The American court system gets cleaned up in the nineteen twenties and becomes a, you know, a, institution by which we discover truth. So those constitutions of knowledge really get established in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, and that's— What I wanna do is write a book about how those things were developed in part to fight the fascist tendency that the country was going in, which is based on lying.

00:17:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. John Rauch [as spoken: Jonathan Rauch] is another old friend of the show and a good friend of mine. Of course, he wrote a very influential piece probably, again, in connection with your book. "Yes, It's Fascism," for The Atlantic a few months ago, which had a big impact. Let's go back to the big— Rather than jumping forwards, let's go back to the beginning of the book. We did a show recently with another American historian, Andrew Curran. His book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race, is very controversial. It goes from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson and connects racism, the birth of eugenics with the Enlightenment. He ends his Biography of a Dangerous Idea with Thomas Jefferson. Every book seems to either begin or end with Jefferson, especially about America. You begin with Jefferson. What's the big deal about Jefferson? Does he— Is he the father figure of what you call American fascism?

00:18:44 Joseph Kelly: No. Definitely not. And, in a way, I would say my book is trying to recuperate, Thomas Jefferson certainly for, use on the left. I think it was a huge strategic mistake for the American left to vilify the founding fathers. I think we— What we should have done is, picked what was admirable about them and deplored what was not and, you know, maybe take them down off their pedestals and make them human beings, but, there— There's an awful lot to admire about them. The most important thing to admire about Thomas Jefferson is he wrote all men are created equal, and he really meant it. I haven't read Curran's book yet, but I did listen to your podcast.

00:19:28 Andrew Keen: Except that some people might say with Jefferson, he meant it for everything except his own— his own—

00:19:34 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. I—

00:19:35 Andrew Keen: His own Monticello and relations with— and all that sort of thing.

00:19:40 Joseph Kelly: That— That's obviously a contradiction. You know? It— It's— How we deal with his relationship with Sally Hem— Hemings is, you know, on the one hand, we don't wanna take agency away from Sally Hemings, and she chose to return to Monticello with, with Jefferson so that— You know, she had agency there. She could've, sued for her freedom in France and even declared that she was gonna stay in France, and he talked her into coming back to Monticello. So I think to you know, why— I understand why we want to define all sexual relations between white slave owners and enslaved, black women as rape. You know, in some cases, I think it's more complicated than that, and we're in danger of taking agency away from the black women. And now Sally Hemings, of course, was an extraordinary case because she lived in France, and she could have chose freedom. It would have been a really tough choice. Don't get me wrong about that. And she was probably pregnant. And if she had stayed in France, it would have been a tough time. You know? She— How she survived— How was she gonna survive? Probably her brother would have stayed with her who, you know, had learned to be a chef there and went back with her to Monticello under, terms with Jefferson. We don't know exactly what the terms were, but we do know that he promised to free their children when they came of age, and he promised to, you know, treat her with the kind of privilege that certain enslaved Americans were given on plantations. We know there's a very complex hierarchy of slavery within the plantation. So, you know, that's— How did— It— It's really tough to deal with that. And I—

00:21:34 Andrew Keen: I don't want to [unclear] point. I don't— And I— And I— And it's my fault for bringing Jefferson up. I don't wanna turn this whole conversation into, another rehash of Jefferson's slavery and all the rest of it and Hemings. So let's go back to the book then. The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. Let me try and kick it off a little fairer to you, Joe. Firstly, what is the biggest lie? And secondly, who are the founding fathers? If they're not Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison and all those white guys who founded the republic, who exactly are they?

00:22:12 Joseph Kelly: Who are the founding fathers of the United States?

00:22:14 Andrew Keen: No. The founding fathers of American fascism. And what is the biggest lie? What does that mean?

