15:00:35 --> 15:00:39 Francesca Rheannon: Joseph Kelly, welcome to Writer's Voice. 15:00:38 --> 15:00:42 Joseph Kelly: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. 15:00:42 --> 15:00:57 Francesca Rheannon: Your book, The Biggest Lie, the central idea is that American history has always contained two competing traditions. One is rooted in the Declaration's promise of universal equality, but the other repeatedly. 15:00:57 --> 15:01:13 Francesca Rheannon: is about the construction of national identity through hierarchy, exclusion, myth making, and that is specifically applied racially, although not exclusively in this book. 15:01:13 --> 15:01:17 Francesca Rheannon: So your title refers to the biggest lie. What is that? 15:01:17 --> 15:01:29 Joseph Kelly: Uh, thanks very much for that, for that introduction. The, uh… I'm borrowing from Heather Cox Richardson, and historians like Stephen Hahn, and… 15:01:29 --> 15:01:44 Joseph Kelly: thinking of American history as this 400-year competition between these two, I don't know, political forces, you might say. And I'm looking at a specific 100-year period, 1818 through 1915. 15:01:44 --> 15:01:59 Joseph Kelly: Roughly. And that's because I identify the biggest lie in American history that's in the title is that all men are not created equal, actually, as a political ideology in American history. 15:01:59 --> 15:02:07 Joseph Kelly: So the book actually begins really with the Declaration and talking about the notion of equality and what those first couple generations of Americans. 15:02:07 --> 15:02:15 Joseph Kelly: thought equality meant, and then, uh, I take 1818 as the departure point for this new. 15:02:15 --> 15:02:33 Joseph Kelly: Uh, political ideology, uh, in American history, because that's when people, for the first time, start arguing that people are not created equal. So, that fight is going to take a number of various forms. Ultimately, it's really white nationalism, right? White people are superior. 15:02:33 --> 15:02:50 Joseph Kelly: to people of color. And of course, who gets to count as white and who doesn't get to count as white is a contested issue, and I talk quite a bit about the changing nature of whiteness over that 100-year period. But ultimately, it boils down to that notion that. 15:02:50 --> 15:02:55 Joseph Kelly: we are not all created equal, that the founders. 15:02:55 --> 15:02:57 Joseph Kelly: were either… 15:02:57 --> 15:03:12 Joseph Kelly: just, you know, bright-eyed romantics, idealists, in pronouncing that all men are created equal. And if they were realists, they would… they would have faced up to the fact that's obvious to everybody, that… that the races are unequal. Or… 15:03:12 --> 15:03:16 Joseph Kelly: Uh, that, that, uh, you know, that… 15:03:16 --> 15:03:31 Joseph Kelly: There's another, you know, sort of parallel lie that begins in American political ideology, that the founders didn't really mean what they said. That when the founders said all men are created equal, what they really meant was all white men were created equal. Um, and… 15:03:23 --> 15:03:24 Francesca Rheannon: Mmhm. 15:03:31 --> 15:03:46 Joseph Kelly: So, so those, you know, that strain in American politics and public, public discourse, if you will, really gets going in 1818 as a result of, or maybe, you know, right after the debates, or during the debates of, uh. 15:03:46 --> 15:03:56 Joseph Kelly: the Missouri comp… what leads to the Missouri Compromise? Shall the state of Missouri be admitted as a slave state, or as a… uh… as a free state? And that… 15:03:56 --> 15:03:57 Joseph Kelly: Really… 15:03:57 --> 15:04:04 Joseph Kelly: forces the country to grapple with the notion, uh, are we gonna… is slavery… 15:04:04 --> 15:04:21 Joseph Kelly: a temporary evil that we're putting up with for a few generations that is really inimical to Republican ideology? Are we going to do something about it, finally? Or are we not going to do something about it? So that's why that particular moment in American history, I think, is very important. 15:04:22 --> 15:04:29 Joseph Kelly: That's where public discourse, where we start seeing this lie appear in public discourse. 15:04:29 --> 15:04:44 Francesca Rheannon: Yes, and just to go back very briefly to Thomas Jefferson, and only because we have recently passed July 4th and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which, of course, he penned. 15:04:46 --> 15:05:06 Francesca Rheannon: You make the… I think a lot of people could be justified in thinking that he thought that all men are created equal applies just to white people, given his ownership of slaves. So just briefly say why you think, in fact, he didn't believe that, and why that belief was. 15:05:06 --> 15:05:12 Francesca Rheannon: Uh, common even among the slaveholding… slaveholding founders. 15:05:11 --> 15:05:27 Joseph Kelly: Yeah, one of the things that we have to distinguish is, or recognize, is that the notion of equality that Jefferson was voicing in the Declaration did not necessarily mean all the races were exactly the same. 15:05:27 --> 15:05:46 Joseph Kelly: This is an idea that we've dispensed with a long time ago, but in the 18th century, even people who thought about, you know, subscribed to universal human rights might think that there are racial differences. Thomas Jefferson thought that black people were better musicians, naturally, than white people. 15:05:46 --> 15:06:03 Joseph Kelly: war. He didn't think they were good composers. And that, of course, is because he thinks white people are smarter than black people. So he believes in these essential differences between the races, but none of those essential differences are important enough. 15:06:03 --> 15:06:20 Joseph Kelly: to distinguish whether, or to single out a particular race and say they are undeserving of universal human rights. And the most fundamental of those, of course, is the right to self-determination. Everybody has the right to have a say in their own government, the social compact. 15:06:20 --> 15:06:37 Joseph Kelly: You know, it's not a compact if it's forced upon you. And everybody in the world, every human being has a right to enter into or withdraw from or withhold their support in the social contract, at least philosophically. 15:06:37 --> 15:06:52 Joseph Kelly: And so that's what equality means, that there's no human being on Earth that is not worthy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and fundamental to those is that governments are established among men to secure those rights. 15:06:52 --> 15:07:12 Joseph Kelly: So this is why, on the one hand, he could say black people smell bad, which is one of the horrible things that he says and notes on the state of Virginia. But also he could say he fears for his country when he thinks about the fact that God is just. 15:07:12 --> 15:07:17 Joseph Kelly: Because he knows that his country is perpetrating an injustice. 15:07:17 --> 15:07:30 Francesca Rheannon: Yeah, so how really did this happen? You mentioned the Missouri crisis, the whole, um, you know, controversy over whether Missouri was going to be a slave state. Um… 15:07:30 --> 15:07:48 Francesca Rheannon: You say that that pseudoscientific racism, because, of course, we all understand now that racism is a construct, and you also refer to the fact in your book that there can be a greater genetic variation between people within one so-called racial group than. 15:07:48 --> 15:07:58 Francesca Rheannon: Uh, between people of widely differing, uh, uh, racial groups. But, uh, you say that… 15:07:58 --> 15:08:13 Francesca Rheannon: it didn't just emerge, obviously, from ignorance, but was consciously constructed by respective intellectuals. It's not just, you know, ignoramuses kind of spewing racism. 15:08:13 --> 15:08:17 Francesca Rheannon: Talk about that effort and how organized it was. 15:08:16 --> 15:08:22 Joseph Kelly: Yeah, so we're talking about the 1820s and the 1830s, and this is really… 15:08:22 --> 15:08:43 Joseph Kelly: kind of the era of the birth of anthropology as a science, certainly in the United States. And what we find is a number of intellectuals, college professors, medical doctors, you know, self-trained naturalists, but people who certainly fashion themselves as scientists who are. 15:08:45 --> 15:08:50 Joseph Kelly: You know, pride themselves on adhering to. 15:08:50 --> 15:09:03 Joseph Kelly: what is well known, then, as a scientific method, you know, where you're supposed to purge yourself of prejudices and look at the facts as they are on the ground. Nevertheless, what we find is that a number of people writing. 