The New Know Nothings

A nativist American political party, which inflamed passions that led to the nation's Civil War, has some striking parallels to President Trump's MAGA movement.

Photo courtesy of Freepix

Immigrants cause crime in America; they litter the nation’s welfare rolls; they perpetrate crimes; they are foreign beggars and felons who should be deported; they take jobs away from Americans; they vote illegally. They don’t belong in America!

Although such policies might sound like something out of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement playbook, American members of a secretive nativist movement called the No Nothings enunciated those biases in the 1840s and 1850s, a time when the nation stood on the brink of Civil War.

The Know Nothings evolved from secret societies dedicated to American nativist ideas to organizations such as The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, founded in New York City in 1849. They transitioned into a more visible force with the founding of the American Party in 1854, an organization that resembles the America First Republicans championed by the President and his most ardent followers.

The dreaded immigrants targeted by the Know Nothings were not the Latin American, Central American, or Muslim transplants from foreign lands – the people that Trump and Stephen Miller, his virulently anti-immigrant deputy chief of staff, want to deport.

The scoundrels in this mid-19th-century American drama were my ancestors. A wave of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment swept across America in response to the influx of Irish immigrants fleeing massive starvation engineered by the British, who then controlled Ireland. The tragedy referred to as “the Potato Famine” really was ethnic cleansing, British style. The immigrants arrived in an America where Protestants viewed the Irish and some German immigrants as a threat to their economic and political interests, just as contemporary MAGA activists fear they are being displaced by Black and Brown people.

The secretive nature of the movement gave the Know Nothings their name. When outsiders questioned the motives and activities of secretive organizations such as the Order of United Americans, the members often would reply, “I know nothing,” hence the nickname that stuck.

The parallels between the Know Nothings and the Republican Party’s MAGA crusade now underway in America are striking. Each movement and party would have enthusiastically endorsed the anti-immigrant policies that are— and were — core to their political identities. Both advocated measures that capitalize on working-class anxieties about jobs, the economy, and social change.

The Know Nothings advocated restricting civil rights by imposing long residency requirements for citizenship and creating obstacles for legal immigrants to become Americans and vote. The Know Nothings’ anti-Catholic mantra demonstrated how American political groups could dilute the power of their adversaries with demagoguery that exploits political anxieties.

President Trump’s tariff policies and support from working-class voters involve the same fears. Indeed, groups with strong ties to the MAGA movement use the same tactics to limit the voting rights of voters they view as a threat.

Here in heavily gerrymandered North Carolina, where I live, The Assembly, a first-rate digital magazine that does in-depth reporting on power in the state, recently reported on how GOP leaders in control of both chambers of the state’s General Assembly and the State Board of Elections are set to rewrite future voting rules.

“A recent Supreme Court race has given the GOP leaders plenty to work with,” The Assembly reported. “Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin sought to overturn a 734-vote loss to Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by removing some 66,000 North Carolinians from the vote count.”

Griffin alleged “those voters had information missing from a voter registration database, had never lived in the state, or hadn’t provided a required photo ID,” a flashpoint for groups concerned that the GOP wants to marginalize minority group voters not in the GOP’s natural constituency.

“While Griffen lost that battle in federal court,” The Assembly‘s Bryan Anderson reported, “Republicans maintain that the problems he flagged are serious. They are planning their next moves.“ The same process is underway in many states where Republicans control state and local election offices.

In another parallel to America’s powerful MAGA movement, the Know Nothings often became involved in protest rallies that turned violent, mirroring the recent mayhem in Los Angeles that prompted President Trump to call in the U.S. military.

In New York’s Abington Square riot in 1854, for example, a horse reined in by a stagecoach driver watching a protest got spooked by hundreds of Irishmen marching down the streets to assert their rights. The horse plunged into the crowd, igniting disputes between the driver and the marchers.