00:22:19 Joseph Kelly: Yep. The biggest lie is white supremacy in a word. That's what it is. And, not to try to direct us back to Jefferson, but he's the one who really established, I think, what was the master narrative of American identity for the first couple generations of the republic, when he wrote in his draft of the Declaration of Independence that, one of the main pieces of evidence proving that George III was a tyrant was the slave trade, that he went to Africa and kidnapped people who had never offended him and brought them back to a country and— Where they are— Where men are sold. I'm kinda paraphrasing there. I don't have the exact language. But in the draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote men in capital letters just to make sure everybody could see that. So it's pretty clear that in this clause, this last grievance against King George, the climactic grievance, if you will, against King George was the slave trade and, subjecting men to slavery here in North America. Men, at the end of the document, are men at the beginning of the document. So when he said all men are created equal, he meant everybody. And that became the narrative that slavery was an inherited evil. Now a lot of people obviously were very comfortable with not doing anything about it, but there was practically nobody in the first couple generations of American public discourse who dissented from that narrative. One of those dissenters was a guy named William Loughton Smith from South Carolina in the First Congress. And he went so far as to say, well, if slavery is an evil, it's an evil that the— It's one of those kinds of evils that the world is okay putting up with. And that outraged the rest of Congress. We see James Madison, you know, who— Who's scandalized by this notion that slavery is good and that maybe it ought to become— He's sort of hinting that slavery ought to be permanent. The only people who went along with it are— Were the congressmen from South Carolina and Georgia. The only reason that clause that I was talking about in the Declaration of Independence was taken out was because the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia refused to sign the Declaration of Independence unless they took that clause out. Thomas Jefferson at the time said he didn't think that the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia were ideologically opposed to the notion that all men are created equal. But it was their greed that overcome. This is what Jefferson says in his notes. Now I would say that the— These folks, John Rutledge, at the Constitutional Convention does the same thing representing South Carolina, Charles Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, then another William Smith in congress in 1820. He's the one who really gives the first speech that declares that all— What the founding fathers meant by all men are created equal is that all men are not created equal. It— That— It's a crackpot speech. It's almost— It— It's like, you know, either— You know, what the most crackpot congressman in MAGA today spouting off something that— That's just absurd. No one took him seriously until two years later, there was a slave or a supposed slave insurrection in Charleston. And then that started changing the narrative in, in the South. So who's— The lie is that all men are not created equal, that white men are superior to black men. Now this is not to say the founding fathers were not racist. They were essentialists. They thought there were differences between white people and black people. They thought that black peep— White people were better than black people, but they didn't think any of those differences amounted to enough to say that black people were not given the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that they did not have the right to self-determination. That was the belief of the founding fathers. In 1820, William Smith changes that. Then he starts saying, no. The founding fathers look. They didn't emancipate their slaves, so they must have really believed in slavery. So when they said all men are created equal, what they really meant, they were only talking about white men. They thought black people were not equal. Well, we know that was not the case. So that lie begins right around 1820, and then with the slave insurrection in Charleston and then, of course, the Nat Turner in Virginia, which really adds fuel to this new narrative. The new narrative is that black people are so primitive that they cannot— we cannot give them self-determination. Certainly, we can't invite them into the republic. We can't have a biracial public. You know, there's no way we could have black people, having any authority over white people. But black people are so backward that they can't even rule themselves. This becomes the new story. And, you know, that— This is what fuels American anthropology beginning in the eighteen twenties and the eighteen twenties [as spoken].

00:27:38 Andrew Keen: So it's— And you haven't read the Curran book. But what he argues, and I don't wanna put words in his mouth, but he argues that one of the consequences of the Enlightenment was to create not racism, which probably has always existed, but the idea— The scientific idea of race. And out of the Enlightenment, you get the American eugenics movement, which I know you deal with in some detail in your book. In other words, it sounds to me as if— And, again, I don't wanna speak for Curran, but there— You're presenting racism, what you call the biggest lie, as irrational but founded on something that's clearly insane, indefensible. Whereas some historians like Curran suggest that maybe the seeds of your big lie— Of your biggest lie do come out of the Enlightenment, of science. Were— Was everybody who bought the big lie, who created the big lie in your view in American, history, this prehistory of American fascism, Joe, were they all, conscious liars? Did they believe what they were saying? Did they use science? Did they use history to justify their argument?

