“What is equality but stagnation?”
“All (members of a minority religion) and all persons … are…vile imposters, liars, villains, and cowardly cutthroats.”
No, that wasn’t Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene… it was…
– Thomas Whitney (Nativist, US Congressman from NY… who served from March 4, 1855, to March 3, 1857. Member of the American Party- Know-nothing Party.
I love how history tells us who we are… who we really are!
As James Baldwin told us in 1965, “History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”
Our history is filled with what fills our headlines regarding white supremacy and the newest revival of American hatred for “THEM” …Replacement Theory.
How many Americans know anything about or recall what they were taught in high school about The Nativists and/ or The Know Nothing Party? It’s the 1840s and 50s again but on the internet and with modern weapons, not single shot rifles.
The suspect in the most recent and horrible example of this reoccurrence in the Buffalo massacre, espoused what some pundits branded Replacement theory, which has been embraced by some right-wing politicians and commentators. But what, exactly is this “replacement theory”?
The New York Times (5/16/2022) has described it as “… the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace”, and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years. The fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.”
Yet, as usual, today’s journalists ignore our storied past while writing their stories. Is this any different from the mid 19th Century fight to maintain slavery, destroy Native Americans, and limit immigration to what we now call White Anglo Saxon Protestants from the UK (minus the Catholic Irish).
The usual dictionary definition of Nativism is simple: “a policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants” (Merriam- Webster), but who gets to define who is a native of America? When you use native as an adjective it turns out we now mean indigenous people. I love the irony of that.
And as for the Members of the Know Nothing party? They waved banners like this.
Officially the “Native American Party” prior to 1855, it then became the “American Party”. The Know Nothing party launched a nativist movement whose effects are still felt today in xenophobia to conspiracy theories. But it wasn’t the first…
In 1849, in the most cosmopolitan and diverse of settings, New York City, Charles B. Allen created an oath-bound secret society to protest the rise of Irish, Catholic, and German immigration into the United States.
At first a simple “local fellowship numbering no more than three dozen men, by 1852, it began to grow quickly, and leaders of the Order of United Americans (OUA) took notice. Many of their membership joined and its membership swelled “from under fifty to a thousand in three months.” ((David H. Bennett, The Party Of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement , 107.) ) Later that year, the two organizations joined, and hundreds of lodges were formed “all over the country with an estimated membership ranging up to a million or more.”
Those who joined promised to “vote for no one except native-born Protestants for public office” and those endorsed or nominated candidates in secret councils. Because their rules required them to say they “knew nothing” about the organization, the movement became known as the “Know Nothings”. (James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Oxford Press, 1988), 133.)
At its height in the 1850s, the party included more than 100 elected congressmen including Mr. Whitney, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians.
Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office.
They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like.
And… they were the first party to leverage economic concerns over immigration as a major part of their platform.
“The Know Nothings came out of what seemed to be a vacuum,” says Christopher Phillips, professor of history at University of Cincinnati. “It’s the failing Whig party and the faltering Democratic party and their inability to articulate, to the satisfaction of the great percentage of their electorate, answers to the problems that were associated with everyday life.”
In theory, the party died out in 1862, but during the early 1900s, growing numbers of United States citizens expressed sentiments of nativism. Nativism and the legacy of the Know Nothings has been apparent in policies aimed at each new wave of immigrants. Anti-immigration sentiment increased even more after World War I.
In 1912, the House Committee on Immigration debate over whether Italians could be considered “full-blooded Caucasians” and immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe were considered “biologically and culturally less intelligent.”
The immigration laws (or rather Anti-Immigration laws of 1924 and 1928 placed strict quotas all but eliminating those people from emigrating and cut off Asian Immigration where the previous Chinese Exclusion Act (1892) and Gentlemen’ Agreement in 1907 with Japan may have fallen short.
So here we are about 100 years after those infamous were passed and 57 years after they were overturned by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In this law Congress erected a legal framework that prioritized highly skilled immigrants and opened the door for people with family already living in the United States. The popular bill passed the House, 318 to 95.
And here we are again. Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and their likes have stimulated the growth of the newest version of the Know Nothing American Party, the MAGA Rethuglicans, hell bent on bringing us back to the 1850s and 1920s.
As the famous NY Yankee announcer, Mel Allen would say, “How about that!”
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