15:09:03 --> 15:09:15 Joseph Kelly: these anthropological studies of Black Americans. I'm not going to use the term that they use, it's in the book, you know, it's a term we don't like to say out loud anymore. 15:09:15 --> 15:09:17 Joseph Kelly: But… 15:09:16 --> 15:09:24 Francesca Rheannon: Uh, you call it N-word-ology. I had to think about how I was going to actually say that. 15:09:17 --> 15:09:18 Joseph Kelly: Yep. 15:09:19 --> 15:09:36 Joseph Kelly: And wordology, yeah. And I would just like to point out, Francesca, I don't call it that. That's what one of the, you know, the guy who was sort of the historian of the early anthropological movement in the 18… 15:09:36 --> 15:09:54 Joseph Kelly: 40s called it. He said he was engaging in that, right? And he was kind of saying it as a joke, but it's very telling about what kind of prejudice he had going in. So, on the one hand, you have naturalists like Audubon going around making these incredibly scientific. 15:09:54 --> 15:10:11 Joseph Kelly: uh, objective observations of birds, for instance. And I… and in the book, I give a description… his description of the pelican, as he observed it in Charleston, the city that I live in. And this is where some of the… the anthropology of Black Americans originates in South Carolina, so I think it's. 15:10:11 --> 15:10:29 Joseph Kelly: particularly apropos. So, using that kind of language that, like, an Audubon would use as a naturalist, we have people writing about Black Americans. But these are just… these are plantation owners who have a vested interest in perpetuating slavery. 15:10:29 --> 15:10:31 Joseph Kelly: And… 15:10:31 --> 15:10:46 Joseph Kelly: They don't go about making their observations in anything like the scientific objective rigor that an Audubon does. I mean, they're really, what they're doing is writing up their own prejudices with a couple anecdotes and that kind of thing. 15:10:46 --> 15:11:02 Joseph Kelly: There's there's one guy from North Carolina, Caldwell, who initiates the notion that there are many different Gardens of Eden, and there was one in Africa, and there was one in Europe, and there was one in Asia. And this this accounts for the differences. Right. And creation was not one event. It was the several events. 15:11:02 --> 15:11:03 Joseph Kelly: Um, so… 15:11:03 --> 15:11:14 Joseph Kelly: And he makes claims about the dimensions of white male. 15:11:14 --> 15:11:32 Joseph Kelly: private parts, and the same thing about black, and we… we know he did not… he did not go about measuring anything, you know, he did not… but… yes, well, there's no record of it, and I think there would be, if there had been. He claims black penises are longer than white penises, but white. 15:11:22 --> 15:11:24 Francesca Rheannon: Let's open up. 15:11:32 --> 15:11:36 Joseph Kelly: testicles are bigger than black testicles. Um… 15:11:36 --> 15:11:44 Joseph Kelly: You know, he was not plunging white testicles into graduated cylinders to find out how much. 15:11:44 --> 15:12:03 Joseph Kelly: Fluid they displaced, you know, there was no science behind this. This is all anecdotal observation, and those anecdotal observations, of course, were very much colored by the prejudice that they went in with. So, from the beginning, this was incredibly bad science, and anybody who took the time. 15:12:03 --> 15:12:23 Joseph Kelly: to think about it. Darwin thought it was bad science, right? There were contemporary scientists who were calling them out on this, but it was… it served such a convenient political end that nobody looked into it too carefully. The biggest perpetrator was Samuel Morton, who was a Philadelphia. 15:12:23 --> 15:12:25 Joseph Kelly: uh, physician. 15:12:25 --> 15:12:40 Joseph Kelly: a great what's called craniologist. He studied human skulls, and he had the greatest collection. He'd write to people and say, send me the skulls of, you know, these Bedouins in Sinai and Egypt and things like that. And he would collect all these things. 15:12:40 --> 15:12:56 Joseph Kelly: you know, he had Native American skulls, he had the skulls of… of Black Americans, he had the skulls of Englishmen, and… and he would measure them. He did, actually. He didn't use graduated cinders, he used little pellets, and, you know, he would measure the capacity of… of brain… 15:12:56 --> 15:13:10 Joseph Kelly: cases, and things like that. Uh, but his, his data is horribly inaccurate. Uh, Stephen Jay Gould, very famously, uh, before he died, obviously, before he died, uh, exploded. 15:13:10 --> 15:13:12 Joseph Kelly: the… 15:13:12 --> 15:13:17 Joseph Kelly: scientific rigor of Morton's methods. One of the things, for example, that Morton did. 15:13:17 --> 15:13:18 Joseph Kelly: Ah. 15:13:18 --> 15:13:33 Joseph Kelly: He reasoned that the skulls that he collected from Englishmen were collected from criminals. That's what you could get, right? Those were the bodies that you could get body parts from were people who were executed as criminals. 15:13:33 --> 15:13:39 Joseph Kelly: So, and he knew, of course, as everybody knew, that criminals were… 15:13:39 --> 15:13:51 Joseph Kelly: dumber than regular people who… law-abiding people. So he deliberately increased the data that he collected about English skulls, because he knew that his sample. 15:13:51 --> 15:14:09 Joseph Kelly: as, you know, generally was going to be lower than the average English. So he just more or less arbitrarily increased the number, you know, the capacity of the skulls that he had there. Stephen Jay Gould points out a bunch of those kind of things, what he calls a priori convictions, what we would call prejudice, right? 15:14:09 --> 15:14:29 Joseph Kelly: That, you go into your collection of data and your analysis of data with a preconceived notion of what you're going to find when you come out. Not only a preconceived notion, but but a preconceived notion that is so strong that it's going to distort the way you look at that data, even, and the way that you collect the data. 15:14:29 --> 15:14:41 Joseph Kelly: So this is what happened in the 1830s, 1840s, and people are producing these books, and they end up, you know, these writers are referencing each other over and over again. 15:14:41 --> 15:14:56 Joseph Kelly: and at the base of it, there's no real good science, and if, you know, a good scientist could detect that at the time, and good scientists did detect it at the time. Nevertheless, it was still… 15:14:56 --> 15:14:59 Joseph Kelly: Put out there as, you know, cutting edge. 15:14:59 --> 15:15:15 Joseph Kelly: research on the human species and the varieties of humans. Probably the most influential thing that Samuel Morton wrote, he wrote these two great books, A Craniology of the Egyptians and A Craniology of Native Americans. 15:15:15 --> 15:15:18 Joseph Kelly: Those were his biggest collections, and they had magnificent… 15:15:18 --> 15:15:25 Joseph Kelly: Magnificent, uh, illustrations, uh, the… just the presentation of the data. 15:15:25 --> 15:15:41 Joseph Kelly: It was spectacular, it wowed everybody who looked at it, or almost everybody. But the most influential thing was a introduction, like 70 page, 80 page introduction about the varieties of human beings and the data in this. 15:15:41 --> 15:15:54 Joseph Kelly: It was lent credibility by all those wonderful, beautiful illustrations of skulls and the differences between skulls in Asia and the skulls in Africa, et cetera. 15:15:54 --> 15:16:05 Joseph Kelly: Uh, but it didn't really draw on that data at all. The data it was drawing on were myths and legends and the dimensions of ancient statuary, um… 15:16:05 --> 15:16:11 Joseph Kelly: You know, just nothing that any scientist would take, and yet, based on this. 15:16:11 --> 15:16:21 Joseph Kelly: he tells with, with great authority and, and, um, with, with no self-doubt at all, the minutest. 15:16:21 --> 15:16:38 Joseph Kelly: different traits of the different nations. I am the Director of Irish Studies at the College of Charleston, so I'm always looking for how the Irish are described. And he says they're really hardworking, and they're pretty stupid. For white people, they're pretty dumb, but. 15:16:38 --> 15:16:43 Joseph Kelly: But they're very hardworking, that kind of thing. 15:16:42 --> 15:16:48 Francesca Rheannon: Well, we should point out that the Irish were not always considered white in America. 15:16:44 --> 15:16:45 Joseph Kelly: Yep. 15:16:47 --> 15:17:04 Joseph Kelly: No, no, not really. And I know that, you know, Noel Ignatiev has that very controversial book, "When the Irish Became White," which was attacked, I think somewhat, I won't say unfairly, but I think wrongly. 