Donald Trump and the 1856 Know Nothings
Immigrants and religion, then and now
Donald Trump has said quite a lot recently about his plans for a hoped-for second term as president and one of his newest promises is to ban immigrants who “don’t like our religion.”
Hearing this, it’s hard not to be reminded of the 1856 presidential election, when a different nativist movement also managed to fuse immigration and religion in the national consciousness. I’ve already written about other similarities between our current era and the 1850s, but Trump’s sentiments could be drawn straight out of the 1856 campaign of the Know Nothings (the popular name for the then American Party).
Here are Trump’s words from a recent rally, as reported by the Washington Post:
“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” he said, reading from the teleprompter. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel,” he continued, apparently ad-libbing, “if you don’t like our religion — which a lot of them don’t — if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right?” The crowd cheered enthusiastically. Trump vamped: “We don’t want you! Get out of here! You’re fired!”
First, one has to ask what the former president even means by “if you don’t like our religion.” What religion, exactly, is “our religion?”
According to the Pew Research Center, more than 22% of Americans have no religious affiliation at all, while about 6% follow such religions as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other faiths.
It’s true that a majority of Americans identify as Christians, but that doesn’t exactly pin things down to a simple answer either. Evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism are the two largest faiths, but there is also mainline Protestantism, Black Protestantism, Mormonism, and more. And within these faiths there are quite a few additional divisions.
Many Catholics, for instance, find themselves in disagreement over the meaning of the Church’s social teachings, and some conservative Catholics are at the moment in near rebellion against Pope Francis. Meanwhile, 1,800 United Methodist churches recently disaffiliated from the denomination in a dispute over LGBTQ stances.
The truth is, religion in America encompasses such a wide swath of values and beliefs that it’s impossible to identify a national faith. And should we want to? Even the Founders didn’t seem all that interested in going down that road, which is why the Constitution’s first amendment grants freedom of religion to all Americans and explicitly states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
As Thomas Jefferson wrote: “(I)t does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
And yet there is clearly a faction of American voters and politicians today who applaud the mention of a religious test for immigrants.
Which brings us back to 1856.
That year, the Know Nothings won 22% of the vote in the presidential election, one of the best third-party performances ever. And they did so by campaigning against immigrants. Specifically, against Catholic immigrants.
At the time, a surge of newcomers had flooded onto U.S. shores and many of these arrivals were Irish and German Catholics trying to escape poverty and famine in their home countries. The Catholicism of these immigrants, however, caused angst among some, who blamed the newcomers for taking their jobs and for laying siege to American culture.
Soon, nativist gangs were terrorizing Catholic communities, attacking individuals and burning buildings. Meanwhile, secret anti-Catholic societies were also formed (with members instructed to say “I know nothing” if questioned about the groups, hence the name given to the political party that arose from the movement).
The American Party at the time wanted to bar Catholics from holding political office and to make it considerably more difficult for all immigrants to become citizens. The party quickly gained traction, winning a few dozen seats in Congress and even persuading former Whig President Millard Fillmore to serve as its presidential nominee.
The party slogan was “Americans to rule America.” It's obviously not much of a leap to see parallels between the Know Nothings of 1856 and the Trump Republicans of today.
We don’t know, of course, how the current nativist battles will play out. What we do know is that American political history would have turned out quite differently if the Know Nothings had succeeded in stopping Catholic immigration to the United States. After all, two American presidents have been Catholic (John Kennedy and Joe Biden), as well as three recent Speakers of the House (Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner) and six current justices of the Supreme Court, not to mention countless other federal and state officeholders.
We also know the Know Nothing movement faded rather quickly after 1856, but not for any reasons that allow us to draw conclusions about the trajectory of current politics. Nativism waned in the 1850s mostly because the country’s attention was soon diverted to a civil war. And perhaps because a country at war doesn’t attract much in the way of immigration. Nativist sentiments did reappear two decades later, but were directed by then at Chinese immigrants in the West.
The other factor that helped chase away nativism for a while is that the Republican Party became the dominant force in U.S. politics for several decades after the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln, the first GOP president, had this to say about the Know Nothings, in a letter to a friend: “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘All men are created equal’ … When the Know Nothings get control, it will read ‘All men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’”
So, no, the GOP of the mid-19th century was decidedly not a nativist movement. In 1864, in fact, Lincoln signed The Act to Encourage Immigration, which was the very antithesis of what the Know Nothings wanted.
The idea of encouraging immigration, obviously, is also contrary to the base position of today’s Republican Party. Which goes to show, I suppose, that with Donald Trump leading a movement that seems straight out of 1856 it’s getting more and more difficult for the GOP to continue proclaiming itself as the Party of Lincoln.
This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
(Photos of Millard Fillmore and Donald Trump are public domain images via Wikimedia Commons.)
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