The return of the Know Nothings
Last Sunday morning, Stephen Howard, pastor of the Cornerstone Missionary Baptist Church of Greenville, North Carolina, addressed his congregants on the matter of Donald Trump’s divisive tweets and the president’s hate-inducing remarks at a political rally in the city the previous Wednesday.
“There’s a message in [Trump’s] message. It’s not just for [Congresswoman] Ilhan Omar, it’s for you and I. Because when it’s over with her, they’re coming to us to tell us to go back,” Howard told his nearly all black congregation, according to the Washington Post.
“We can’t go back,” Howard continued. “What is it you want us to go back to? Second-class citizenship? Jim Crow? What is it you want us to go back to, [former Republican senator] Jesse Helms?”
The firestorm Trump ignited in Greenville was real. Eager to divide Americans by race, religion, and ethnic origin, apparently on the strength of a political calculation he’s made about the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s decidedly un-presidential remarks were like a siren screaming in the night.
This president is dangerous; he’s a menacing presence in a country, which, because of its inherent regional, religious, racial, ethnic, and economic differences, needs someone in the White House who will not exacerbate the divisions that occur naturally, but will attempt to reconcile them.
The mantra “Bring us together” is often little more than a presidential mirage, or a smokescreen; still, it’s important to try; it’s certainly better than its opposite.
As for The Rev. Howard’s point, it is well-founded. After Representative Omar, a naturalized American citizen born in Somalia, who’s next on the president’s list of types to be banished as undesirable, Americans who don’t measure up to his particular standard of Americanism, which evidently comes down to agreeing with everything — EVERYTHING — he happens to say.
Then, again, as a nation we have veered into the fear and exclusion lane on more than one occasion.
As with most things, there is a Lincoln quote that knocks it out of the park. It goes like this: “As a nation, we began declaring ‘all men are created equal’, except for negroes. When the Know Nothings get control, it will be ‘all men are created equal’, except for negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’
The Know Nothing Party was a product of the 1840s and ’50s, years of rapid increases in immigration, largely from Germany and Ireland.
The response of a segment of native-born Americans to the presence of these “foreigners” with their strange ways sheds some light on today’s hatreds stirred by President Trump, especially the Greenville crowd’s chant of “Send her back.”
“To the fear of the foreigner was added the fear of a strange religion,” noted the 20th century historian, Herbert Agar, of the Know Nothings of the mid-19th century.
He continued, “The Know Nothings pledged to vote only for ‘natives’, to demand that immigrants spend 21 years in the country before they could become naturalized, and to work against the influence of the Catholic Church.
“For a few years it seemed like they might draw a national majority into their strange and novel web. “
Critics have accused Donald Trump of promoting a false narrative of America as a land of Anglo-Saxon Protestant milk and honey.
Likewise, the Know Nothings marinated in “nostalgic rhetoric,” according to Sean Wilentz in his The Rise of American Democracy.
The Know Nothings, Wilentz writes, were reacting to waves of immigration, and porous immigration laws. As “white natives who had escaped the debasements of early industrialization,” party adherents viewed the newly arrived Germans and Irish as disruptors, as despoilers of “a fanciful golden age before mass poverty, crime, and class strife.”
Today’s Republican Party seems disdainful of democracy itself. Instead of making voting easier, party leaders are eager to make it harder, more onerous. Both Democrats and Republicans have tried to stack the deck over the years when drawing boundary lines for congressional and state legislative districts; but only Republicans, until now at least, have fine-tuned the gerrymandering process to the point of gross unfairness.
This essential distrust of democracy was a feature of the Know Nothings as well.
“Know Nothings despised the established parties,” Wilentz writes. He quotes Know Nothings founder Thomas Whitney: “If democracy implies universal suffrage … without regard to intelligence … morals … [and] principles, [then] I am no democrat.”
Lincoln feared the direction the Know Nothings were taking the country. Instead of following along, Lincoln said, “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.