15:17:04 --> 15:17:22 Joseph Kelly: attacked, because he was actually very much, you know, very progressive in his thought, and what he was pointing out in that book was when the Irish came to the United States, they were not accepted as mainstream Anglo-Saxon citizens. As a matter of fact, it's their arrival in the United States. 15:17:22 --> 15:17:37 Joseph Kelly: That sort of invents this notion of the Anglo-Saxon in America before the arrival of the Irish by the hundreds of thousands as a result of the great hunger, the famine in the 1840s. 15:17:38 --> 15:17:52 Joseph Kelly: people didn't make much distinction between varieties of white people, but when all these Irish Catholics were coming into the country, suddenly the white people who were already here did not want to be associated with those ignorant. 15:17:52 --> 15:17:55 Joseph Kelly: Uh, filthy, slum dwelling, uh… 15:17:55 --> 15:18:10 Joseph Kelly: you know, bog hopper Irish Catholics. They were Catholic, too, rather than Protestant, which was a strike against them. And besides that, they sort of resisted assimilation. They kept to their own churches and their own pubs and that kind of thing. They very jealously guarded their religion. 15:18:10 --> 15:18:12 Joseph Kelly: So… 15:18:12 --> 15:18:26 Joseph Kelly: uh, they were… they were not mainstreamed. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that they never suffered the kind of suffering that non-white people suffered. So, in that sense, they were never not white. They were not enslaved in America. Um… 15:18:26 --> 15:18:29 Francesca Rheannon: He always had white privilege. 15:18:26 --> 15:18:28 Joseph Kelly: But. 15:18:28 --> 15:18:34 Joseph Kelly: Right. They always had a degree of white privilege, but they didn't have full white privilege. They were, they were, um… 15:18:34 --> 15:18:50 Joseph Kelly: They were excluded. And we can see in the 1870s, there's a very famous Thomas Nast cartoon that was on the cover of Harper's Magazine in 1876. This is the year, of course, that reconstruction falls apart, the great experiment of biracial republic. 15:18:50 --> 15:18:56 Joseph Kelly: collapses in 1876. And there's this famous, um… 15:18:56 --> 15:19:12 Joseph Kelly: cartoon. Many of your readers have probably seen a version of it. It's out there quite a bit. There's a giant scale, and on the left-hand side of the scale is the stereotype of a freed black man, you know, looking happy-go-lucky with all the stereotypical. 15:19:12 --> 15:19:23 Joseph Kelly: physical features. And on the other side of the scale is the Paddy, right? The stereotypical Irish immigrant. And the notion here is that they're equivalent. 15:19:23 --> 15:19:24 Francesca Rheannon: Mmhm. 15:19:23 --> 15:19:29 Joseph Kelly: uh, the Irish are the white version of black people. Um, and that goes… that… 15:19:29 --> 15:19:46 Joseph Kelly: notion goes far back. I mean, a lot of people speculated in the 19th century that the Irish were a strange European race that actually derived from Africa via the Iberian Peninsula. And because they were on the very edge of Europe, they never. 15:19:46 --> 15:20:05 Joseph Kelly: you know, they were never in the struggles, the survival of the fittest struggles that the rest of the Europeans went through, so they never really evolved as a people, and they were sort of a throwback. You can see what European tribes looked like 2,000 years ago by looking at the Irish, whereas if you wanted to look at the. 15:20:05 --> 15:20:19 Joseph Kelly: the most modern version of white people, you're going to look at Northern Europeans, you know, what Donald Trump calls the Nordics, right? The good countries that we want to accept immigrants from. 15:20:19 --> 15:20:36 Joseph Kelly: But so the Irish eventually do, I mean, they do get mainstreamed. They become what I would call Anglo-Saxon adjacent. They're never fully Anglo-Saxon because they never give up their Catholicism. They never become white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but they get about as close as you can get. 15:20:19 --> 15:20:21 Francesca Rheannon: Yep. 15:20:33 --> 15:20:34 Francesca Rheannon: Bye. 15:20:36 --> 15:20:54 Francesca Rheannon: Yeah, and talking about another racial or racialized group that you do link to this story. Andrew Jackson occupies an important place in this story. 15:20:51 --> 15:20:52 Joseph Kelly: Mmhm. 15:20:55 --> 15:21:06 Francesca Rheannon: How did Indian removal, which was accomplished or done by him, inflicted by him, how did that help shape this broader ideology that you describe? 15:21:05 --> 15:21:28 Joseph Kelly: Yeah, so we were talking about sort of top down ideology, the way elites, ministers, scientists, professors, that kind of thing, influence the way people think. But then there's also bottom up. And when we talk about, or the chapter in which I talk about Andrew Jackson, he's a representative of what historians have called the plain folk of the old south. 15:21:28 --> 15:21:44 Joseph Kelly: Scots-Irish descendants, these were Presbyterians, they were not Irish Catholics. In the Irish context, the Catholics are called Native Irish, while the Scots-Irish came in in the 16th and 17th century. 15:21:44 --> 15:21:46 Joseph Kelly: confiscating. 15:21:46 --> 15:22:02 Joseph Kelly: Catholic lands, living there for a few generations, then life was so tough for them that they came to the United States in the 1700s. Andrew Jackson's family was that, you know, his parents were for County Antrim. They were, you know, Presbyterian Scots in their. 15:22:02 --> 15:22:20 Joseph Kelly: ancestry, and they settled the backcountry. And these, in the South especially, this group of people, the Scots-Irish, were distinct people from the coastal whites who were largely of English extraction. I'm talking in great generalities right now, but there was a perceived. 15:22:20 --> 15:22:28 Joseph Kelly: cultural difference between the backwoods white people and sort of the coastal white people. 15:22:28 --> 15:22:44 Joseph Kelly: And those backwoods, you know, the people who settled the backcountries, they came into Philadelphia, they went west till they got to the Appalachian Mountains, and they came down the Great Wagon Trail. So they settled, you know, western Virginia, western North Carolina, western South Carolina. And those were the lands that were… 15:22:45 --> 15:23:00 Joseph Kelly: butting up against Indian lands. You know, the Indians had been mostly pushed out of the coastal areas by this time. So, um, you know, someone like Andrew Jackson's family, they discovered whiteness by their. 15:23:00 --> 15:23:15 Joseph Kelly: relationship with Native Americans. They didn't know they were white until they came to America. Every… because everybody was white in… in Ireland, nobody was white. Nobody thought about whiteness. The… the racial distinctions were between Celts and Anglo-Saxons. Um… 15:23:15 --> 15:23:18 Joseph Kelly: Uh, and so… 15:23:18 --> 15:23:27 Joseph Kelly: What was going on on the frontier, of course, were, you know, white people encroaching on the lands of Native Americans, so this caused incredibly violent. 15:23:27 --> 15:23:43 Joseph Kelly: conflicts between those two groups. I mean, this was, in essence, racial warfare. White people were getting killed in Indian raids for being white, and white people were killing Indians going into Indian towns and slaughtering everybody for the fact that they're Indians, so this was… 15:23:43 --> 15:23:50 Joseph Kelly: This was very, obviously, racial conflict, um, and this, this… 15:23:48 --> 15:23:54 Francesca Rheannon: Except it was also a conflict over expropriation or settler colonialism. 15:23:52 --> 15:24:08 Joseph Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What's a little different between the attitude that was fostered by people like Andrew Jackson, who was on the frontier, of course, he went over the mountains and then was one of the first settlers in Tennessee. 15:24:08 --> 15:24:11 Joseph Kelly: Uh, you know, really cut off from… from… 15:24:11 --> 15:24:30 Joseph Kelly: you know, the American East, you know, people had to fend for themselves, and they did. And they did by killing Native Americans. One of the important differences, I mean, there's obvious racial distinction, and there's certainly among white people a sense of superiority over Native Americans, racial superiority. 15:24:30 --> 15:24:50 Joseph Kelly: But in all that, there was never a belief that Native Americans did not have the capacity for self-government. It was more, we want your land and we're going to take it. It's inevitable. Our population is exploding. Your numbers are so small. It's going to happen. 