The Great White Hoax

Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America

Philip Kadish

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781620974124
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A provocative new history of the forgeries, bogus science, rigged data, and fake news that keep American racism alive

“Anyone interested in the intersection of race, politics, and public lies in America will want to read this book.” —David S. Reynolds, Bancroft Prize–winning cultural historian and author of John Brown, Abolitionist and Walt Whitman’s America

Fake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Philip Kadish argues, are nothing new. The Great White Hoax, a masterpiece of historical and literary sleuthing, reveals that the era of Fox News and Donald Trump is simply a return to form. We have been here before.

In a book that brilliantly puts our current era into historical context, The Great White Hoax uncovers a centuries-long tradition of white supremacist hoaxes, perpetrated on the American public by a succession of political hucksters and opportunists, all of them willfully using racial frauds as tools for political and social advantage. In the antebellum era, slavery’s defenders used bogus science to “prove” the inferiority of African American people; during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s enemies circulated a sham pamphlet accusing him of promoting a dilution of the white race through “miscegenation” (a racist term invented by the pamphlet’s authors).

From these murky beginnings, author Philip Kadish draws a direct thread to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Henry Ford’s adaptation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Madison Grant’s embrace of eugenics (which directly influenced Adolf Hitler), Alabama Governor George Wallace’s race-baiting, and Roger Ailes’s creation of Fox News.

The Great White Hoax reveals white supremacy as today’s real “fake news”—and exposes the cast of villains, past and present, who have kept American racism alive.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: American Racism and the Long Prehistory of Post-truth
• Chapter 1. The Lying Truth: The Two Types of Great White Hoax
• Chapter 2. The Great W.A.S.P. Hoax: The Maria Monk Hoax of 1835 and the “Epoch of the Hoax”
• Chapter 3. “That Almighty Dollar Is the Thing ”: The American School of Ethnology, 1830 to 1850s
• Chapter 4. “Ingenious and Audacious Machinery”: The Miscegenation Hoax of 1864
• Chapter 5. “A Cruel Hoax on the American People”: Thomas Dixon, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Lies of Lynch Culture, 1870s to 1920s
• Chapter 6. “Our Own Game”: Henry Ford and the Gotham Eugenicists, 1910s to 1940s
• Chapter 7. A New “Sweet Science” of Racism: George Wallace and the Transition Years, from the Civil Rights Era to the Threshold of Today
• Epilogue: Unearthing the Great White Hoax: An Origin Story and a Model Man
• On the Capitalization of the Names of Races and the Handling of Racist Epithets
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Image Sources
• Index
• Copyright