When Donald Trump told a debate audience last September that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s cats and dogs, co-moderator David Muir, of ABC News, quickly pointed out that the claim was baseless. But as American studies professor Philip Kadish writes in The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America, the racism at the heart of Trump’s assertion is part of a long history of made-up political statements that bolster white supremacy and instill fear and loathing of people of color by white Americans.
Unsurprisingly, Black people have been the most frequent targets of such lies and distortions, but Kadish reports that Chinese and Irish immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and people with disabilities have also been on the receiving end of media falsehoods.
The book opens with a dastardly hoax designed to erode support for Republican presidential candidate James Garfield in 1880. The well-orchestrated plot emerged less than a month before the election, when a little-known publication called Truth published a photo of a handwritten letter, supposedly penned by Garfield, on its front page. It went viral.
The Great White Hoax: Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America
By Philip Kadish
The New Press, 368 pages
Publication date: June 24, 2025
The missive pledged that if elected, Garfield would help industrialists by allowing underpaid Chinese laborers to flood the market and suppress the wages of non-Asian workers. The fact that Garfield and the GOP already supported what would become the Chinese Exclusion Act was ignored. Instead, anti-Asian and anti-Garfield prejudice was stoked by media outlets that supported Democratic candidate Winfield Scott Hancock.
Garfield, for his part, immediately decried the letter as fake, and “a quickly convened court hearing provided expert and investigative evidence that the ‘Chinese letter’ was a forgery and the whole affair a ginned-up illusion,” Kadish writes.
Skeptics were unconvinced, and continued to ply the letter as proof of Garfield’s lack of suitability for public office—and they nearly prevailed. Kadish likens their efforts to “a multilayered chess strategy” and notes that the 1880 election was one of the tightest in U.S. history.
This near success made media manipulation a tried, true, and oft-repeated tactic. Nonetheless, Kadish writes that its roots go back to 1835, when a nineteen-year-old Canadian sex worker named Maria Monk sensationally claimed that she’d become pregnant by a Catholic priest, although the father was likely Protestant minister William K. Hoyt. “Hoyt,” he explains, “was aware that American white society was at that moment roiled by the nation’s first immigration crisis sparked by the recent influx of Catholic immigrants.” He further understood that as the nation’s “founders,” Protestants saw the newcomers as threatening to their cultural, economic, and political dominance.
The New Press
Hoyt seized the moment, and, eager to gain wealth and influence and deflect attention from his role in Monk’s pregnancy, he published a lurid “autobiography” using her name. To promote it, Kadish writes, Monk donned a nun’s habit and offered horrifying details of convent life: Babies that resulted from forced sexual liaisons between nuns and priests were strangled. Moreover, nuns who resisted the priests, or who refused to commit infanticide, were also killed.
Readers couldn’t get enough of the story, and Kadish writes that the book sold 300,000 copies before the start of the Civil War. Its success led to a burgeoning new enterprise: “convent captivity narratives.”
The upshot is that hucksters, including P.T. Barnum, saw that the American public had a seemingly unquenchable appetite for such materials and that they could make a buck by playing fast and loose with the facts. Moreover, as purveyors of hate disguised as entertainment, they built a foundation that remains strong two centuries later.
The Great White Hoax stresses that numerous cultural products and policies have served to protect white [and male] privilege. What’s more, whether they were concocted by clergy, filmmakers, doctors, politicians, novelists, or journalists, they are an integral part of the American story. Trump’s lies about cats and dogs, of course, fit squarely within this legacy. Small wonder that he, J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk are so adroit in their use.