00:29:07 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. That— The answer to that's pretty complicated. Some, yes. You know? William Smith that I said gave that speech in the senate in 1820, he definitely knew he was lying about the founding fathers. The founding fathers were still around. He could have asked him if he wanted to, but he wouldn't have got the answer that he wanted. The anthropologist, you know, American anthropology, I would say, you know, begins with Notes on the State of Virginia and Jefferson's comments on black people in that document. What— Whatever— And everybody, you know, those are famous, you know, and horribly embarrassing now to say, okay. Here's our founding father who said that black people smell bad, and, and black men, you know, lust of after white women just as orangutans lust after black women. You know? Those horrible things to quote today. But as I said, none of that amounted in his mind to denying them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What Jefferson— What nobody remembers about— Notes on the State of Virginia is Jefferson says these are provisional conclusions, and I know there's a lot more evidence out there. And if I see evidence of black genius, I'm ready to revise these opinions. So he's thinking like a scientist. Even as he's, prejudiced by these enlightenment thinkers from, you know, the— From the, eighteenth century, he's still open to having his mind changed. Now it's it— It's, you know, it's regrettable that he never did change his not— Mind. He essentially had this, what they call the surrogate wife. His enemies called Sally a surrogate wife, and he had children, and that didn't change his mind, apparently. He still thought a biracial republic, you know, and to his death was gonna be impossible. Although he still thought we're committing a grave sin to prevent black people from having their freedom. So he wasn't, you know, he wasn't lying. Then the anthropologist, the beginning we— You know, the beginning of anthropology in the United States is invented in order to prove the primitiveness of black people. And we have— And they had— What they wanna do is prove that they were so primitive that they didn't deserve self-determination. The first anthropologists were like the first naturalists. They were amateurs. They were plantation owners, and their authority came from being plantation owners. And people didn't challenge them because they hung out with black people more than, you know, most of the people in Northern society, you know, certainly in Philadelphia where you have, you know, scientific society that Benjamin Franklin established. So those planters were probably— You know, they're, you know, sincere in their belief about black primitivism, but what they ended up doing is that they just took anecdotes and they took, you know, bogus notions about black people, dressed it up in scientific language, and presented to the world as science. Anybody who really seriously— Cared to seriously look into it in the eighteen twenties, eighteen thirties, eighteen forties, eighteen fifties would have seen that it was bogus science, but they didn't. So it's less that they were consciously lying about white supremacy is that they chose not to look into it with the sufficient rigor, the kind of rigor that any scientist did. Louis Agassiz is the prime example of that. Right? He— If there's anybody who was equipped to explode the horrible anthropology that was being done in the United States, the bogus science. It would have been Louis Agassiz, but instead he gets taken in by it and becomes a great advocate of the notion of black primitivism. Now the first generation of people telling this story about, the United States, that it was founded as a white supremacist nation, they first start telling that story in the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties [ed.: 1820s and 1830s]. They are lying. They know that they're lying. But by the time we get to eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, we have a generation of Southerners who grow up in a culture that does not brook dissent. It is essentially a one-party government. It is, you know, there is a tradition of extrajudicial vigilante violence. Eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, we could see that the turning point is the summer of eighteen thirty five. Pretty much after the summer of eighteen thirty five, you can't proclaim in the American South all men are created equal. Not in a way where you really believe it and you're really advocating for it. You're risking— If you're a white person, you're risking, you know, physical violence. You're risking getting lynched. Certainly, you're gonna probably have to go and live in exile if you can escape. So we have an entire generation, maybe almost two generations of white southerners who grow up in a culture that, where there's no free speech, where, you know, the rights that white people enjoy in the North do not obtain in the South. You know, people can come visit violence upon you, and the authorities are gonna do nothing about it. As a matter of fact, they can get a wink and a nudge. It is, you know, the historians from the nineteen seventies on had described the antebellum South as a Herrenvolk democracy, but we should put democracy in scare quotes there. You know, it's a master race democracy, but it's not really— A master race democracy is a contradiction in terms because even for the people who are supposedly the master race, you don't have— You know, the Bill of Rights doesn't obtain for you. You can't dissent from what is the, the master narrative. So that's what we have. By the time we get to eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, we have people who have grown up listening to white supremacists in the pulpit, learning it in school, reading it in their newspapers and magazines, and never— Mark Twain talks about growing up in Missouri and never hearing slavery arraigned ever by anybody until he left Missouri. So that's the kind of world that they were living in. Now those people— Those white supremacists who march off to fight the Union soldiers in the Civil War, they're not, you know, they're not, you know, they're sincere in their white supremacy. They really believe white people are supreme, but that lie has pervaded their society. That's— When it gets to a certain size, then it takes over everything. And everybody believes it, and you can't dissent from it.

00:35:58 Andrew Keen: And what about, Joe, this, descent, if that's the right word, into, eugenics? We did a show. We've done a number of shows on eugenics, the theory of racial superior, a supposed scientific theory of racial superiority or right racial taxonomies and categories. Did one with one author, Susanne Paola Antonetta, The Devil's Castle, that connects nineteenth century American eugenics and eugenicism with the Nazis. Did science then sort of— Was it a— An epiphenomenon of this ingrained racism that you say, was created in the South over two or three generations?

