Philip Kadish is a professor of American Studies at Pace University in New York City, having previously taught at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Medgar Evers College. His research speciality has been the impact of scientific racism on U.S. culture. He received his PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He lives in New York City. His op-eds on the links between the American 19th century and contemporary politics and culture have appeared on CNN.com and NBC.com.

Q&A

How did you get the idea to write this book?

Back in 2008 there was a lot of discussion of old laws against interracial marriage, called “anti-miscegenation” laws, during the first presidential campaign of Barak Obama, whose parents marriage in Hawaii would have been illegal in 16 U.S. states at the time. When I looked into the origins of the word “miscegenation”-- which lent a scientific legitimacy to the notion that it was wrong to mix races based on the idea that races were essentially different species -- I was startled to learn that the term was coined not by scientists but instead by journalists in a hoax against Abraham Lincoln. Initially I assumed that this was a bizarre fluke, but years of further research revealed that it was part of a consistent pattern of manufacturing false “facts” backing up racist claims and bolstering racist laws and institutions stretching from the 1830s to the middle of the twentieth century.

I felt that the history of the Great White Hoax tradition, as I call it, could help the public understand how cynical manipulation of media, science, and entertainment have been used to foster white supremacism throughout our history and provide tools for understanding the similar practices occurring in today’s politics. I also felt that the outrageous stories of the racist con artists I profile could provide any entertaining means by which readers could understand the often slippery notion that race is socially constructed rather than biologically real

We lament the rise of dis- and misinformation in our daily politics but this is not a new phenomenon is it?

Lies and what psychologists call “motivated reasoning” are, of course, perennial features of human cultures, and spin has been a key component of political rhetoric since at least classical times. Disinformation, the tactical manufacture of false evidence of facts or events, has just as long a history in human warfare and politics. The key distinction for understanding the Great White Hoax is the difference between a false claim -- the easy to make untrue statements that in fact constitute the vast majority of our current “crisis of truth” today -- and the manufacture of false evidence, which takes much more effort.

Hoaxes involving the creation of false evidence to fool the public erupted into U.S. culture in the 1830s, what writer Edgar Allan Poe called “the epoch of the hoax.” They were deployed in political campaigns but also in public entertainments., P.T. Barnum was a famous hoxer and Edgar Allan Poe was the author of half a dozen hoaxes., They were used to goose newspaper sales, to foment prejudice, to support changes in law and policy, and as a means to a quick buck. Often simultaneously. The practice remained a regular feature of U.S. culture, particularly around race, for more than a century. My book recounts racist hoaxes against the presidential campaigns of not only Lincoln but also James Garfield, their deployment by John C. Calhoun to bolster slavery, their role in stoking the fires for the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882 and the racist 1924 Immigration Act. Their most common target was African Americans but they were also deployed against Irish Catholics and Native Americans in the 1830s, and against Jews and immigrants from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. Much of this “disinformation” was then absorbed as foundational “facts” by the nation’s scientific and historical authorities.

You write that before the 1830s religion was an effective force for keeping white supremacism at bay. Why?

The biblical account of creation -- that is, that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve and constitute an extended family possessed of the same abilities and due the same moral considerations -- did not begin to give way to until the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Until then all scientific speculation on human “races” and all justifications of unequal treatment of certain races had to work themselves around that biblical premise. Early American defenders of slavery like Thomas Jefferson from the “peculiar institution” as a “necessary evil,” temporarily economically necessary for the enrichment of American whites and the advancement of the nation but an “evil” nonetheless. Even John C. Calhoun’s 1837 rebranding of slavery as a “positive good” in that it would over centuries “civilize” Africans was in shaky ground while biblical creation held sway. Furthermore, the conversion of Black people and Native Americans to Christianity voided religious justifications of unequal treatment based on their “heathen” status.

Various Europeans iconoclasts had played with the idea that different types of humans were created separately, what was called polygenesis, but they were dismissed as heretics.Voltaire, for example. It was only in the context of American white society’s intense desire for a moral justification for racialized slavery that, in the 1830-50s, scientific theories of Polygenesis profiled in my book began to attract public acceptance, to the point that by the 1850s, before the arrival of Darwin, polygenesis was widely accepted among America’s educated classes North and South.

You mentioned the story of the origin of the term “miscegenation”. How did that hoax play out?

In 1864 two New York City journalists concocted an elaborate hoax against Abraham Lincoln during his mid-Civil War reelection campaign. Leveraging a longstanding proslavery claim that anti-slavery activists secretly favored taboo interracial marriage and procreation, the journalists published an anonymous pamphlet purportedly by an Abolitionist “revealing” that this charge was true and that Lincoln’s party planned to solve America’s “race problem” through a mass campaign of interracial marriage to create a new American race. The then current term for race mixing, amalgamation, was such a hot button issue that the hoaxers invented a new term, “miscegenation,” so as not to set off the suspicion of abolitionists. After managing to procure mild approval from some overly credulous abolitionists (but no Republican politicians) the hoaxers leaked their letters and the pamphlet to a Democratic congressman who ignited a scandal over the issue after denouncing the pamphlet in Congress. The hoaxers nursed their hoax along by impersonating their fictitious abolitionist in communications with newspapers and even Lincoln himself.

The pamphlet was never revealed as a hoax during the election, but battlefield victories saved Lincoln from this and other forms of Northern discontent. P.T. Barnum revealed the identities of the hoaxers only two years later, but the origin of the new word as a hoax was largely forgotten and it went on to become the preferred word for race mixing, one that carried scientific authority and the sense that races were distinct species. The word only faded from use after the Supreme Court decided in the Loving v. Virginia case that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.

What is the role of science in racism and how is it different now from say, 100 years ago?

The modern concept of race is a product of science and colonialism. The concept that the human race consists of types called races that are physiologically and cognitively distinct dates only to the 1770s when, shortly after Linnaeus devised his system of mapping species, genus, kingdom, etcetera a German scientist named Blumenbach proposed that humans consist of five distinct types. The concept of race caught on with European societies as those societies sought to justify their domination and exploitation of the people of their far flung colonial empires. “Scientific racism” boomed in European and American cultures in the mid-nineteenth century as science claimed to prove the inequality of races. It is this sort of “evidence” that many of the Great White Hoaxes manufactured to meet the cultural and commercial demands of their culture.

Beginning in the 1930s discoveries regarding DNA and the emergence of cultural anthropology led science to gradually challenge the idea of human races. By the mid-20th century the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust lead mainstream science around the world to declare race biologically meaningless and humanity definitively a single species. As science abandoned racism many white Americans began to abandon science, with implications today that extend beyond racism to climate change and anti-vaccine hysteria.