Know Nothing Malarkey
“We are all sufferers from history,
but the paranoid is a double sufferer,
since he is afflicted not only by the real world,
with the rest of us,
but by his fantasies as well.”
Richard Hofstadter
“One can’t possibly make sense of [current events]
unless you know something about nativism.
That requires you to go back in time to the Know Nothings.
You have to realize the context is different,
but the themes are consistent.
The actors are still the same, but with different names.”
Christopher Phillips,
Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati
If you were to believe some folks of that era, they were the Wile E. Coyote of their times – roughly 1831 to 1878.
Cunning, devious and, because they were slowly losing the territories and power their predecessors once controlled, Bartolomeo Alberto Cappallari and Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti were anxious to gobble-up a chunk of the American heartland and reestablish their failing kingdom.
Of course, the fact that they were almost five-thousand miles from the lands they allegedly coveted didn’t stop some American rabblerousers from repeating the lie that they were sending legions of immigrants to pave their way into power.
In 1835, Samuel F. B. Morse – he of “What hath God wrought!” – published the two-volume collection of essays – Foreign Conspiracies Against the Liberties of the United States and Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration. [Try saying that in one breath.]
According to the man of dot-dot-dash-dash, the two monarchs – Popes Gregory XVI (1831–1846) and Pius IX (1846–1878) - were so terrified of America’s democratic institutions that they conspired to flood the United States with their agents, disguised as immigrants, allowing them eventually to seize control and undo a nation and democracy already being torn apart by North-South and Slave-Free issues:
“You are marked for their prey, not by foreign bayonets,
but by weapons surer of effecting the conquest of liberty
than all the munitions of physical combat
in the military or naval storehouses of Europe.”
Reflecting the nativism and anti-Catholic attitudes of the 1830s, America could be saved only by stopping the flow of immigrants, Morse argued.
The following year saw the publication of Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, As Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice, and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hotel DieuNnunnery at Montreal - one of history’s most salacious, prurient and fully fabricated works of religious bigotry.
With “revelations” of “criminal intercourse” between priests and nuns of the Montreal Hotel Dieu designed to titillate a populous steeped in Victorian morality, the Awful Discourse fueled nativist prejudices that had been gathering steam against immigrants from the Catholic countries of Europe who were flooding the Eastern Seaboard and threatening to create the first sizable non-Protestant group in American history.
Maria’s mother contended that - as a child and after her head was penetrated by a slate pencil - her daughter was unable to distinguish between right and wrong and had become a Jezebel, ultimately confined to a Catholic asylum in Montreal. Although Awful Discourse was clearly the product of her imagination, Monk’s lover, William Hoyt, and nativists Theodore Dwight and J.J. Slocum, and the anti-slavery advocate and Protestant minister George Bourne were instrumental in its popularization – if not in its actual writing
The 1829 passage of England’s Catholic Emancipation Act had already given rise to a whole new genre of anti-Catholic books, pamphlets and magazines in England and their importation into the States. American authors quickly recognized the value of anti-Catholic screeds. The Protestant newspaper was launched in New York, quickly followed by the appearance of the New York Protestant Association and the 1834 publication of A Master Key to Popery and Female Convents: Secrets of Nunneries Disclosed
Threats of the “Jesuitical abomination” of popery were heralded by The Downfall of Babylon, a weekly publication in Philadelphia, and the American Protestant Vindicator, published biweekly in New York. The New York Protestant Association became the Protestant Reformation Society and flooded the country with propagandist literature and lecturing agents.
Proponents of America’s “Manifest Destiny” insisted that Gregory XVI was anxious to move the Vatican out of decadent Italy and resettle in the Mississippi Valley. In his Plea for the West (1835) Rev. Lyman Beecher echoed the arguments of the publications of the American Home Mission Society that Gregory, in collusion European monarchs anxious to protect their own thrones in the face of rising liberalism, was flooding America with faithful immigrants, who would allow him to seize control and establish despotism and Romanism
[During first half of the Nineteen Century and the unification of Italy (1859-1870), the papal states were reduced to the territory of Lazio surrounding Rome. In 1870, St. Peter’s Basilica and the papal residence became the last visage of papal temporal power.]
Significant nativist-bred anti-Catholicism and a combative Catholic response arose with the American Bible Society announcement that it would place a copy of the Bible – the King James version - in every American classroom and local and state boards of education began authorizing daily scripture readings. Many non-Catholics interpreted Catholic opposition as anti-education and anti-Christian.
