Know Nothing Terrorists and Fillmore
* What: A wave of anti Irish, anti Catholic, and anti immigrant violence from the 1840s and 50s. Such violence was directed at Irish Catholic churches, schools, neighborhoods, businesses, and even orphanages and monasteries.
* The Body Count: At last fifty deaths directly from attacks by vigilantes armed with guns and even artillery in Baltimore, Louisville, Maine, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. How many Irish and others died earlier deaths from being intimidated and forced into lower paying jobs and poorer neighborhoods by such violence is far more difficult to say.
* Who Also Gets the Blame:
* The American Party AKA the Know Nothings, who became one of the largest third parties in American history. For perhaps a decade and a half they were a political force to be reckoned with, concentrating on calls to ban all Catholics from immigrating to the US.
* William Hoyte, JJ Slocum, and George Bourne’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, a sensational lurid expose claimed that Catholic nunneries were harems for priests filled with secret passages and graveyards filled with murdered newborn babies. Hoyte had a teenage mistress named Maria Monk. Monk had a long history of mental illness and had been expelled from an asylum after getting pregnant. Hoyte, together with Protestant ministers Slocum and Bourne, wrote Awful Disclosures, claiming it was Monk's own experience. The book sold 300,000 copies, greatly contributing to anti-Catholic hatred. The three authors had a falling out over money, and Monk became Slocum's mistress. Her book was exposed as a hoax by William Stone, who investigated and found neither secret passages nor children's graves in the nunnery.
* Anglo-American gangs and mobs, best known to today's public by the film Gangs of New York. Such mobs were often the hired thugs for political machines used to control elections and neighborhoods.
* British authorities, whose policies worsened the Potato Famine and drove many Irish to the US. While Ireland suffered from famine partly due to a potato blight made worse by over dependence on potatoes, the British government and absentee landlords still insisted on growing food for export and profit even while from three-quarters of a million to one and a half million Irish died of starvation and disease. At least one million Irish also fled the country. In some parts of Ireland the population dropped by one third.
* Irish Catholics had been in America long before the biggest wave hit in the 1840s. Some were in Jamestown and the Plymouth colony. But longstanding bigotry taught in many Protestant churches forced many Irish underground. Many calling themselves Scotch-Irish Americans were actually originally simply Irish. Many chose to deal with bigotry by converting to Protestant faiths, calling themselves Scotch-Irish, and then hiding their Irish ancestry. One of the most famous examples was Bill Clinton's family line, who had long claimed to be Scotch-Irish. When he ran for president, genealogists uncovered the actual town of his Irish ancestors.
* By the early 1840s, Irish immigrants were coming in much larger numbers fleeing the man made potato famine. Anti-Catholic hatred has a long history among Protestantism, and the US as a mostly Protestant nation had quite a bit of hostility towards what was derogatorily called Popery or Romanism. Anti-Catholic laws went back to colonial times, when both Massachusetts and Virginia banned Catholic colonists.
* Irish immigrants were considered to be Black people for the first generation most came to America. Pseudo scientific racists argued that Irish and Africans shared similar features; curly hair, broad noses, thick lips, low foreheads, and dull eyes. Thus from their “reasoning” they were both Black people, though they might not share the same skin tone. The Irish were often referred to with the same insults as Blacks, as apes and monkeys, described as subhuman and violent, and even called “Irish niggers.” Blacks in turn were sometimes referred to as “smoked Irish” or “Irish turned inside out.”
* Works like Awful Disclosures fed hysterical claims of a Popish conspiracy to take over the US using Irish immigrants and even supposedly build a new Vatican on the Mississippi River. Parties and secret societies called the American Republican Party, the Native American Party, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, and the Order of United Americans rose up, growing astonishingly fast in two waves, in 1844 and then in 1855. Often members of these orders were called Know Nothings because they pledged to never talk to authorities when questioned.
* Know Nothings elected mayors and most of the councilmen in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Salem, and Washington DC in the 1850s. A California chapter added Chinese immigrants to the list of groups targeted. In Chicago, all immigrants were barred from city jobs. In Massachusetts the Know Nothing controlled the state legislature. Part of the reason for their success was the Whig Party had collapsed. They were the only alternative to the Democratic Party.
* Some Know Nothings were terrorists in addition to being a political party. The first violence was in Philadelphia in 1844. Know Nothing mobs burned down a convent, three churches, a fire station in an Irish neighborhood, several dozen homes, and a market. The violence did not end until the militia halted it. Amazingly, a grand jury blamed the Irish, claiming they planned to force the removal of the Bible from schools. (Yes, they really were that ignorant of Catholic belief.) A second wave of violence included Know Nothings firing on a Catholic church using cannons. Even a state militia using its own cannon could not disperse the terrorists, and they attacked the soldiers. There were at least fifteen deaths, and again a grand jury blamed the victims, Irish Catholics.