15:24:51 --> 15:25:00 Joseph Kelly: So, let's try to get it done maybe the most humane way, if we're gonna be progressive about it. If we're not gonna be progressive, it doesn't matter how it happens, we're just gonna… 15:25:00 --> 15:25:16 Joseph Kelly: We're gonna remove you and send you out to Oklahoma, and then you can rule yourselves over there. The people we were talking about earlier with the anthropologists and stuff, their point was to prove that Black people did not have the capacity. 15:25:16 --> 15:25:27 Joseph Kelly: for self-government. So, so this, it's a kind of racism that's coming from, from the bottom up, uh, in the American West, in the American South, and then when Andrew Jackson opens up. 15:25:22 --> 15:25:23 Francesca Rheannon: Thank you. 15:25:27 --> 15:25:40 Joseph Kelly: the Great Black Belt, where, you know, it opens up Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, to white settlers who are going to be cotton farmers. You know, this is great cotton country. 15:25:40 --> 15:25:41 Joseph Kelly: uh… 15:25:41 --> 15:25:52 Joseph Kelly: the people flooding in are gonna be both of these people. They're gonna be planters from South Carolina, Virginia, you know, that sort of more elite class who are gonna be bringing, um… 15:25:52 --> 15:26:04 Joseph Kelly: you know, gangs of enslaved Black people with them to start their cotton farms, and then there's gonna be backwoods, what we call yeoman farmers, who might not own any slaves. 15:26:04 --> 15:26:20 Joseph Kelly: At all. Most of them didn't. And they would come with a wagon and their family and a few possessions, and they would get the worst lands, of course. They would get the Pine Barrens, they would get the, you know, the mountaintops and the bottoms of the valleys, while the rich lands were taken up by the wealthy people. 15:26:20 --> 15:26:27 Joseph Kelly: So, what we see taking place in the 1830s and the 1840s is those planters. 15:26:28 --> 15:26:32 Joseph Kelly: I have to persuade the, um… 15:26:32 --> 15:26:47 Joseph Kelly: You know, those Scots-Irish, the plain folk of the Old South who don't own slaves and have no interest in the perpetuation of slavery. As a matter of fact, their own political powers is harmed by the amount of wealth that's getting accumulated by people who do own slaves. 15:26:47 --> 15:26:51 Joseph Kelly: Uh, so they have to persuade those plane folk to… 15:26:51 --> 15:27:00 Joseph Kelly: have political solidarity. Um, now, it's not that people like Andrew Jackson were not already racist, right? So they are… they had… they had good… 15:27:00 --> 15:27:02 Joseph Kelly: material to work with. 15:27:02 --> 15:27:23 Joseph Kelly: But they have to persuade them that their interests are with the perpetuation of slavery, rather than the gradual abolition of slavery. And and they do that by, sowing fear. And beginning in 1822, here in Charleston, there was a supposed Denmark visi. 15:27:23 --> 15:27:32 Joseph Kelly: uprising. Then, in 1831, there is the Nat Turner uprising in Virginia. And what is… what is… 15:27:32 --> 15:27:41 Joseph Kelly: blown up into the consciousness of white folks in the South is that at any moment. 15:27:41 --> 15:27:43 Joseph Kelly: these primitive… 15:27:44 --> 15:27:47 Joseph Kelly: uh, potentially violent Black people. 15:27:47 --> 15:28:02 Joseph Kelly: could rise up, sneak into your bedroom, slit your throat, and carry your wife off as a sex slave, maybe sail to Haiti or something like that. Um, so this… this becomes the narrative that is going to support, uh. 15:28:02 --> 15:28:17 Joseph Kelly: the notion of perpetual Black slavery. It's going to change, you know, what had been up into the 1820s. Everybody… no one in the United States said slavery was good. Nobody said, what we really need to do is make this. 15:28:17 --> 15:28:30 Joseph Kelly: permanent. Uh, what everybody presumed is that it was going to die out, more or less naturally, under the… the great waters of the Republic. We're gonna erode it away. Um… 15:28:30 --> 15:28:42 Joseph Kelly: And, you know, conveniently, that would always be 3 or 4 generations down the road, but that's what people… you know, that's what political discourse… that was mainstream political discourse, and almost nobody. 15:28:42 --> 15:28:53 Joseph Kelly: said slavery was good. By the 1830s, 1835 in particular, we can almost look at the exact moment, the summer of 1835. After the summer of 1835, you can no longer. 15:28:53 --> 15:29:09 Joseph Kelly: Say all men are created equal in the South. You are putting yourself in danger to do that. The South is rapidly becoming a police state akin to what we would associate with a fascist state in the 20th century. 15:29:09 --> 15:29:17 Joseph Kelly: And the reason it does is because it has to perpetuate this ideology, this ideology of inequality. 15:29:17 --> 15:29:27 Joseph Kelly: And as we know, the truth repudiates it, so you have to impose restrictions on speech, you have to impose, uh… 15:29:27 --> 15:29:30 Joseph Kelly: Uh, you have to… 15:29:30 --> 15:29:37 Joseph Kelly: intimidate, you have to threaten, you have to send into exile, uh, dissidents, um, or lynch them. 15:29:37 --> 15:29:38 Francesca Rheannon: Mmhm. 15:29:37 --> 15:29:49 Joseph Kelly: Which is what happens in the South. So, we have an entire generation from about 1835 up to the beginning, well, up to 1860s, you know, until the Union troops occupy. 15:29:49 --> 15:29:52 Joseph Kelly: whatever part of the South you're talking about. 15:29:52 --> 15:29:59 Joseph Kelly: we have what is really the American equivalent of the Hitler Youth. We have an entire generation of white folks who are growing up. 15:29:59 --> 15:30:06 Joseph Kelly: Uh, under a hegemonic ideology, an ideology that, uh, does not allow. 15:30:06 --> 15:30:25 Joseph Kelly: any kind of dissent. It's not an ideology that comes out of argument. It's not an ideology that is championed in what we come to call the marketplace of ideas in the 20th century. It is an ideology that demands the marketplace of ideas be shut down. 15:30:25 --> 15:30:41 Joseph Kelly: So one of the things that we often forget about the South, obviously it was hugely oppressive for black people, the notion of perpetual slavery. And slavery becomes worse for black people after 1835, really after 1832. 15:30:41 --> 15:30:44 Joseph Kelly: Slavery had been… 15:30:44 --> 15:30:53 Joseph Kelly: gradually kind of, you know, eroding at the edges up to the 1820s. In many places, it had been getting less horrible. 15:30:53 --> 15:31:09 Joseph Kelly: Now, there's exceptions to that, of course, but in general, that's what was happening. And then it reverses. And what most people think of, you know, the stereotype of slavery in the United States is that last generation before the Civil War, the gone with the wind. 15:31:09 --> 15:31:14 Joseph Kelly: you know, image of slavery. Um, that's… 15:31:13 --> 15:31:16 Francesca Rheannon: Or the Uncle Tom's cabin. Yeah, or the… 15:31:15 --> 15:31:32 Joseph Kelly: Or Uncle Tom's Cabin, yeah, the flip side of the same thing, right? One is the, even though it's a sentimental novel, is much closer to the truth, certainly the spiritual truth of slavery, what it does to a human psyche. 15:31:32 --> 15:31:43 Joseph Kelly: uh, you know, what is possible, you know, what… you know, why… why Eliza has to jump on the ice and run away with her child across the Ohio River, because… 15:31:43 --> 15:31:53 Joseph Kelly: she knows her child is going to get stolen, and she's going to get raped if she doesn't, right? That's not in Gone with the Wind, of course, that's in… 15:31:53 --> 15:32:02 Joseph Kelly: That's… that's the… what I would say is, despite it being a sentimental novel, is very much the truth of… of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel. Yeah. 15:32:01 --> 15:32:17 Francesca Rheannon: Yeah, and gone with the wind. I mean, you're talking about a book that was written in the 20th century. One of the points you make just to kind of indicate the continuity is that where. 15:32:17 --> 15:32:36 Francesca Rheannon: This white supremacist ideology, this people are not equal. Ideology began to justify slavery in the 20th century, 100 years later. It was used to convince Northerners of the, correctness. 15:32:36 --> 15:32:40 Francesca Rheannon: of white supremacy. Why? 15:32:38 --> 15:32:53 Joseph Kelly: Yeah, yeah, well, this is a result of the South losing the Civil War, which should have settled the question, right? I mean, the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments write equality into the Constitution to take all doubt. 15:32:53 --> 15:33:14 Joseph Kelly: It's always been in the Declaration, but the Declaration is not really a binding document. So the Declaration is essentially written into the Constitution as a result of the Civil War. So by 1870, when we get the universal right of all male citizens to vote, no matter what your race is, obviously women still don't have the vote. 15:33:14 --> 15:33:21 Joseph Kelly: But 1870 is when the third of those reconstruction amendments gets passed. 