00:36:45 Joseph Kelly: I'm not sure what you're asking there, Andrew.

00:36:50 Andrew Keen: What you got— And so what— You got in— Particularly in American eugenicism and in— in this science of eugenics and racial hierarchies, you got the biggest lie dressed up in science. My question is, in a way, was it more acceptable, and did it make eugenics as a science more successful because, the soil was already fertile for this kind of thinking. In other words, everyone always thinks science comes before culture, but, actually, you're suggesting that culture maybe created the science in a way.

00:37:30 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I was being dense there. I understand your question perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I would argue that it is the— You know, there's a oligarchy in the South that wants to retain slavery, and they very actively figure out how to do it. And this, you know, this anthropological story of black inferiority is a hugely useful tool. Now that then gets, you know, that lays the blueprint. That's the playbook, if you will. After the Civil War, you know, a really curious phenomenon is what— For ten years, we have a biracial republic, and it's working pretty well. I mean, obviously, there's problems, but almost all of those problems are created by unreconstructed white southerners. So the biracial republic is working, and then it falls apart in 1876 with the redemption of the Southern states. And the great curiosity is why did the North let that happen? Essentially, you know, they had hundreds of thousands of people, killed and maimed in order to end that white supremacist civilization in the South. They did it. They had a new birth of freedom. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments remade the republic into a multiracial, not even just biracial, no matter what Clarence Thomas says. It was a multiracial republic because of the Fourteenth Amendment. And, and then they retreat, and they let the white supremacists take over the Confederacy again. And the Jim Crow South becomes a nation within a nation. Why do they let that happen? Well, it's really convenient for them. This— These racial notions become hugely useful to the oligarchs in the North during the second, industrial revolution as Northern cities— Industrial cities are sucking in people from Europe. So the first proletariat, of course, is the Catholic Irish coming in, fleeing the potato famine in the eighteen forties and the eighteen fifties. By the time we get to the end of the nineteenth century, they have become— Well, before I even get there, I mean, this is really where we get the invention of Anglo-Saxonism in, in American sort of consciousness. It— It's the arrival of these Irish that trouble the notion of white versus black or white versus Asian. All of a sudden, white isn't good enough because we have all these Irish here, and the white folks who are already in the United States wanna distinguish themselves from these primitive people who can't govern themselves that have flooded into the country. Well, we can't deny that they're white, but we can't really accept them into the democracy either. So we start parsing white people into various categories. Right? So the playbook that was used in the South then becomes very useful in the North. Now it's— It doesn't take very long. It takes a couple, you know, decades or generation and a half for the Irish to become, I would say Anglo-Saxon adjacent is how I would describe it. They're not really quite Anglo-Saxon because they don't give up their Catholicism, but they get pretty darn close. And what's really helpful is that they'll hold the billy clubs that are gonna beat the other white immigrants. But Italians, Jews, Central and Eastern Europeans of any kind, Southern Europeans, these become the categories of white that we're gonna use in the North, wants to use this as the same playbook, wants to use the same playbook that was invented in the South in order to control this unruly population of proletariat masses that is percolating down there in, you know, in the ghettos of the cities. So it becomes very convenient. And, you know—

00:41:30 Andrew Keen: The biggest lie— You're arguing in the book and in this conversation, Joe, that the biggest lie was the South's most successful export. They successfully exported it to the North.

00:41:42 Joseph Kelly: Absolutely. And this is what happens. The, you know, it's being done very successfully up through the eighteen nineties, but then it's a Spanish-American War that really clinches it. You know?

00:41:57 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wanna come to the Spanish-American. We— We've got a lot more to get through. And so— a couple more questions before we get to the Spanish-American War of 1898. Just very briefly, because there's so much to cover here. We did a show recently, with Dennis Rasmussen, who has a really interesting new book out on Frederick Douglass's American Founding, how Frederick Douglass went from being a very outspoken, very articulate critic of slavery and of the American association, obviously, with slavery, with the republic's association with slavery, to rereading the Constitution and arguing actually that the Constitution was against slavery and racism. It's probably his— The second coming of Douglass would have been sympathetic to your reading of Jefferson. Very briefly, Joe, because there's so much to cover here. What was the black reaction, particularly in the South, to this biggest lie, to this emergence of American fascism? Did they— Did African Americans, both slaves and freed slaves after the Civil War, did they understand what was happening? How did they articulate a response?