* Louisville was an even more notorious case of organized vigilante violence, killing 22. Know Nothings violently prevented immigrants from voting. In Baltimore in three separate elections they used violence, intimidation, and vote rigging. In one election they even used a cannon. In Bath, Bangor, and Portland, Maine, Know Nothings attacked priests, parishioners, and even an archbishop, smashing several churches.
* Former President Fillmore did the most appalling thing possible. He ran as the Know Nothing candidate for president. He had been president during a relative lull in the violence, from 1850 to 1853. The first wave of violence was in 1844. The second wave of violence was longer lasting, from 1855 to 1856, was far more violent, and happened in more cities. Fillmore ran as their candidate right in the middle of the worst wave of Know Nothing anti-Catholic terrorism.
* There are claims that Fillmore himself was not prejudiced. These are based on two assertions. One is that Fillmore merely wanted to use the party to promote compromise on the slavery issue. The second claim is that Fillmore could not be prejudiced because his daughter attended a Catholic school. Such claims of a lack of prejudice are not only false, even if true they would be irrelevant. The fact is Fillmore became the public face of anti-Catholic bigotry. We also know there have been cases of politicians pandering to bigotry even if they were not personally bigoted. George Wallace is the best known example, but both Bush presidents also often pandered to bigots while not being so themselves.
* The claim of Fillmore supporting compromise on slavery is just not true. Fillmore supported and signed the Fugitive Slave Act. It became part of the Compromise of 1850. But in part thanks to Fillmore, the “compromise” no long was. The law favored slave owners against abolitionists, forcing all northerners to return fugitive slaves, no matter what the state laws were or the personal beliefs of abolitionists. Fillmore also pushed for New Mexico Territory to be open to slavery, even sending federal troops to the territory to pressure abolitionists in Congress. Fillmore even supported a private mercenary army that tried to take Cuba away from Spain to become a US slave state. He was very disappointed when the mercenaries were defeated and executed.
* We also know Fillmore was personally bigoted against Catholics. Fillmore did meet with the Pope and later issued the standard bigot's disclaimer, “Some of my best friends are...” Fillmore was recruited for the Know Nothings by Anna Carroll. At a speech in New York, she introduced him with a harangue repeating Awful Disclosures' claims that nunneries were harems for Catholic priests, with graveyards filled with murdered babies. He was always comfortable with such anti Catholic groups.
* Fillmore's daughter only attended Catholic school for one year, and Fillmore may have chosen it simply because it was a boarding school. He publicly stated that America was only for the native born, not immigrants. Fillmore was anti-Semitic as well, pushing for a treaty with Switzerland that had anti-Jewish provisions. The final proof of his anti-Catholic bigotry is that after his defeat he blamed his loss on “foreign Catholics,” agreeing with the central premise of Know-Nothing belief, that the Catholic Church was conspiring to take over America.
* To have run for office as the front man for a bigoted terrorist organization, while they were at the height of committing mob violence and terrorism, is deeply contemptible. In more recent terms, imagine a white congressman of either major party quitting their party to run for president for a neo-Nazi or other white racist organization. (The closest to that ever happening was when Texas Governor Rick Perry sought the support of the Republic of Texas militia, which has a faction within it which is white supremacist. This is a militia which tried to kill GW Bush when he was governor of Texas, as well as President Clinton, and was still carrying out terrorism when Perry sought their support. But Perry somewhat distanced himself from their secessionist platform when he ran for president.)
* Fillmore's stated, if hypocritical, goal of claiming to run for compromise on the slavery issue failed. Most of his former party, the Whigs, joined the Republican Party. True to his earlier beliefs though, Fillmore later opposed both secession and Emancipation. With the Republicans as a strong party to compete with the Democrats, the Know-Nothings went into a sharp decline. Today their name is a nickname for ignorant bigots.
* As for the Irish Catholics so feared by the Know-Nothings, they discovered how to assimilate into American society: Take part in bigotry against others. Where once Blacks and Irish had worked together, lived in the same neighborhoods, and even intermarried, Irish-American bigotry against Blacks became common as a way to distinguish themselves and try to avoid prejudice from whites. In the Civil War draft riots in New York City, Irish mobs targeted Blacks as well as draft authorities. By the mid 1860s, Irish were no longer considered Black people, but whites. As the book How the Irish Became White (the source of much of the information for this entry) described it, they learned to stop being green and became one more group of whites.
* Anti-Catholic bigotry remained a big part of American society, widespread until it started to become discredited during World War II. By 1960, America even elected a Catholic president. Today anti-Catholic bigotry is largely believed in only by some fundamentalists, and increasingly by militant atheists. One obvious example of recent anti-Catholic bigotry is the singling out of the Catholic Church for sexual abuse by priests, when such abuse was and still is an equally serious problem in Protestant and evangelical churches, Orthodox Jewish communities, and others such as the New Age and pagan movements.