15:33:21 --> 15:33:33 Joseph Kelly: we're engaged in, you know, the reconstruction of America is this great experiment in a biracial or a multiracial republic. Really, I should say multiracial, if we look at the… 15:33:33 --> 15:33:45 Joseph Kelly: you know, the opinions in the, in, in the recent, uh, is it the Barbara case? The, the, the birthright citizenship case that was just adjudicated. It's not just as, uh, Justice Thomas said. 15:33:45 --> 15:33:56 Joseph Kelly: the 14th and 15th Amendments that are not just about Black people, they're about everybody, right? So a multiracial democracy, this is the first time the country is really. 15:33:56 --> 15:34:12 Joseph Kelly: rolling up its sleeves and trying to produce a multiracial democracy, and it's actually working. You know, I mean, obviously there's problems, and one of the… the biggest problem is the recalcitrance of white Southerners, people who are resisting the imposition of equality. 15:34:12 --> 15:34:19 Joseph Kelly: Uh, where, uh, it least existed before the war. Um. 15:34:19 --> 15:34:34 Joseph Kelly: But then, I won't go into the details of it, but by 1876, this is when white southerners gather enough strength again. They've reorganized the Ku Klux Klan. The federal government puts down the Klan, but then they. 15:34:34 --> 15:34:45 Joseph Kelly: Revive and various organizations. One of the most notorious of is, is called the Red Shirts in, uh, the Carolinas, especially in Georgia. Um… 15:34:45 --> 15:35:01 Joseph Kelly: Precursor to the black shirts of Mussolini and the brown shirts of Hitler are the red shirts in the post Civil War American South. And by intimidation, violence, they steal the election of 1876. 15:35:02 --> 15:35:17 Joseph Kelly: And this is the beginning of the end of reconstruction, that great experiment. And what happens after 1876 then is that southerners begin telling stories about reconstruction itself. 15:35:17 --> 15:35:25 Joseph Kelly: The great proof of white supremacy is, hey, look what happened in Reconstruction. Look how horrible it was. 15:35:25 --> 15:35:42 Joseph Kelly: When we gave political power to Black people, it was the most catastrophic consequences came from it. Now, this was all a lie, as scholars of Reconstruction have, you know, painstakingly. 15:35:42 --> 15:35:52 Joseph Kelly: documented, really, since the 1860s. It began in the 1830s with W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction. He was way ahead of his time. 15:35:51 --> 15:35:53 Francesca Rheannon: 1930s. 15:35:52 --> 15:36:01 Joseph Kelly: Did I say 1830s? I'm sorry. Yes, 1935. Yes. 15:35:54 --> 15:35:56 Francesca Rheannon: Yes. 15:35:56 --> 15:36:02 Francesca Rheannon: Just say it over again, it's okay. It began… you can just say that over again. It began in… 15:36:01 --> 15:36:17 Joseph Kelly: It, uh, it began in 1935 with W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction, and he was very much ahead of his time. It took about a generation or so before, you know, sort of mainstream historians catch up, but, you know, since the 60s, 70s, and up through today, we're still. 15:36:18 --> 15:36:30 Joseph Kelly: making the case for the successes of Reconstruction, and how that story of the failure of Reconstruction was itself a lie. 15:36:30 --> 15:36:32 Francesca Rheannon: Part of the biggest lie. 15:36:30 --> 15:36:32 Joseph Kelly: What? 15:36:32 --> 15:36:42 Joseph Kelly: Yes, I mean, that's a version of it, right? What is it… what is it that's proving white supremacy, if we… if we look at the debacle of Reconstruction? Now. 15:36:42 --> 15:36:47 Joseph Kelly: Actual professional historians, the first professional historians, were among those who. 15:36:47 --> 15:37:03 Joseph Kelly: uh, established and perpetuated the lie about Reconstruction. Um, that's a fascinating story in and of itself. I don't go into too much detail about it. I go into more detail about what is far more influential than those… those professional historians is… is Thomas Dixon, and… 15:37:03 --> 15:37:18 Joseph Kelly: you know, his novel The Klansman that becomes the blockbuster movie Birth of a Nation. And that's what that is about. You know, we have the pre-Civil War, then we have the epic Civil War battles and stuff, but really what it's about. 15:37:18 --> 15:37:33 Joseph Kelly: is about Reconstruction, and it's designed… Dixon explains this, you know, he says it openly, the purpose is to persuade Northern white people about the disaster of Reconstruction, how bad it was when we let Black people. 15:37:33 --> 15:37:49 Joseph Kelly: participate in the democracy. So the central narrative, of course, is that narrative that was established in the 1820s of white people are going to get replaced by black people if we let them participate in the democracy. 15:37:49 --> 15:38:04 Joseph Kelly: As soon as they get power, they're gonna kill the white men, and they're gonna rape the white women. That's what happens when you give Black people power. That's the central narrative of a Klansman, it's a central narrative of Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation comes out in 1915. 15:38:04 --> 15:38:08 Joseph Kelly: And then, of course, Margaret Mitchell. 15:38:08 --> 15:38:11 Joseph Kelly: takes up the torch for the next generation. 15:38:11 --> 15:38:13 Francesca Rheannon: Margaret Mitchell. 15:38:12 --> 15:38:23 Joseph Kelly: Yes, that becomes the central, yeah, that's the central narrative of Gone with the Wind, is the disaster that is reconstruction, right? 15:38:14 --> 15:38:17 Francesca Rheannon: Oh, yeah. Yes, exactly. 15:38:17 --> 15:38:19 Francesca Rheannon: Yeah, I'm… 15:38:19 --> 15:38:20 Francesca Rheannon: Okay. 15:38:23 --> 15:38:30 Francesca Rheannon: Right. I mean, just parenthetically, I was thinking about, yeah, a different person. 15:38:25 --> 15:38:32 Joseph Kelly: Yeah, and it hinges. 10 minutes ago, that's where this started, was with Gone with the Wind. 15:38:30 --> 15:38:53 Francesca Rheannon: Yeah, no. So one of the most interesting things that I see. You know, I read this book obviously through the lens of the present day. I can't help but do so. And what's so interesting is how these themes come up again and again and again. I mean, you just mentioned replacement. Of course we know the. 15:38:41 --> 15:38:42 Joseph Kelly: Yes. 15:38:53 --> 15:39:03 Francesca Rheannon: the, the Tiki Torch guys of, uh, Charlottesville talking about, uh, white, you know, the replacement theory. 15:39:01 --> 15:39:06 Joseph Kelly: Right. You will not replace us, I think. Wasn't that the Chan, right? Yeah. 15:39:03 --> 15:39:19 Francesca Rheannon: Exactly. They also said Jews will not replace us. It's another part of that. But also bring in this whole idea of what today is being called masculinism. 15:39:08 --> 15:39:10 Joseph Kelly: Oh, that, yeah, yeah, yeah. 15:39:19 --> 15:39:35 Francesca Rheannon: But back then was this whole kind of sexual panic, how this replacement theory was tied to, you know, panic about white women's innocence being. 15:39:35 --> 15:39:48 Francesca Rheannon: attacked by Black people, of course, Black men, of course. So, um, draw out how this… this is part of the white lie, and how is it, and how do we see it happening today? 15:39:48 --> 15:40:01 Joseph Kelly: Yeah, well, you know, in the beginning of the book, I say I'm not talking about contemporary times, even though I'm borrowing heavily from those writers who obviously are. 15:40:01 --> 15:40:14 Joseph Kelly: talking, like, Madeleine Albright's Fascism, a Warning, you know? I think it's a great book. And that whole genre, uh, has certainly influenced my thinking. Um, but every historian is writing about. 15:40:14 --> 15:40:20 Joseph Kelly: present times, whether they own up to it or not. And in the book, you know, I want to… 15:40:20 --> 15:40:23 Joseph Kelly: be as as. 15:40:23 --> 15:40:30 Joseph Kelly: you know, not to discuss contemporary events, because I want the history to stand for itself, but I certainly expect people. 15:40:30 --> 15:40:47 Joseph Kelly: to look at that history, and they themselves apply it to contemporary events. So for your listeners, I feel, you know, licensed to go ahead and do what I say I will not do in the book. You know, we have J.D. Vance. 15:40:44 --> 15:40:45 Francesca Rheannon: Okay. 15:40:48 --> 15:40:53 Joseph Kelly: And Donald Trump saying, "Somalians, we're going to do this. 15:40:53 --> 15:40:59 Joseph Kelly: are killing your pets and eating them. Or was it Haitians? I think it was Somalians. 