The conflict quickly escalated into a violent confrontation as Know Nothing sympathizers in the crowd capitalized on the chaos to attack the Irish marchers, which led to a riot. The resulting violence reinforced the Know Nothings’ stereotype of the Irish as rambunctious ingrates who couldn’t hold their liquor.

The police soon joined in and beat the Irishmen, destroyed their banners, and arrested nearly forty, most of whom bore clear signs of injuries from police batons and the crowd. The stereotype wasn’t true. Many Irish of the era embraced the temperance movement led by Irish hero Daniel O’Connell. Although they enjoyed drinking a pint of Guinness, they were not the drunks they were portrayed to be. Nevertheless, the image stuck for decades.

Many particulars of the Los Angeles violence differ from the secretive tactics employed by the Know-Nothings. In Los Angeles, the federal government is openly involved, putting White House pressure on federal agents to increase their number of immigration arrests. Masked federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided several locations in the city to arrest immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally.

I remain baffled at why ICE agents need to wear dark masks that cover their faces, but their spooky presence quickly sparked protests, particularly since the masked agents raided places of employment, such as LA’s garment factories, warehouses, and areas where day workers and street vendors gathered. Local and state officials called in the police, who eventually would arrest nearly 400, including protestors and allegedly undocumented immigrants detained during ICE operations.

Despite the differences in the particulars, the politics involved in the Know Nothing and MAGA movements are similar. Just as the Know Nothings capitalized on a volatile situation to score political points, President Trump saw an opening to crack down on the protests in a Democratic state led by a vocal political opponent.

He says he called in the National Guard to help and protect federal agents from harm, even though no help was sought by local and state officials, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, a political nemesis of Trump and the MAGA Republicans. Media reports say just one ICE agent was injured when a rock thrown by a protester hit the windshield of his car, resulting in a cut to the hand. About twenty times as many journalists covering the mayhem were injured, often, it seems, as targets of the weaponized police and ICE agents.

Although local officials reported isolated incidents of violence and vandalism, most of the protests, which soon spread to other parts of Los Angeles and the nation, were peaceful. Both Gov. Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the local police had the situation under control. Both said Trump’s deployment of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines, which the Pentagon estimates will cost American taxpayers $134 million, wasn’t needed. The troop deployment is now the subject of a legal challenge that could reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Coincidentally, Trump’s intervention came at a time when his “Big Beautiful” tax bill, now before the U.S. Senate, came under searing criticism by friends and foes alike. The clarion call of violence and riots sent the media scrambling to cover Los Angeles, diminishing the attention paid to Washington and those concerned with a budget-busting tax bill that caters to the ultra-rich.

Now, everyone is bracing for what comes next when President Trump holds his military parade celebrating the Army’s 250^th anniversary, which happens to be the same day as the President’s 79th birthday. The parade will cost American taxpayers an estimated $45 million. President Trump issued a warning that anyone planning a protest at his parade is “going to be met with very big force.”

Just as the MAGA movement gained traction in the past few elections, the Know-Nothing movement and its political party expanded rapidly in the 1850s. The Know-Nothings lured citizens disaffected with the Democrats and another party, the Whigs, founded to oppose the authoritarian tendencies of President Andrew Jackson. Similarly, many Americans with the same frustrations flocked to the MAGA-dominated Republican party in the last election that sent President Trump to the White House. Both movements also capitalized on voters who felt their views and priorities had been ignored by conventional politicians. Like MAGA, the nativistic American party experienced a surge in electoral successes, including electing members of Congress.

But Know Nothings and their party fractured and faded into history because they couldn’t establish a unified stand on slavery, the dominant political issue of the time. The rapid rise and fall of the Know-Nothing movement reflected the volatile political and social climate of America that eventually led to America’s devastating Civil War.

In his 1905 book The Life of Reason, Spanish American philosopher George Santayana wrote, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books, is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, a managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, and chairman of the board of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Follow Jim’s Substack, Five W’s + H here.