Propaganda inspired by the Bible-reading controversy won the allegiance of middle class Protestant churchgoers, while sensualist and pornographic-esque Maria Monk-style stories appealed to the less affluent and semiliterate.
After lives were lost and churches and homes burned in New York and Philadelphia during anti-Catholiic riots, the Protestant Reformation Society, reinvented as the American Protestant Society, pledged to illuminate the “spiritual darkness” of popery with “Light and Love” and to “awaken Christian feeling and Christian action for the salvation of Romanists.”
Through it all, immigrants were portrayed as an enemy – threatening the integrity of political parties, disrupting time-honored (and Atlantic Ocean safeguarded) guarantees of isolation, and nurturing the fears of nativists.
Immigrants were perceived as threatening to corrupt the nation’s political parties, disrupting American isolation from Europe, lowering the living standards of native workers, impoverishing the nation with crime and by draining social services and education. In addition, in Boston, New York and other major cities, Catholics began to demand a share of school-taxes to fund their own institutions, giving rise to new conflicts. As a result, the arguments of nativists gained new appeal.
Boston’s foreign-born voting population increased by 195 percent in the first five years of the 1850s, while the number of native-born voters increased by only 15 percent, indicating a not-too-distant future in which recent and first-generation immigrants and Catholics would dominate the electorate.
The politically ambitious anti-Catholic Order of the Star-Spangled Banner drew its name from the 1814 Francis Scott Key poem that was recognized as the National Anthem by Woodrow Wilson in 1916. The OSSSB made its appearance in New York in 1849 – complete with secret handshakes, passwords and oaths. Within months, the fast- growing Order became the American Party, complete with members’ solemn oath to deny any knowledge of the organization:
[Do you] "solemnly . . . swear upon that sacred and Holy emblem before Almighty God, and these witnesses, that you will not divulge or make known to any person whatever, the nature of the questions I may ask you here, the names of the persons you may see here or that you know that such an organization is going on as such, whether you become a member or not!"
Candidates were required to pledge to elect only native-born citizens – to the exclusion of foreigners and Roman Catholics.
In its “Constitution and Laws” the American Party declared itself to be
“IN FAVOR OF the protection of American Mechanics against Foreign Pauper Labor. Foreigners having a residence in the country of 21 years before voting. Our present Free Schools System. Carrying out the laws of the State, as regarding sending back Foreign Paupers and Criminals.
OPPOSED TO Papal Aggression & Roman Catholicism. Foreigners holding office. Raising Foreign Military Companies in the United States. Nunneries and the Jesuits. To being taxed for the support of Foreign paupers millions of dollars yearly. To Foreign Orders in the U.S.
We are burdened with enormous taxes by foreigners. We are corrupted in the morals of our youth. We are interfered with in our government. We are forced into collisions with other nations. We are tampered with in our religion. We are injured in our labor. We are assailed in our freedom of speech.
Sworn to secrecy, members of the American Party were referred to as the “Know Nothings,” deriving their name from their standard reply to questions abut their rituals and mysteries: “I know nothing about it.”
In popular newspapers and journals of the time, Irish immigrants were frequently portrayed as and compared to apes – suggesting that this comparison is a generalizable tactic of oppression of Black Americans throughout history and of immigrant groups.
In fairness, it must be noted that – at least in the case of the May 1844 mob attack and destruction by fire of the St. Michael’s Church and the convent of the Sisters of Charity – some of the anti-Irish Catholic violence was actually the work of Irish Protestant immigrants.
In his 1710 essay on “Political Lying,” Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish satirist who would become an Anglican cleric and Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, observed:
Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.
Considering that natural disposition in many men to lie, and in multitudes to believe, I have been perplexed what to do with that maxim so frequent in every body's mouth, that truth will at last prevail. Here hath this island of ours, for the greatest part of twenty years, lain under the influence of such counsels and persons, whose principle and interest it was to corrupt our manners, blind our understanding, drain our wealth, and in time destroy our constitution both in church and state, and we at last were brought to the very brink of ruin; yet, by the means of perpetual misrepresentations, have never been able to distinguish between our enemies and friends.
Credit for the phrase – “Everything old is new again” – has been ascribed to Confucius, Churchill, Mark Twain, and more song writers than we can shake a stick at. But Know Nothing malarkey has never died:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people…..”
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
“Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”
“Some people call it an ‘invasion, It’s like an invasion.”
“There is a Muslim problem in the world and you and I know it.”
“We have a problem in this country; it’s called Muslims.”
“Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our country. Who knows who they are – some could be ISIS.”
“There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down, and that tells you something. It was well covered at the time.”