15:40:58 --> 15:41:00 Francesca Rheannon: No, no, Haitians. 15:40:59 --> 15:41:19 Joseph Kelly: It was Haitians. It was Haitians. We have J.D. Vance saying, basically, that the real Americans are what he calls the heritage Americans. And those are the ones whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents are buried in the cemetery in Kentucky, right? Those people who can claim. Now, that repudiates the. 15:41:00 --> 15:41:02 Francesca Rheannon: Patience, right. 15:41:02 --> 15:41:04 Francesca Rheannon: Thank you. 15:41:19 --> 15:41:26 Joseph Kelly: 14th Amendment, of course, which says anyone who's born here is as much an American as J.D. Vance is. 15:41:26 --> 15:41:36 Joseph Kelly: that, that notion of heritage American, uh, is, you know, always very quickly elides into. 15:41:36 --> 15:41:46 Joseph Kelly: white supremacy, you know. Technically, you would say, okay, Black Americans have been here as long as white Americans have, right? So they have just as good a claim. But somehow, that's… that's… 15:41:46 --> 15:42:02 Joseph Kelly: Gonna erode, and certainly it's a way of bludgeoning immigrant families, right? That's how it was used in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s against the Irish. To be a true American, your family had to have been here before the Irish got here. 15:42:02 --> 15:42:05 Joseph Kelly: Um, so, uh… 15:42:05 --> 15:42:21 Joseph Kelly: You know, the application or the resurgence of these ideas, I mean, what we're seeing is history repeating itself. I'm tempted to say as farce, except so many people are getting hurt by it, that to use the word farce, I think. 15:42:21 --> 15:42:32 Joseph Kelly: would, would be too, you know, would, uh, undermine or, or, or, uh, ignore the suffering, the real suffering that is being imposed in the United States today. 15:42:32 --> 15:42:47 Joseph Kelly: But we do see, we are in the midst of an ideological battle between people who believe all men are created equal, all people are created equal, and people who do not believe it. And that's where we are. 15:42:47 --> 15:42:49 Joseph Kelly: Couple generations. 15:42:49 --> 15:42:52 Joseph Kelly: We have been sort of lulled. 15:42:52 --> 15:42:58 Joseph Kelly: I think it's, you know, since the mid-60s, the early 70s, maybe, with the busing, uh… 15:42:58 --> 15:43:04 Joseph Kelly: uh, you know, controversies in my own youth. You know, my childhood is when I last saw. 15:43:04 --> 15:43:05 Joseph Kelly: these… 15:43:05 --> 15:43:17 Joseph Kelly: conflicts bubbling up to the surface and really making you wonder who's going to win, right? And, you know, the fights to establish equal rights in the South, which were never fully won. 15:43:11 --> 15:43:12 Francesca Rheannon: Mmhm. 15:43:19 --> 15:43:22 Joseph Kelly: But, certainly, things were better. 15:43:22 --> 15:43:31 Joseph Kelly: in the 1990s and the 2000s than they were in the 1950s and the 1960s for people of color in the United States. 15:43:31 --> 15:43:33 Joseph Kelly: No. 15:43:33 --> 15:43:46 Joseph Kelly: Now, we see we take two steps forward and one step back, right? And we're definitely within a generation now that has to contend with that one step back. 15:43:46 --> 15:43:57 Francesca Rheannon: And and so again, to the kind of the racial manufactured racial sexual panic, how that's been used, because. 15:43:46 --> 15:43:48 Joseph Kelly: I've got… 15:43:54 --> 15:43:55 Joseph Kelly: Hmm. Okay. 15:43:57 --> 15:44:15 Francesca Rheannon: you tell another story in the book, which is kind of the story of the road not taken, that is a populist story. And by the way, when I was a history major at the University of Wisconsin in the great days of George Mosse and other great historians. 15:44:15 --> 15:44:30 Francesca Rheannon: I was most interested in this time of reconstruction and Populism, because it really was a time when we could have taken a different road, and yet that road was undermined and eventually destroyed. 15:44:30 --> 15:44:47 Francesca Rheannon: by this kind of divide and conquer, how racial, economic, and sexual anxieties get politically weaponized against class-based coalitions. So I wonder if you could talk a bit about that and, you know, maybe just. 15:44:47 --> 15:44:51 Francesca Rheannon: lightly gloss over the connections to today. 15:44:50 --> 15:44:55 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. Well, you know, replacement theory. 15:44:56 --> 15:45:07 Joseph Kelly: almost always boils down to race, even though racial ideas are spread over class differences. 15:45:07 --> 15:45:23 Joseph Kelly: Right? So we end up, or not we, you know, people who are in fear of being replaced tend to be the people who are at the upper side of economic society, political power. 15:45:23 --> 15:45:37 Joseph Kelly: In the United States, they're white people, right? As we said, who gets to be counted as white is always contested. Are Hispanic people white today? Are they not white? You know, we're in that… 15:45:37 --> 15:45:47 Joseph Kelly: You know, those same arguments were made about the Irish and the Germans and the Italians, and then the Jews in the early 20th century, right? 15:45:47 --> 15:45:48 Joseph Kelly: But… 15:45:48 --> 15:45:53 Joseph Kelly: That fear of the race being replaced. 15:45:53 --> 15:45:59 Joseph Kelly: is most visceral when it's experienced as a sexual anxiety. 15:45:59 --> 15:46:08 Joseph Kelly: When people who are talking about getting replaced, you let them talk for a little bit, and they're always going to end up in that spot where the fear. 15:46:08 --> 15:46:15 Joseph Kelly: is that those other people who are not real Americans are gonna end up. 15:46:15 --> 15:46:17 Joseph Kelly: In bed with my wife. 15:46:17 --> 15:46:32 Joseph Kelly: Or they're going to marry my daughter and they're going to have kids. And my grandkids are not going to be like me. They're going to be like those other people who are not real Americans. So it always, always gets expressed. 15:46:33 --> 15:46:38 Joseph Kelly: Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but as this sexual anxiety. 15:46:38 --> 15:46:53 Joseph Kelly: That's what we see really motivating people in today's, you know, on the far right today is not the fear that their dog is gonna get kidnapped by Haitians and eaten. 15:46:53 --> 15:47:08 Joseph Kelly: It's the fear that these hordes of people coming in are rapists, right? That's the thing that Donald Trump comes back to all the time. We need a wall at the southern border to keep the racists out. 15:47:07 --> 15:47:10 Francesca Rheannon: Keep the rap, keep the raping. 15:47:08 --> 15:47:11 Joseph Kelly: I'm the rapist, the rapist. 15:47:11 --> 15:47:12 Francesca Rheannon: Say it again. 15:47:11 --> 15:47:21 Joseph Kelly: to keep the people who are not racist, right? We want to keep the country safe for racists who, yeah. 15:47:19 --> 15:47:26 Francesca Rheannon: Which is, of course, so ironic, because he's a rapist himself. Adjudicated. 15:47:21 --> 15:47:22 Joseph Kelly: Yes. 15:47:24 --> 15:47:44 Joseph Kelly: Oh my god, the irony is unbelievable, right? Yeah, I mean, just as E.M. Foster says, only connect. Make the connection. Come on. You're… you are the boogeyman you fear. You know, that's… that's almost always true, too. Who are the people committing sexual crimes? 15:47:44 --> 15:47:51 Joseph Kelly: in the antebellum South, it's the white owners of Black women, you know? It's not Black men. 15:47:51 --> 15:48:07 Joseph Kelly: committing crimes against white women. And then, of course, after the Civil War, that's what, you know, the great Ida B. Wells, you know, spends her career trying to tell the truth about lynching. And, you know, the central narrative of lynching is this is the only way we can. 15:48:07 --> 15:48:16 Joseph Kelly: control the lust of Black men. Since we don't have slavery anymore, we have to have extrajudicial violence in order to. 15:48:16 --> 15:48:21 Joseph Kelly: make them too frightened to rape white women. And… 15:48:21 --> 15:48:37 Joseph Kelly: you know, what gets told over and over again by the Black press, and Ida B. Wells is probably the, you know, the pioneer and the champion of this, is to say, you know, white women have sex with Black men because they want to have sex with Black men. But of course, if you say that. 15:48:37 --> 15:48:44 Joseph Kelly: in the South in the 1880s, as Ida B. Wells did. 15:48:44 --> 15:48:52 Joseph Kelly: then you're gonna get lynched. And when she published that in a newspaper in Memphis, the newspaper that she owned, uh… 15:48:52 --> 15:48:55 Joseph Kelly: The, uh… you know, the… 15:48:55 --> 15:49:13 Joseph Kelly: mainstream commercial white folks, newspapers, elites, down to plain folks of Memphis, um, they declared that they needed to lynch her. They thought the editorial was actually written by a man, so what they demanded was that he get tied to a post. 15:49:13 --> 15:49:28 Joseph Kelly: in the middle of Main Street, and get branded on the forehead and castrated in front of a public crowd. Once they found out it was Ida Wells who wrote it, you know, she was told that she better stay in exile. She happened to be in New York City when it was. 15:49:28 --> 15:49:47 Joseph Kelly: when the editorial was published, telling the truth about interracial sex. And she essentially was then in exile from the American South for the rest of her life. She did make a couple brave journeys down South, one of which I recount in the conclusion to the book. 15:49:47 --> 15:49:53 Joseph Kelly: in regard to the Elaine Massacre after World War I in Arkansas. 