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

*“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.”* — Joseph Kelly **INTRO** On yesterday’s show, Anthony Badger, author of Prosperity Road, told the story of America’s transformation into a global superpower between 1920 and 1945. Today is the prequel. Joseph Kelly, author of The Biggest Lie, narrates the story of America between 1818 and 1915. It’s what he calls the “prehistory of American fascism”. There’s no prosperity here. Nor nostalgia. It’s a miserable story. The “biggest lie”, for Kelly, is the myth of white supremacy. He traces it back to a South Carolina congressman named William Smith who, in 1820, claimed that what the founders had meant by all men are created equal was that all men aren’t created equal. The convenient logic of Southern slave-owners. So America didn’t import fascism from Mussolini or Hitler, Kelly says. It’s actually a made-in-America product, the innovation of Southern racists. Thus the American white supremacist Madison Grant’s *The Passing of the Great Race* was the book that the pagan Hitler called his “bible”, and Jim Crow became, in all-too-many ways, a model for the Nazis. “Nostalgia is a way of being modern”, Kelly says. Racialized American fascism took its romantic iconography from the Germanic knights and the Scottish lairds so mocked by Mark Twain. By reaching back into the European Dark Ages, the Confederates imagined they had invented the civilization of the future, one they sought to spread across the Western and Southern Hemispheres. So fascism, for all its fetishization of the volkish nation, is actually an early product of globalization. The biggest lie became the South’s “most successful export” — first shipped to the American North, and later, through Grant and the eugenicists, to Europe. A most unprosperous idea. And, Kelly warns, one that is returning to fashion. The prequel threatens to become the sequel. **FURTHER READING** •   Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915 (Bloomsbury, 21 July 2026). Kelly is professor of English at the College of Charleston and has also written *Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin*, *America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War* and *Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon*; he edits the *Seagull Reader* anthologies for Norton. Biography. •   Anthony Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt — yesterday’s episode, and the book Kelly’s argument hands off to. Kelly dates the reversal of the American fascist experiment to 1932; Badger starts there. •   Jonathan Rauch on Trump and the f word, and his six key moments. His *The Constitution of Knowledge* is the source of the phrase Kelly uses at 16:16 for the free press, academic tenure and peer review, and a reformed court system — institutions he argues were built in the 1920s and 1930s specifically to fight a politics founded on lying. Note that AK calls him John Rauch twice on the tape; it is Jonathan. •   Susan Neiman, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (Norton), and Andrew Curran, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race, from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson (Other Press) — both previous guests. Curran’s argument that the Enlightenment produced the scientific idea of race is the one AK puts to Kelly at 27:38, and Kelly’s answer inverts it: the culture came first and the science was dressed up afterward. •   Ida B. Wells is the figure Kelly builds his final chapter around. Her friend Thomas Moss was lynched after the People’s Grocery affair in Memphis in 1892; her editorial saying that white women slept with black men because they wanted to drew a published threat to castrate the editor, whom the white papers assumed was her male business partner. Her paper was the *Memphis Free Speech and Headlight*, not the Free Press as said on the tape. •   The Charleston insurrection of 1822 is the Denmark Vesey conspiracy; Nat Turner’s rebellion followed in Virginia in 1831. Together, in Kelly’s account, they turned William Smith’s crackpot 1820 speech into the South’s governing narrative. •   Four things to check against the tape. Robert Paxton’s *The Anatomy of Fascism* is usually cited as setting out seven mobilizing passions, not the nine Kelly counts; the two he says did not obtain in the South — the cult leader and the surrender of reason to him — sit in the middle of Paxton’s list rather than at the end. Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” was published in 1946, not 1945. “Seek truth and report it” is the Society of Professional Journalists’ wording, adopted 1996; the 1923 code was the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Canons of Journalism. And at 29:07 Kelly says the first generation told the story “in the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties” when he means the 1820s and 1830s — the transcript marks it. **FIVE TAKEAWAYS** **1. The summer of 1835.** Kelly puts a season on the closing of the Southern mind. After the summer of 1835 you could not stand up in the American South and proclaim that all men are created equal — not and mean it, not and advocate for it. A white person who tried risked violence, risked lynching, and would probably have to live in exile if he got out at all. What follows is almost two generations of white Southerners raised in a one-party state with a tradition of extrajudicial vigilante violence and no free speech, hearing white supremacy from the pulpit, in school and in the newspapers. Mark Twain said he grew up in Missouri and never once heard slavery arraigned by anybody until he left. Historians since the 1970s have called this a Herrenvolk democracy, but Kelly wants the scare quotes: a master-race democracy is a contradiction, because even the master race loses the Bill of Rights. The men who marched off to fight the Union were not lying. They believed it. That is what a lie does once it reaches a certain size. **2. They chose not to look.** Asked whether the men who built the lie knew they were lying, Kelly separates the generations. William Smith knew — the founders were still alive and he could have asked them, and would not have liked the answer. But the first American anthropologists were amateurs in the way the first naturalists were amateurs, and their authority came from owning plantations: they were credited because they spent more time around black Americans than the learned societies of Philadelphia did. They took anecdotes and bogus notions, dressed them in scientific language and presented the result to the world as science. Anyone who cared to look hard would hav...