The American Kaleidoscope. Lawrence H. Fuchs
not just by fear of Rome but also by the separatism of the church, which established Catholic parochial schools to guard the young and keep them faithful. One political response to the growing numbers of Catholics was the formation of a Nativist party, which in New York City published a newspaper entitled Spirit of Seventy-Six; it elected a mayor and the entire common council of New York City in 1837. It led, in turn, to the American Republican party, which was swept into office in the city in 1844 on an explicitly anti-Catholic platform,17 and established branches in every county in New York State and New Jersey and in the cities of Boston and Charleston, South Carolina. The American Republicans changed their name to the Native American party and embraced a program of positive reform as well as antiforeignism and anti-Catholicism.
In the 1850s, the Know-Nothing party, the only xenophobic, nativist party to win substantial power in national and state elections, was organized. It was officially called The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and appeared on the ballot as the American Party.18 Believing that Catholicism was a foreign conspiracy bent on destroying American institutions, its members were sworn to exclude all immigrants “and Roman Catholics in particular” from places of trust, profit, or honor. No one who was a Catholic or even married to one could join.19
Americanists intended to guard the gates of republicanism by having the newcomers wait twenty-one years before becoming eligible for naturalization and by placing an absolute bar against their holding public office.20 The success of their appeal was phenomenal, and in the state legislative elections of 1854 the new party carried Massachusetts, Delaware, and, in alliance with the Whigs, Pennsylvania.21 In Massachusetts, the governor and all state officers were Know-Nothings, as was the state senate and all but two of 378 members of the state house of representatives. In the fall election, about seventy-five party members were elected to Congress, and in the next year, major state offices in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut were won by nativists.22 By 1856, seven governors, eight U.S. senators, and 104 members of the U.S. House of Representatives who campaigned on the American Party platform were elected. Talk of a Know-Nothing president became commonplace.
Most leaders of the Democratic party itself resisted anti-Catholic hysteria and made a strong appeal for immigrant support. The party platform in 1856, faithful to the Pennsylvania idea of American nationality, insisted that “no party can justly be deemed national, Constitutional, or in accordance with American principles which bases its exclusive organization upon religious opinions and accidental birthplace.” Opposing what it called a “crusade … against Catholics and foreign born,” the platform denounced it as not “in unison with the spirit of toleration and enlarged freedom which peculiarly distinguishes the American system of popular government.”23
The platform was right and wrong. The Pennsylvania approach of “toleration and enlarged freedom” was an important feature of American life in the 1850s. But Massachusetts disbanded Irish military companies and kept the Irish from the police force and state agencies, an approach of those who believed they were protecting republicanism. But even in Massachusetts, no action was taken to restrict the voting of immigrants, as many Know-Nothing leaders had demanded. The militant attacks of the Americanists had diminishing appeal to politicians, especially in states where a growing number of newcomers voted. But the most important reason for the demise of the American Party was the rise of a wrenching debate over slavery.
Millard Fillmore, American Party nominee for the presidency in 1856, was viewed in the North as a champion of slavery. He had signed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 as president. New England nativists, perhaps discouraged by the excesses of some leaders, were disgusted by the nomination of Fillmore, and although the American Party polled about 25 percent of the votes nationally, it won a majority only in Maryland. As the conflict over slavery intensified, religious passions and the debate over the period of residency required for aliens to become citizens receded; the American Party disappeared, and with it the issue of a religious test for membership in the American polity.
The urban Irish opposed the cause of abolition; Irish rioted against the draft law in New York City in July 1863, and rumors arose of papal conspiracy to destroy republican government. But these were largely forgotten as the Civil War ended. More likely to be remembered were the heroes of General Thomas Meagher’s Irish Brigade, two-thirds of whom had been killed in the battle of Fredericksburg, and the thousands of Catholic soldiers who fought in the Union Army. Americans hardly noticed when Pope Pius IX in 1864 issued a series of eighty propositions as the Syllabus of Errors, among them the “error” that “the Pope may and must reconcile himself and adapt himself to progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”24 In later decades, anti-Catholicism would surface again in a national movement in the form of the American Protective Association and the Ku Klux Klan.
The Irish Response: Americanization Through Politics
The Irish were well on their way toward becoming Irish-Americans just as the Germans were becoming German-Americans, even though, unlike the Germans, they were overwhelmingly poor and suffered from high rates of family separation, crime, and disease. The story of the Americanization of Irish Catholics is without parallel, not just because of their desperate economic circumstances but because the civic culture of the Americans was formed to such a large extent on the basis of principles antithetical to Irish Catholic culture in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Altogether, about nine million Irish immigrants came to the United States, nine-tenths of them of Roman Catholic background.25 They provided a severe test of the capacity of the civic culture to permit and sanction voluntary pluralism while unifying newcomers around republican principles. Most of the Irish did not speak a foreign language, but they might just as well have, so suspect were their strange habits, manners, and authoritarian religion. Yet, they proved that it was possible for immigrant-ethnic groups to retain separate communal, cultural, and educational institutions even as they participated increasingly in the nation’s wider economic and political life.
If language had been the principal political issue for the Germans, Catholic education was the Irish issue. Even before the great famine migrations, when there were relatively few Irish Catholics in the U.S., the Catholic church pressed the issue of Protestant influence in the schools, although its only power at the time lay in the votes of naturalized immigrants and, later, of their children. In an important political struggle in New York City in the late 1830s, the Irish pressed their sectarian interests, not only becoming more Americanized in the process but also strengthening one of the most important principles of the civic culture, the separation of church and state. Catholics in New York objected because a Protestant sectarian organization, the Public School Society, ran the common schools of the city and used books with an anti-Catholic slant. When, in 1840, Catholics petitioned for a share of the school funds to support their own sectarian schools, Protestants successfully rebuffed their efforts through both the Whig and Democratic parties. Many Protestants saw in the Catholic opposition to the common schools an unwillingness to let their children become Americanized.26
In this struggle, unable to win sufficient support from the major parties, Bishop John Hughes led Irish Catholics in advancing Catholic nominees independent of the established political parties, for three assembly seats and two for the state senate. Catholics pressed their case on the ground of equal rights. When a large crowd assembled on October 29, 1840, they came, as their advertisement said, as “the friends of civil and religious freedom.”27 When Bishop Hughes urged his listeners to use politics to protect their interests, he employed the language of the civic culture: “You now, for the first time, find yourselves in the position to vote at least for yourselves … now you are determined to uphold, with your own votes, your own rights … go, like free men, with dignity and calmness, entertaining due respect for your fellow-citizens and their opinions, and deposit your votes.”28 The chemistry of ethnic Americanization was at work. The Irish organized, petitioned, and voted to get their view across. Although the independent Irish Catholic ticket lost, with only two thousand votes, Catholic votes made the difference between success and defeat for the ten Democratic candidates for assembly whom Catholics endorsed. Irish Catholics had demonstrated to Tammany Hall, New York City’s Democratic organization, that it needed Catholic support to win. Upstate New York Democrats were impressed when Hughes presented a petition to the legislature bearing