Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Know Nothing Party
A major political party divided against itself. Fear of profound social changes. A populist movement that feared America was in decline and looked for a leader that would make the country great again. Virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and fear that members of a “foreign” religious group are a threat to–well– pretty much everything.* Sound familiar? Welcome to 1854 and the rise of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, more commonly known as the Know Nothing party.***
The Know Nothings tend to be overlooked in American history classes, largely because they are overshadowed by the events leading to the Civil War and partly because they represent an ugly side to the antebellum north that muddies the narrative. Located in the urbanized North with a membership base that was primarily working and middle class, the party had a “nativist” ideology: they were for white men born in the United States (preferably several generations previously) and against pretty much everyone else–particularly the Irish Catholics who flooded into the country following the potato famine of 1848. Long before Max Weber coined the phrase “Protestant work ethic”, the Know Nothings believed that Protestantism was responsible for America’s freedom and prosperity and that Catholics in particular and immigrants in general had corrupted the political system.***
Because they played little role in the sectarian divisions of the war, it is easy to brush them off as a minor movement, but their contemporaries saw their rise as a major political problem They were originally a fraternal order, complete with secret rites and vows of secrecy–think Masons with a bad attitude. By 1854, they had some 50,000 members in sixteen states. By the end of 1855, they had elected eight governors, more than 100 congressmen, mayors in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and thousands of local officials. Their influence did not survive the presidential election of 1856. Their candidate, Millard Fillmore (previously a member of the Whig party), took only one state and split the Whig/Republican votership, ensuring the election of the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan. By 1860, the Know Nothings had disappeared, taking the Whig party down with it.
* If you’ve spent any time here in the Margins, you may have noticed that one of the themes I return to from time to time is the fact that we** historically screw up on the question of immigration. In theory we say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” In reality, large numbers of us say, “I’m on board the freedom ship, pull up the ladder so no one else can get on. Don’t want it to get too crowded in here.” We pass quotas. We put up signs saying “No Irish need apply.” Now we rant about building walls. It really irks me that we keep going back to this poisoned well whenever people feel threatened by social, political and/or economic change. Rant over.
**And by we, I mean the United States. I know some of the Marginalia are from other parts of the world.
***Because they swore an oath when they joined that they would answer any questions about the order by saying “I know nothing.”
****In all fairness, it was the height of Tammany Hall corruption, which in fact drew on New York City’s immigrant base for its political clout. But Tammany Hall was able to do so because existing political blocs rejected immigrants. Chicken or egg?
Forgotten Women: A Reading List
Clio, the muse of history, hasn’t done very well by her daughters.
Over the last month or two* I’ve been thinking about how women vanish from history. How their contributions are often erased. Rachel Swaby, whose book about women scientists is listed below, describes writing about their lives as “revealing a hidden history of the world.”
Here are a few examples of books that bring otherwise forgotten women back into the story, with links to books that I’ve written about before:
Karen Abbot. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War. Harper Collins. 2014 An account of four women who played active roles in the American Civil War, including Emma Edmonds who disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Union Army
Margalit Fox. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code. The forgotten role of classicist Alice Kober in the decipherment of Linear B, which is usually attributed solely to Michael Ventris.
Nathalia Holt. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us From Missiles to the Moon to Mars. The overlooked story of the women who did the math that made space exploration possible. “One small step for man” depended on a lot of pencil pushing by women.
Denise Kiernan. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. Touchstone. 2013. Kiernan tells the story of the young women who were recruited to work as secretaries, factory workers, mathematicians, and low level chemists at a secret installation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they unknowingly helped develop the atomic bomb. Oak Ridge is familiar to anyone interested in the development of the atomic bomb, but its history has generally been told from the perspective of the men who led the project. Kiernan looks at the familiar story from the perspective of the women involved—women whom traditional histories of Oak Ridge have left out of the story entirely.
Adrienne Mayor. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World. A sweeping and authoritative study of the realities behind the Greek myths about the Amazons. (If you want your Amazonian history and related popular history in bite-sized pieces, joint Mayor’s Facebook group, Amazons Ancient and Modern
Rachel Swaby. Headstrong: 52 Women who Changed Science–and the World. Broadway Books. 2015. Written in response to media accounts of brilliant women scientists that routinely note “domesticity before personal achievement”, Headstrong treats “women in science like scientists instead of anomalies or wives who moonlight in the lab.” Swaby makes the interesting choice not to include Marie Curie because Curie “is who we talk about when we talk about women in science…thee token woman in a deck of cards featuring famous scientists.” Instead she gives us fifty-two fascinating stories of women you’ve never heard about.
That should keep you going for awhile.
*Or the last thirty years, depending on how you count.
ADDENDUM: A regular blog reader reminded me of another book that should be on this list, and my personal TBR list: Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation, by Cokie Roberts. thanks, Paul
The secret lives of America’s most important historical documents
In the early days of World War II, poet Archibald MacLeish, then the reluctant director of the Library of Congress, worked with the Secret Service to relocate the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and thousands of other precious documents to hiding places, including Fort Knox, where they would be safe in case of enemy bombing. In American Treasures:The Secret Efforts to Save the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address, Stephen Puleo uses the story of MacLeish’s undercover librarianship as a framing device for the documents’ history as a whole, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 through the development of twenty-first century restoration and conservation techniques.
Puelo never loses track of the dual nature of the documents as both artifacts and symbols. He describes the physical creation and publication of the documents as well as the political debates that surrounded their creation, bringing new life to familiar stories in the process. (I don’t know about you, but I never thought about what was involved in producing copies of the Declaration of Independence for distribution in 1776.) He traces the documents’ physical deterioration, attempts to preserve them, and bureaucratic infighting over their control. In what is possibly the most fascinating section of the book, he compares the single-handed efforts of Stephen Pleasonton, a senior clerk in the office of the Secretary of State, to save the documents when the British attacked Washington in 1814 with MacLeish’s carefully executed plan.*
Ultimately, American Treasures is an engaging exploration of Archibald MacLeish’s assessment that “They are not important as manuscripts, they are important as themselves.”
Who would have thought the story of some pieces of paper could be so enthralling?
*Pleasanton wrapped them in makeshift linen sacks**, drove them out of the city in borrowed wagons, and hid them in an abandoned farmhouse. Not exactly Fort Knox.
**Sewed together by Pleasanton and other government clerks, none of whom would have been experienced with a needle. (I picture a lot of sticking themselves and swearing.)
Most of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.