The Biggest Lie
The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 21 Jul 2026
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
An eye-opening work of narrative history tracing the roots of American fascism back to the Antebellum South.
When American fascists suddenly goosestepped down Main Street in the 1930s, fascism was seen by the rest of the country as a terrifying and radical new European import. It was not. It didn't come from abroad. Nor was it new or radical. The seed of American fascism was planted by elite southern planters who insisted that slavery need not be addressed in the Constitution because it would soon die out on its own.
In The Biggest Lie, Joseph Kelly chronicles fascism's deep roots in the antebellum South; its codification under Jim Crow; and, then, after the Spanish American War, its ascendency in the form of Anglo-Saxon nationalism, proposing that the nation belongs to a master-race-the original lie of American fascism. In this dark hour of American history, Kelly's gripping story reminds us that the monied elite have always exceled at deploying disinformation to bias and inflame the masses, and that there have always been courageous patriots helping us to fight our way out of darkness toward the light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fascism's origins are inextricable from American slavery, according to this penetrating study. Historian Kelly (Marooned) points in particular to the lead up to the 1818 Missouri Compromise—a "debate over whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a free or a slave state"—during which many elites who were financially invested in slavery, in defiance of a widespread sense that it was time for the U.S. to "set itself on the path to equality," began "promoting its opposite, human inequality." Over the subsequent century, proslavery and segregationist advocates "pioneered many of the techniques by which twentieth-century fascists would exploit and then dismantle democracies," Kelly argues, including stoking "fears of Indian and slave insurrections... that supposedly threatened the survival of white Americans." These "supposed threats... generated a new type of nationalism... an ethno-nationalist state within the greater Union." This new ideology "required the suspension of civil rights" to protect it—including suppressing the rights of white Southerners who expressed liberal beliefs, who were often beaten and ostracized—leading to a white nationalist "police state" in the South. At the end of the 19th century, mass immigration triggered by industrialization became a "second... battleground" in the fight between fascism and liberal democracy, extending the police state's reach to the North. By the 20th century, Kelly observes, "the Republic had become... an ethno-nationalist state that systematically denied equal rights to... millions of citizens." Readers will find this a striking, potent reframing of fascism as an American invention.
