The Hoaxes:

1836: “Maria Monk Hoax, The Awful Disclosures”

Target: Catholic Immigrants

Claim: Conspiracy against American Protestants

Group of Protestant ministers in New York City forge a phony autobiography “revealing” sex crimes and murder in Catholic convents, exploit cognitively impaired young mother to present herself as an abused former nun escaped with the newborn child conceived after being raped by a priest who fled the convent to save her baby’s life. The book, The Awful Disclosures, fanned anti-Catholic prejudice during America’s first Nativist anti-immigrant movement and becomes the best selling book by an American for twenty years, despite being proven a fraud within two years of publication. The hoax combined European traditions of religious propganda with American commercial and publishing culture to generate a new phenomenon.

1840: Census Hoax

Target: African Americans

Claim: Racial Inferiority

Bungled collection of mental health in the 1840 U.S. Census seemingly shows that African Americans suffer skyrocketing “insanity”and “idiocy” outside of enslavement, and becomes an intentional hoax when Secretary of State John C. Calhoun ignores voluminous evidence that the census data is utterly false and publishes a rigged “investigation” attesting to its accuracy. The data was used in the shirt term to justify slavery and in the long t erm served as a foundational data set for scientific racism in the U.S. and Europe.

1856: The Polygenesis Hoax

Targets: Native Americans and African Americans

Faulty evidence that Africans and Native Americans are less intelligent than Europeans, based on measuring the brain cavity of skulls, is popularized by a combination of deceptive salesmanship, theatrical showmanship, false advertising, and the recruitment of a preeminent scientist with a phobia of African Americans makes the theory that perpetually unequal races sprang from separate divine creation, or “polygenesis,” the leading scientific theory in the U.S. before the publication of Darwin’s work on evolution. Theory used to justify enslavement of African Americans and extirpation of Native Americans.

1864: The Miscegenation Hoax

Target: African Americans

In an effort to discredit Abraham Lincoln and deny him reelection in the mid-Civil War 1864 presidential election, a pair of New York City journalists forged a fake pamphlet supposedly by an abolitionist that “revealed” that Lincoln and the Republicans planned, if reelected, to solve the nation’s “race problem” through a mass campaign of interracial sex and marriage. The elaborate media hoax dogged Lincoln up until election day and coined the term “miscegenation,” a new word for race mixing that carried a sense of scientific disapproval and tthat hat implied that races were different species. “Miscegenation” lent scientific credibility to racial segregation and are the source of the label “anti-miscegenation laws” for laws against interracial marriage.

1880: “The Chinese Letter” or “Morey” Hoax

Target: Chinese Immigrants

As an “October Surprise” against Republican presidential candidate James Garfield in the 1880 presdiential election, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee William Barnum, cousin to P.T. Barnum, concocts an elaborate media hoax employing a forged letter and “crisis actor” impersonators to smear Garfield with the false claim that he did NOT support banning Chinese immigration. The ensuing scandal, drawn out in legal hearings and a “flood the zone” news manipulation strategy, sparked riots including one in Denver, Colorado, that left one Chinese immigrant dead, many more badly injured, and their neighborhood in ashes. Hoax helps to nationalize animosity towards Chinese largely confined the western states and paves way for 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

1890s-1920s: Reconstruction and Lynching Culture Hoaxes

Target: African Americans

False charges against lynched African Americans in the South spawn misleading statistics on African American criminality justifying lynching culture and Jim Crow segregation. Exaggerated southern white accounts of African American criminality during Reconstruction and heroizing of the Ku Klux Klan become the basis of new national historical narrative through the Dunning School of academic historians, same claims used in novels and plays of Thomas Dixon that are then adapted into D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist film, The Birth of a Nation, in 1915 and the rebirth of the KKK as a respectable organization.

1910s-20s: Eugenics and Nordic Race Hoaxes

Racial eugenics popularized in the U.S. by leveraging support from wealthy donors and foundations and connections to major universities to spread poorly reasoned “scientific” studies. Intelligence tests based more on cultural assimilation than cognitive ability appear to show lower intelligence in new immigrant groups. Idea of a “Nordic” race (essentially northwest Europeans) as superior to other European races popularized by wildlife conservationist with no biological training. These all combine with “astroturf” political campaigns (fake grassroots organizations that are in fact funded adn run by wealthy interests) to help pass the 1924 Johnson Immigration Act severely limiting immigration of non-Nordic Europeans and banning Asians and Africans, as well as helping bring about lawsd for the involuntary sterilization of the “unfit,” directly influencing Adolph Hitler.

1940s-60s: Codeword Era

After open racism becomes socially disreputable after the war against the Nazis, and as science abandons belief in race as a meaningful biological category, U.S. race culture turns away from elaborate production of false racist evidence and towards coded political issues such as states’ rights,