15:49:53 --> 15:50:03 Joseph Kelly: you know, one of the more horrific, um, pogroms that take place in American history. Um, but, uh… 15:50:03 --> 15:50:06 Joseph Kelly: Yeah, that this… 15:50:06 --> 15:50:13 Joseph Kelly: This sexual fear, this visceral reaction to replacement is. 15:50:14 --> 15:50:18 Joseph Kelly: most effectively deployed as a sexual fear. 15:50:17 --> 15:50:19 Francesca Rheannon: Yeah. 15:50:19 --> 15:50:34 Francesca Rheannon: Now, another connection that you make is that American imperialism and domestic white supremacy actually reinforced one another. How did overseas empire change the way Americans thought about democracy itself? 15:50:35 --> 15:50:48 Joseph Kelly: Yeah. Yeah, and this is a really big story, too. So this is, you know, the Spanish-American War. The buildup is in the mid-1890s, the sinking of the Maine. 15:50:48 --> 15:50:52 Joseph Kelly: February 1898, and then the subsequent. 15:50:52 --> 15:51:07 Joseph Kelly: Newspaper coverage, et cetera. This is the end of the 19th century. This is kind of, you know, the transition between the 19th and 20th century. For historians, very convenient that the American empire, you know, comes into existence. 15:51:07 --> 15:51:11 Joseph Kelly: at the end of the century. So, um… 15:51:12 --> 15:51:29 Joseph Kelly: The justification for going into Cuba is actually a liberation story. And it's actually written, Congress writes it into law that the reason we're invading Cuba is to liberate the Cubans and not to make Cuba a dominion. 15:51:29 --> 15:51:42 Joseph Kelly: The Philippines is not really even on anyone's agenda at the time. You know, it's part of the last remnant of the Spanish Empire, but we're not thinking about it until Admiral Dewey sinks. 15:51:42 --> 15:51:53 Joseph Kelly: the Spanish fleet in Manila Harbor, and all of a sudden, we've won the war in the Pacific, right? And everyone starts saying, where are the Philippines, and what are they, right? 15:51:53 --> 15:51:57 Joseph Kelly: the Cubans get stabbed in the back, the… the Filipinos… 15:51:58 --> 15:52:08 Joseph Kelly: were never really promised that we were there to liberate, so it's less of a stab in the back, but what happens as a result of the Spanish-American War is that. 15:52:08 --> 15:52:24 Joseph Kelly: we really take dominion over these old possessions of the Spanish Empire. Now, there's no doubt the Spanish were horrible, and it was the right thing to do to end their colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. 15:52:24 --> 15:52:29 Joseph Kelly: But it was not the right thing to do to replace them, and. 15:52:29 --> 15:52:46 Joseph Kelly: We do replace them, and we replace them because of this notion of the white man's burden. That phrase actually comes from a poem written by Rudyard Kipling, an old veteran of the British Empire, who sees, who is enamored of what comes to be called the Anglo Alliance. 15:52:46 --> 15:53:01 Joseph Kelly: between the Brits and the Americans, right? The Anglos need to take over the world, because they are the superior race, and they're going to be the benign rulers of these benighted, backward, primitive peoples around the world. 15:53:01 --> 15:53:19 Joseph Kelly: So we try to impose this on the Philippines, on Cuba. Cuba, we set up puppet governments, and it's a little more complicated how we manipulate Cuba, but we still see the consequence of it today in the sorry state that Cuba is in, right off the shores of Florida. 15:53:19 --> 15:53:24 Joseph Kelly: Uh, the Philippines is even a more horrific story, because. 15:53:24 --> 15:53:28 Joseph Kelly: Um, the… once we kick the Spanish out. 15:53:28 --> 15:53:41 Joseph Kelly: then we start fighting the Filipino nationalists. Uh, you know, some people describe this as the earlier-day Vietnam. You know, those of your listeners who are old enough to remember Vietnam. 15:53:41 --> 15:53:51 Joseph Kelly: the same… many of the same themes that we saw in Vietnam were… were initiated in the Philippines. Um, what we did there was horrific. Uh… 15:53:51 --> 15:54:08 Joseph Kelly: I mean, we tortured people, we burned down villages, we killed women and children as well as men. We put hundreds of thousands of people into concentration camps. The estimates, I mean, they vary, but the estimates are that hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died as a result. 15:54:08 --> 15:54:18 Joseph Kelly: of our military intervention. Now, they didn't… most of those did not die in battle. Most of those died as a result of our pacification of the islands. 15:54:18 --> 15:54:33 Joseph Kelly: So this is a huge controversy in the United States. It's a moment of great soul searching and a moment of great conflict where people are arguing, what is the identity of America? 15:54:34 --> 15:54:49 Joseph Kelly: are we an empire, or are we a democracy? And, uh, the people arguing for democracy, people like Mark Twain, ironically enough, people like Andrew Carnegie, you know, one of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. 15:54:49 --> 15:54:59 Joseph Kelly: Um, politics makes strange bedfellows. But, uh, they… they lose, right? And America becomes an empire. And we absorb… 15:54:59 --> 15:55:06 Joseph Kelly: millions of people who are not citizens, but are under the jurisdiction of the United States. 15:55:06 --> 15:55:18 Joseph Kelly: We already have a model for how to treat these people. The model is how we treat Black people in the Jim Crow South, right? Those are people subject to the authority. 15:55:18 --> 15:55:24 Joseph Kelly: of the states in which they live. Not really the United States. The United States abrogates. 15:55:24 --> 15:55:26 Joseph Kelly: any responsibility. 15:55:26 --> 15:55:38 Joseph Kelly: for Black people in the South. Uh, they… they are subjects of the states. Um, but obviously, they are not participating. They have… they have… there's no… 15:55:38 --> 15:55:52 Joseph Kelly: consent of the governed among them, there's no consent of the governed among the Filipinos, there's no consent of the governed among the Cubans, the Puerto Ricans, etc. So the analogy is very, very clear. 15:55:52 --> 15:56:09 Joseph Kelly: And we take the lessons learned in the American South and apply them elsewhere. So we see the soldiers in the Philippines beginning to use the vocabulary and the methods that are used to pacify black populations in the American South. 15:56:09 --> 15:56:15 Joseph Kelly: Soldiers from the North, whose parents or grandparents fought to end slavery. 15:56:15 --> 15:56:16 Joseph Kelly: or… 15:56:16 --> 15:56:18 Joseph Kelly: Learning… 15:56:18 --> 15:56:24 Joseph Kelly: The methods of oppression. 15:56:24 --> 15:56:30 Joseph Kelly: that were perfected in the American South, and they're applying it to the Filipinos. 15:56:30 --> 15:56:33 Francesca Rheannon: Well… 15:56:33 --> 15:56:51 Francesca Rheannon: Joseph Kelly, in this book, The Biggest Lie, it's prehistory of American fascism, prehistory, so it's 1818 to 1915. You end it before the rise of European fascism, and you argue that the American story exhibits. 15:56:51 --> 15:57:08 Francesca Rheannon: 7 characteristics, 7 out of 9 characteristics of fascism, and if I can just list them, tribal feeling, victimhood, fear of replacement, loss of faith in ordinary politics, a purity impulse. 15:57:08 --> 15:57:22 Francesca Rheannon: a belief that violence is beautiful and manly, J.D. Vance again, and the conviction of the tribe's absolute right to rule others. But there are two missing ingredients, devotion to a single national chief. 