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

Kelly (history, Coll. of Charleston; Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin) asserts that the U.S. has a long history of fascist impulses, though many believe that fascism has never been an American worry. Kelly considers the problems the Founding Fathers faced in addressing enslavement and reconciling it with “all men are created equal.” By assuming it would be resolved later, they ensured that the problem would fester. Kelly looks at roughly a century of American history (from the 1818 Missouri Compromise to 1915) to pull threads of fascism out of the shadows and prove that it has always been there. His extensive research reveals that approximately one third of the population will always harbor hierarchical preferences that seek to exclude “the other.” He posits that the laboratory for these ideas was the antebellum South, where these ideas persisted as the “Lost Cause.” The book’s title references the false idea that there exists a human hierarchy with white men at the top. As Kelly notes, race is a social construct, not a biological fact, yet such white supremacist ideas persist in the U.S.