00:43:12 Joseph Kelly: Oh, they absolutely—

00:43:13 Andrew Keen: And very briefly because there's so much more to talk about here.

00:43:16 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. Well, Frederick Douglass is, you know, the narrative of his life. I just taught that in my class a couple weeks ago. And, I mean, almost every word is a repudiation of the calumny, you know, what— Where they call the calumny against the black race, saying that we are not men. We are not worthy of self-government, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So already, he's doing it in the antebellum stage. But after the Civil War, this is where we absolutely see it. Because what happens after the Civil War, by freeing the slaves, we unleash an unbelievable reserve of talent in this country. And the speed with which the newly freed slaves and their children, succeed despite all odds is just remarkable. The rising black middle class that we see in southern cities is just tremendous. And the example I use in the book is Ida B. Wells who ends up being the great voice against, against lynching. She, you know, she starts out as a school teacher, and she gets into journalism. And, she is involved in some of the early separate but equal cases, in the state of Tennessee, which he ended up losing. But what really fires her and gives her mission is when a good friend of hers who, operated a People's Grocery, a co-op grocery in a black neighborhood in Memphis ends up getting lynched. She tells— She decides then that she's gonna tell the truth about lynching. And in her paper, which conveniently for my purposes is called the Memphis Free Press [ed.: Wells's paper was the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight], she publishes an editorial that says no one believes the lie. No one down here in the South believes the lie that black men rape white women. That story, that notion that unless we have a great yoke on the shoulders of black men, they're gonna run rampant and rape white women. So that's why we have to come down heavy on. That's why we have to have slavery before the Civil War, and that's why we have to have Jim Crow, and that's why we have to have lynching after the Civil War. That is the most potent version of the big lie of white supremacy. And it is also— It— It's the biggest expression of that replacement anxiety. White men are afraid that black men are gonna replace them in the bed. We see this over and over again in white rhetoric about black people. The anxiety is sexual. You know? Whether they know— You know, it may be unconsciously sexual, but it's definitely this sexual anxiety about black men. So she becomes this voice who's gonna tell the truth. White women are having sex with black men because they like having sex with black men. And because she writes that in an editorial, the white newspapers in Memphis declare, I can't believe that the white people of this city had not taken the editor of the free press out and tied him to a stake on Main Street and branded him on the forehead and operated on him with a pair of tailor's shears. Obviously, meaning they should castrate them. They didn't realize it was Ida B. Wells. They thought it was her male business partner who had written the thing. But she becomes, this truth teller. The black reaction to the lie is tremendous. We see it with black newspaper men in the nineteenth century. This become the W.E.B. Du Bois, and the foundation of the NAACP and The Crisis is about telling the truth about black people. Now the one way you tell that truth is by being successful, is by creating your own business, becoming a good businessman, you know, becoming a minister, becoming a journalist, becoming a doctor, becoming a lawyer. We see people entering into the professions in the eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties, black folks. Their very existence defies the lie because the lie says that you're too primitive. We can't give you the vote. We can't let you into the democracy because you're not worthy of it. Every successful black person is a, you know, exposes that as a lie, which is why in the South, we have program after program running through the middle class sections of black cities and torching houses and killing people and destroying businesses because of this replacement anxiety.

00:47:53 Andrew Keen: Now we get to Tulsa. So that— That's a good response. Yeah. Let me ask you another question. How does the history of American populism run along your prehistory of American fascism? Everybody from Andrew Jackson, of course, the arch American colonialist [unclear — possibly "populist"], to Theodore Roosevelt, who I know features in your book. FDR was his distant cousin, a big admirer of his work. Were populists like Roosevelt and, Jackson, were they participants in this lie? And how— I know these are big questions, so maybe try and answer them relatively briefly because I got to— I want to get up to date as well. Already given me very you've been very generous with your time. How does this history, the biggest lie and racism, how does it play out in terms of Native Americans, given that they were the third leg of the, shall we say, the racial stool in America in the nineteenth century.