15:57:22 --> 15:57:36 Francesca Rheannon: embodying the group's destiny, and the belief that the chief's instincts trump reason, literally trump reason, did not fully materialize then. Have they now? 15:57:36 --> 15:57:48 Joseph Kelly: This is something that I would certainly want people to come to their own conclusions, but my belief is yeah. And that's how I got started writing this book. 15:57:48 --> 15:58:03 Joseph Kelly: It was mind boggling to me watching what happened in what had been called in American political discourse in 2020, the big lie. The big lie, of course, was that Trump lost the election, right? And I saw. 15:58:03 --> 15:58:06 Joseph Kelly: Republicans, for whom I had… 15:58:06 --> 15:58:16 Joseph Kelly: some great respect, some grudging respect, some very little respect, but at least I didn't think they were, they were, they were, you know, consummate liars. Um… 15:58:16 --> 15:58:18 Joseph Kelly: Go from… 15:58:18 --> 15:58:34 Joseph Kelly: Saying, no, clearly Biden won the election. You've got to stop saying this to saying, well, what's really the problem is that the election is uncertain in people's minds. Of course, it was uncertain in people's minds because people were telling lies about it. 15:58:34 --> 15:58:45 Joseph Kelly: Um, to finally where we get to, is that the election was stolen. Uh, you know, the poster child for this, for me, is my own senator, Lindsey Graham. 15:58:45 --> 15:58:53 Joseph Kelly: You know, and God knows what Tim Scott, how he sleeps at night, I don't know. But Lindsey Graham, who. 15:58:54 --> 15:59:10 Joseph Kelly: Ends up now being, you know, the, you know, who was a great critic of Trump and who originally said Trump lost the election and decried what happened on January 6th. And now is the great ballyhoeing, you know, more MAGA than the MAGA. 15:59:10 --> 15:59:26 Joseph Kelly: It's, watching that happen was mind boggling to me. I mean, just as an intellectual curiosity, let alone a terrifying emotional experience, how could people be telling that lie? What was, you know, what was going on? 15:59:26 --> 15:59:40 Joseph Kelly: So, that was the original conception for it, and what I discovered in my research is, and I ended up, you know, not really writing about this, I'm now writing a book about the 20s and 30s, where this will come up. 15:59:40 --> 15:59:42 Joseph Kelly: But, um… 15:59:42 --> 15:59:43 Joseph Kelly: Like. 15:59:43 --> 15:59:48 Joseph Kelly: Absolutely important. Sort of the the the thing that triggers. 15:59:46 --> 15:59:47 Francesca Rheannon: Oh. 15:59:48 --> 15:59:53 Joseph Kelly: a society to become fascist is actually the lie. People have to be… 15:59:53 --> 15:59:58 Joseph Kelly: Telling a lie and pretending to believe it, and through that act. 15:59:58 --> 16:00:10 Joseph Kelly: Through that act, they are pledging their fealty to the leader, and by pledging fealty to the leader, pledging their loyalty to the tribe. 16:00:10 --> 16:00:11 Francesca Rheannon: Mm-hmm. 16:00:10 --> 16:00:23 Joseph Kelly: Right? It doesn't matter what's right, it doesn't matter what's true, what's most important is my loyalty to the tribe. And, um, so there's always some triggering lie that begins with people. 16:00:23 --> 16:00:40 Joseph Kelly: telling it as a deliberate lie, and pretending to believe it, and then eventually, of course, it's told so long that people believe it. Um, for the French, this was the Dreyfus affair. The fact, you know, the notion, despite all evidence, that Dreyfus was guilty of. 16:00:40 --> 16:00:56 Joseph Kelly: sabotage, you know, the, um, you know, the officer in the Army who was charged with spying, and then it became, you know, drip by drip by drip, it became obvious that he was set up, that he was framed, that none of this was true, and yet. 16:00:56 --> 16:01:08 Joseph Kelly: to… the French fascists would still deliberately insist on his guilt, even though all reason says he's not. Um, for Mussolini. 16:01:08 --> 16:01:21 Joseph Kelly: It was the betrayal at Caporetto, the Battle of Caporetto in World War I, which almost knocked Italy out of the war, an invasion with the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians, uh, you know. 16:01:21 --> 16:01:36 Joseph Kelly: pour across the lines in northern Italy, and only gets stopped at the river Piave. And he blames it on the communists, although he began himself as a communist, but he blames it on the communists. 16:01:36 --> 16:01:52 Joseph Kelly: this great debacle. For Germany, of course, it's the lie that they were going to win the war, that the army was winning the war, and then they got stabbed in the back by the Jews on the home front. And those lies, you need to have that lie. 16:01:53 --> 16:01:56 Joseph Kelly: In order to establish. 16:01:56 --> 16:02:10 Joseph Kelly: that, uh, a fascist regime. So, this explains why there is the insistence, even today, that Biden lost the election, right? No… nobody looks at the evidence. 16:02:06 --> 16:02:07 Francesca Rheannon: Mm-hmm. 16:02:10 --> 16:02:17 Joseph Kelly: at all, and comes to that conclusion. But the refusal to look at the evidence is a pledge of loyalty. 16:02:17 --> 16:02:35 Joseph Kelly: So that's what got me started thinking about this entire project. And I started wondering, how did Americans learn to lie? And I was looking, of course, at the beginning of what many people thought is the beginning of American fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. 16:02:35 --> 16:02:44 Joseph Kelly: And I wanted to start telling that story, the battle between fascists and liberal Democrats in the 20s and 30s. 16:02:44 --> 16:03:02 Joseph Kelly: And the first chapter was gonna be how America learned to lie, but I ended up writing backwards rather than forwards from World War I, because the story of how we learned to lie in the first place was so fascinating to me. And I don't think has been told in the way that I'm telling it. 16:03:02 --> 16:03:04 Joseph Kelly: Uh, people who have… 16:03:05 --> 16:03:21 Joseph Kelly: At least, you know, briefly sort of suggested that the American South was a experiment in fascism, that the Americans invented it. It was not a European invention, this disease of democracy. And that's what fascism is. It's a corruption of democracy. 16:03:21 --> 16:03:28 Joseph Kelly: It began with the great democracy of the United States. That's where the corruption began. 16:03:28 --> 16:03:38 Joseph Kelly: so it's not entirely original, but I don't think anybody has told the story the way I've told it, which is why I ended up writing backwards, because I felt like it had to be… 16:03:38 --> 16:03:47 Joseph Kelly: we had to look at this, at our own past, and me as a Southern historian, uh… I think we have to own up to… 16:03:47 --> 16:04:03 Joseph Kelly: what the history of the South really is, really was. Now, of course, this is, you know, part of the whole revision of Southern history that's taken place in the last 50, 60 years, but it's telling it in a way that I think makes it. 16:04:03 --> 16:04:06 Joseph Kelly: Very relevant to today. 16:04:05 --> 16:04:10 Francesca Rheannon: Absolutely very relevant today. I've always felt. 16:04:10 --> 16:04:39 Francesca Rheannon: that America's original sin was well, 1st genocide and then slavery. And these are basic. You know, people talk about racial capitalism and settler colonialism. I mean, these are all really linked to racial ideas and the lie of racism. And I look forward to talking with you about your next book. Hopefully, I'll still have this show. It's now in its 22nd year. So I've got. 16:04:37 --> 16:04:38 Joseph Kelly: Okay. 16:04:39 --> 16:04:52 Francesca Rheannon: good hopes for the future. It's just been great to talk with you, Joseph Kelly. This is, um, really a fascinating book, The Biggest Lie. I don't have the subtitle in front of me, but I know it has to do with, um. 16:04:40 --> 16:04:42 Joseph Kelly: Okay. 16:04:51 --> 16:04:57 Joseph Kelly: The prehistory of American fascism, 1818 to 1915. 16:04:56 --> 16:05:02 Francesca Rheannon: The Prehistory of American Fascism, America 1818. 16:05:02 --> 16:05:05 Francesca Rheannon: 1818 to 1915. 16:05:04 --> 16:05:12 Joseph Kelly: That's right. I end with the Birth of a Nation as a film, and it's, you know… 16:05:12 --> 16:05:15 Joseph Kelly: Huge success across the whole country. 16:05:14 --> 16:05:32 Francesca Rheannon: Yeah. It's just been great to talk with you. Thank you so much. My hope is that just as fascism has reared its ugly head over and over again, we will be able to vanquish it the way we did in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. 16:05:32 --> 16:05:42 Francesca Rheannon: And before that, in the 1930s, with, you know, the rise of FDR and the union movement. Thank you so much. 16:05:41 --> 16:05:45 Joseph Kelly: We shall. We shall overcome, Francesca. 16:05:44 --> 16:05:51 Francesca Rheannon: From your mouth to God's ear. Take care, then. It was just great to talk with you. Thank you. 16:05:50 --> 16:05:52 Joseph Kelly: Thank you.