Immigration: Face of America HTY-110

The anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant Know-Nothing movement involved obscure organiza- tional structures and regulations.

Politicians linked to the Know-Nothing movement won mayoral elections in Boston and Chicago, and the Know-Nothing-linked American Party won a stunning victory in the Mas- sachusetts gubernatorial race in 1854. In that same year, the American Party surpassed the Whigs to become the second-largest party in the U.S. House of Representatives, contributing in no small part to the collapse of the old Whigs and the rise of the new Republican Party. (From the 1820s to the 1850s, the dominant parties in the two-party system were the Whigs and the Democrats; the Republicans emerged in the 1850s with the demise of the Whigs [McPherson 1988, 135–36].)

In the gubernatorial election campaign in Virginia of 1855—a contest between Demo- cratic candidate Henry A. Wise and the Know-Nothings in which Wise emerged victor- iousa—a secret Know-Nothing ‘‘constitution’’ was circulated to illustrate the secretive nature of the Know-Nothings (Document 2). The Know-Nothing text addresses the perceived threat to America of Catholicism.

The reaction of many German immigrants, particularly German Catholics, to the rise of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings in the 1850s is captured in Document 3. In the text one German community leaders states, alarmingly, that in the United States, ‘‘people are not content with a mere hate against immigrants; no, they are proceeding to measures which should only be applied in a land of despotism, not in a free land’’ and that ‘‘the crowd of poor laboring men and shopkeepers, who have recently arrived, are imbued with these sentiments; and some are already looking on the American people as a tyrant, only second to the

This 1852 broadside announcing the publication of the American Patriot, a short-lived Boston nati-

vist newspaper, exemplifies the explicitly anti-Catholic character of mid-19th century nativist

polemics. The paper opposes ‘‘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 secret Foreign Orders in the U.S.’’

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07575.

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