A cornerstone of fascism is one big lie: that all men are not created equal. Yet when Americans of this belief suddenly goose-stepped down Main Street in the 1930s—so the story goes—fascism was a radical new European import. It was not. It didn’t come from abroad. Nor was it new or radical. Fascism was home-grown, planted in a barnyard in rural Maryland in 1818, against a backdrop of chattel slavery.
Ironically, the villainies of racism and hard-fought victories of Black liberation have over-shadowed this parallel story of fascism's rise in the United States. In The Biggest Lie, Joseph Kelly chronicles its infancy in the antebellum South; its perfection 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 herrenvolk or master-race.
Unreason, disinformation, lies, and the suppression of free speech—all hallmarks of fascism—paved every step of the journey. This is a violent, heartbreaking story, told via the people who lived it, both on the wrong and the right side of history. The book concludes with the birth of a countermovement, dedicated to what Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called “the free market of ideas.” Led by a group of unlikely heroes, modern liberalism heroically rose to snuff out fascism’s strains and steer the nation in its democratic century.
The Biggest Lie
By Joseph Kelly
For readers Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening and Rachel Maddow’s Prequel, a landmark work of narrative history tracing the roots of American fascism back to the Antebellum South.
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Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing (USA) | Pub date: March 2026 | Format: 234 x 153mm | Extent: 400 pages | Word Count: 120,000 words
About the Author
Joseph Kelly is a professor of literature and history at the College of Charleston. He is the author of two other books on American democracy: Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin and America's Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War. He also wrote a literary history of James Joyce, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon. He edits the popular Seagull Reader anthologies of stories, poems, plays, and essays. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