00:48:55 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. Native Americans— I mean, that's a fascinating story. And, of course, Andrew Jackson is gonna be, you know, somebody whose actions we have to deplore. I mean, he's— He— On the one hand, you know, he doesn't think Native Americans are so primitive that they are incapable of self-government. That's the key issue. Right? Are they capable of self-government? Are they not? So the lie told— Being told about black people in the eighteen thirties, eighteen forties is that they can't. But the idea about primitivism with Native Americans is that they just haven't been civilized yet. So native— Indian removal, the logic behind it, and this is the logic that Andrew Jackson gives us, you know, whether, you know, this is just convenient for them, you know, or not. But the rhetoric is that let's send them out to Oklahoma where they can govern themselves because they're not gonna be able to decide we— A biracial republic doesn't work. White people are just gonna destroy them. And Andrew Jackson recognizes that. He enables it, but he also recognizes that the overwhelming millions of white folks who are going to encroach— Inevitably encroach upon Native American lands, and it's gonna create friction. And when friction is created, then the Indians are gonna lose and the whites are gonna win. So removal is his solution. He doesn't really care how many people die on the way, and he's not— He doesn't have any compassion for these people. In his day, people defended Andrew Jackson by saying, look. He adopted this Indian infant who was orphaned because your soldiers killed his mother at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Yeah. That— We usually forget about that little thing. So Andrew Jackson takes this Native American child into his family after this slaughter of men, women, and children. And that's, you know, some backhanded evidence that he had respect for, Native Americans as a race. You know, he raises this child as somebody in his household. He has ideas of sending him to West Point. It doesn't work out. He ends up dying, I think, of tuberculosis very young. But nevertheless, I mean, Andrew Jackson, who at one— In the same time, he's democratizing the country by taking power away from the elites, but he's only giving it to, to white men. Right? This is the notion of [unclear — likely "Herrenvolk"] democracy that I was talking about before. So he's— You know, he did— He doesn't come off very well on the book. He's certainly not a hero. He's more of a villain, I would say.

00:51:37 Andrew Keen: [unclear — likely "Herrenvolk"] democracy, of course, we'll maybe at the end of this conversation, talk about how it may be reappearing. Let— Let's go up to, Teddy Roosevelt. I know for you— The Spanish Civil— The Spanish-American War of, 1898 has a particular significance in terms of your narrative. Why? And how does Teddy Roosevelt play in your argument?

00:52:01 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. So the Spanish-American War— And Teddy Roosevelt interpreted it this way. A lot of people interpreted it as it was going on as this is the between white northerners and white southerners. The Rough Riders. We have people from the North and the South and the West all coming together to fight the Spanish. And, supposedly, this is a noble cause too. Right? Great. We get rid of the Spanish. Spanish were horrible. We had to get rid of their empire. The question is what do we do after we get rid of them? Are we gonna give Cuba to the Cubans, and are we gonna give, the Philippines to the Filipinos? And Roosevelt is very much against doing those things because he's a white supremacist. He's pretty liberal in his white supremacist more than most because most white supremacists by this time are talking about Anglo-Saxon supremacy. And Roosevelt is ecumenical enough to think all whites belong in this, but black people don't. Right? There are no black people on the Rough Riders. He saw the Rough Riders themselves as sort of a microcosm of American society. He did invite Booker T. Washington to come dine at the White House, but then he went back on it. His— He never— He— His mother is a Southerner, an unreconstructed Southerner. His grandmother is too. So he grows up on the mythology of the Old South. In some ways, he's our first southern president since Andrew Johnson. And, but at the same time, he ends up being this, tremendous figure fighting for workers' rights. Right? And this is— You know, he ends his life in this quixotic quest to get America back from the oligarchs and hand it to the people. So there's much to admire with Roosevelt as well. I think much more—

00:53:53 Andrew Keen: You could say the same about— I mean, you end in, you end the book in 1915, but you could say the same about Woodrow Wilson who himself was from a deeply racist background and family.

00:54:05 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. I think he did worse than Roosevelt. You know, he— He's the one who starts purging, you know, as we see the purging going on right now, purging black people from the civil service. He— You know, W.E.B. Du Bois ends up backing, Woodrow Wilson instead of going with the Bull Moose Party and Roosevelt because Roosevelt gave him the cold shoulder at the Bull Moose Party convention. And Wilson promises, you know, makes promise to be progressive, but then he doesn't do it. So Wilson actually— The country starts taking gigantic steps backwards the same way the country is taking gigantic steps backwards right now.

