‘Abraham Lincoln voiced the Republican dilemma in this matter. “Of their principles” Lincoln said of the Know Nothings “I think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists…Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics’. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” – p.141
Lincoln’s words invite discussion on a number of fronts: the supposed persistence of Russia’s aversion to democracy, the proper place of hypocrisy in politics (including the contribution that Lincoln’s own view on ‘the negro question’ might make to that particular debate). But I want to concentrate on the phenomenon of the ‘Know-Nothing’.
The Know-Nothings sprouted in the United States during the 1850s as a semi-secret ‘nativist’ political movement, restricted in membership to native-born Protestants (their name was inspired by the response that members were supposed to give to outsiders who asked about their activities – ‘I know nothing’.). The focus of their animus was on immigrants, whose numbers had swelled during the 1840s – more specifically, Catholic immigrants. The Know-Nothings’ main concern was reducing the influence of non-native (and, again, particularly Catholic) voters and values in American politics, though this also manifested itself in a totemic, and somewhat quixotic, belief in the absolute virtue of temperance. Their whipping up of xenophobic sentiment led to a number of riots, church-burnings and, on one occasion, the tarring and feathering of a priest.
Their antipathy was reciprocated,and perhaps enflamed, by the Catholic church. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the church was itself going through one of the more reactionary periods in its history under the leadership of Pius IX, scourge of the European revolutionaries. This led to a rather odd dialectic in which the pages of American Catholic newspapers would often be filled with screeds denouncing the evils of prohibitionism, as well as other supposedly ‘Red Republican’ evils, such as state education systems, infidelity, pantheism, abolitionism, socialism and women’s rights.
Although there were certainly racists amongst their ranks, it would be too easy to characterise the Know-Nothings as a straightforwardly racist group. In fact, as McPherson points out, ‘the antislavery movement grew from the same cultural soil of evangelical Protestanism as temperance and nativism‘. A considerable number of Know-Nothings viewed slavery and Catholicism as equally repressive institutions. Although their program was shot through with a deeply illiberal and xenophobic streak, the Know-Nothing leaders were strong proponents of republican ideals. Catholic dogma was seen as wholly inimical to these values. In the pithy description of one Know-Nothing, the whole enterprise amounted to ‘freedom , temperance and Protestantism against slavery, rum and Romanism’.
The antics of the Know-Nothings bring to mind the more recent rabble-rousing of the English Defence League (EDL). The EDL, in a sense, are the Know-Nothings de nos jours. Their political programme, such as it is, seeks to defend the whole gamut of progressive causes – gay rights, anti-racism, religious tolerance, women’s rights. However, they are exclusively – and very often aggressively – anti-Muslim in word and deed.
The actions of the EDL have more than once in my presence been excused as inspired by ‘legitimate grievances’: either a reaction against the genuine excesses of political Islam, or an atonal and anti-establishment yelp of the white working-class. I can’t go that far. Although I would wager that the motivations of their leaders are rather more than a simple cloak for a National Front/football-hooligan revival, I would also place a substantial side-bet that the average EDL marcher does not have the works of, say, Ayaan-Hirsi Ali uppermost in his mind when launching bottles at the mosque. (Of course, there are those on the Left who might disagree with me there too, albeit for different reasons.)
The abolitionist Know-Nothings were eventually absorbed by the nascent Republican party, whilst their pro-slavery wing went the same way as others of that persuasion in the fratricide of the 1860s. Perhaps the EDL will be rent asunder in a similar way.
Discussion
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