The Great White Hoax
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 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 Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Birth of a Nation, Henry Ford’s 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.