September 19, 2015
Recovered history: Know Nothings, forerunners of today's GOP
Wikipedia - The Native American Party, renamed in 1855 as American Party, and commonly named Know Nothing movement, was an American political party that operated on a national basis during the mid-1850s. It promised to purify American politics by limiting or ending the influence of Irish Catholics and other immigrants, thus reflecting nativism and anti-Catholic sentiment. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, whom they saw as hostile to republican values and controlled by the Pope in Rome. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, it strove to curb immigration and naturalization, but met with little success. Membership was limited to Protestant men.
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Wiki: Former Whig President Fillmore was American Party candidate in 1856 supported by conservative and Southern former Whigs. He got 21% of the vote, winning Maryland.
In the fall of 1854 the No Nothings had swept the state of Massachusetts winning control of the legislature. Also won the mayor of Philadelphia by a landslide and won mayor of D.C. One million members in 1854. Filled the void of the collapse of the Whigs. In 1855 elected the mayor of Chicago. The party was populist, highly democratic, hostile to wealth and elites, popular among Yankee Protestants facing competition for jobs from Catholics.
It also opposed slavery- how it lost it's Southern wing and eventually collapsed. Supported women's rights and worker's rights. The No Nothing Massachusetts legislature upgraded status of wives, passed prohibition. But as in the 1920's, prohibition didn't work out and the No Nothings collapsed. The abolitionist and progressive GOP picked up the pieces, much as FDR picked up the pieces after the fall of the dry Dems in 1932. In the South the No Nothings were moderates. In Louisiana and Maryland, and had success by getting support from native born Catholics.
Lincoln said "When the No Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to that 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 simple without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
Trump does profess to love liberty for White native born Protestants. His nativism is Likudnik, Mexicans (who are Catholic Native Americans, but not in your face about it) are deemed terrorists, clannish and mooches. Pat Buchanan already compared the border to Hadrian's wall (assuming he descends from the Scottish Buchanans, he sells out his own ancestors in favor of their Roman enemy.)
The US is facing the same migration issue at home from collapsing the Mexican economy that Europe faces after collapsing the Middle East and Syria.
By the analogy, Trump would be the modern Millard Fillmore, and gets about the same percentage of voters. As with JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr, no president is above being made expendable, certainly a law of modern politics. If Trump gets the nomination, unlikely the donors permit him to win the office, without first ceding his power to a VP from the Bush faction. Sanders has a similar problem in avoiding an internal coup from the Rubin faction.
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