00:54:46 Andrew Keen: And I wanna come to that. One more question. Yeah. Joe, some people might be listening to this and thinking, well, maybe this guy has a point. But, you know, if you have the hammer that he has, a hammer which sees everything in terms of race, then everything looks racial. Is that an argument to be made against what you're saying? I mean, you've constructed this idea of the whole history of America really is the history of what you call the biggest lie and of the idea of whites being superior to blacks, which clearly existed. But is there a danger of this kind of argument that because you've built that kind of hammer, everything looks like a nail?

00:55:30 Joseph Kelly: I don't think so. Certainly not if you read the these historical figures that we're talking about, read their own works. This is how they talk. I'm— I use the vocabulary that they used. I do wanna clarify something that, you know, I— While I do think the notion of white supremacy was around, you know, the entire history of the country, you know, we could look at the new [unclear] histories that, Heather Cox Richardson and Steven Hahn have put out, you know, Illiberal America, for instance. And, and that's definitely true. But I think from 1776 up until the eighteen twenties, there was a different story. It was a revolutionary tale, and, people really believed that black people deserved self-determination. And then it changes, and it changed because of certain individuals in the South who, conspired to do this. And they rapidly take over the entire South, and then it breaks out of the South. And then that— You know, this gets beyond the book, but I think that story changes then again in 1932. So we have these moments where—

00:56:42 Andrew Keen: '32 with, of course, with FDR and the New Deal.

00:56:46 Joseph Kelly: With the New Deal. Yeah.

00:56:47 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So you, yeah. That's— So there's a lovely symmetry between your book and Badger's book. Finally— Joe, obviously, this kind of book is written with one eye or half an eye on contemporary America, the America of January 6, which I know you mentioned, the Unite the Right rally in Charleston— down the road from you in— way in Charlottesville, where Nazi flags were explicitly waved, anti-Jewish racist songs were sung. How is this all relevant in the America of 2026? Do you see Trump and MAGA and the current American administration is really just, history repeating itself of taking so many of the theories of race and repackaging them for our social media age?

00:57:43 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. I mean, when we look at— In the last presidential election when JD Vance and then Trump himself are saying that, was it Haitians? I think it was Haitians or Somalis. I forget who it was.

00:57:56 Andrew Keen: Dogs. Yeah.

00:57:57 Joseph Kelly: The Haitians eating the pets. And then they get called down and said, yeah. We know we're lying. We're just gonna keep doing it, though. You know? The— I think the biggest threat to American democracy right now is Christian nationalism, and Christian nationalism is white supremacy, you know, a disguise version of white supremacy. It's another version of some of us count and some of us don't count. This is the, you know, we think of the big lie that Trump told us that he won the, election in 2020. At the January 6, you know, you know, the mob that he's addressing on January 6. And this is where I open the book, and then I leave MAGA for the rest. I don't talk about MAGA again. But in the opening of the book, the worst thing that he says there is that you're the real Americans, and those other people are enemies. And, you know, he points at the press and say they're enemies of the people, and democrats are enemies. And the real people are the people who are in that rally. Right? So this notion of dividing the citizenry up into who are the real Americans and who are the not real Americans. The most traditional way we do this is by race, but race is only part of that conversation as well. We do it in all sorts of other ways. Christian versus non-Christian is one. But this regime that we're living under is surprisingly overt in its purging of black people and women from federal positions. You know, I'd— You know, another— Say we had another MAGA president for the next four years. I think we're gonna have a civil service that there's almost no black people in it at all. You know, I think we are definitely— You know, that same danger that we were facing in 1876, that we were facing in 1915, that we saw manifest in the, the white man's burden of the Filipino war in 1900, we're seeing that same phenomenon taking place in the country today. And one thing that history tell— Teaches us is that every generation, there are people who rise up to combat it, to fight it, to resist it. And that's what we're seeing today as well.

01:00:15 Andrew Keen: Streets of, the streets of Minneapolis. Well, very controversial argument. I'm not sure everyone would agree, but fascinating conversation. The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. It came out a couple of months ago. It's doing rather well, very controversial, but very articulate, full of remarkably interesting cultural, political, historical, economic insight. Joseph Kelly, joining us from Charleston, South Carolina, the heart of where the biggest lie at least was perpetuated, maybe not so much anymore. But thank you so much, and best of luck with the book.

01:00:53 Joseph Kelly: Thank you very much.