Know Nothings and the Politics of Paranoia
How anti-immigrant misinformation fueled a misguided movement
Maria Monk challenged her doubters to prove her wrong. She offered to take them to the scene of the crime:
Permit me to go through the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, at Montreal, with some impartial ladies and gentlemen, that they may compare my account with the interior parts of that building, into which no persons but the Roman Bishop and the priests... are ever admitted; and if they do not find my description true, then discard me as an impostor.
Monk issues this provocation at the beginning of her barnburner of a memoir, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed, which was published in 1836. In the book, she uncovered a dastardly conspiracy that went to the very core of the Catholic Church.
In Monk’s telling, she became a nun at a young age only to have her superior sit her down, just after she had taken her vows, and explain the shocking practices at the nunnery:
One of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them. I expressed some of the feelings which this announcement excited in me, which came upon me like a flash of lightning, but the only effect was to set her arguing with me, in favor of the crime, representing it as a virtue acceptable to God, and honorable to me. The priests, she said, were not situated like other men, being forbidden to marry; while they lived secluded, laborious, and self-denying lives for our salvation. They might, indeed, be considered our saviours, as without their services we could not obtain the pardon of sin, and must go to hell… I now felt how foolish I had been to place myself in the power of such persons as were around me.
But weren’t the priests sinning by forcing themselves on the nuns? And what about the children that resulted from these assaults?
Priests, she insisted, could not sin. It was a thing impossible. Everything that they did, and wished, was of course right. She hoped I would see the reasonableness and duty of the oaths I was to take, and be faithful to them. She gave me another piece of information which excited other feelings in me, scarcely less dreadful. Infants were sometimes born in the convent; but they were always baptized and immediately strangled! This secured their everlasting happiness; for the baptism purified them from all sinfulness, and being sent out of the world before they had time to do anything wrong, they were at once admitted into heaven. How happy, she exclaimed, are those who secure immortal happiness to such little beings! Their little souls would thank those who kill their bodies, if they had it in their power!
Maria learned that the priests had a secret tunnel through which they entered the nunnery and that the strangled babies were buried in the basement. Nuns who did not go along with the priests’ demands were never heard from again. She goes on to testify that she participated in the punishment of one nun who had said something disobedient to a superior. The poor woman was taken to a secret room and suffocated to death by a priest and several nuns.
Eventually, Maria became pregnant herself. She resolved to flee the convent:
My desire of escape was partly excited by the fear of bringing an infant to the murderous hands of my companions, or of taking a potion whose violent effects I too well knew.
She waited for an opportunity and was eventually told to bring a message to the “sick room,” which connected to the outside. She rushed past the nuns there and found her way through a maze of passages to liberty. Maria was safe, able to tell the world about the horrors she had witnessed in the convent.
There was just one problem: none of it was true.
Maria Monk was a real person, but her story is made up. Her book became so well-known that a group of “impartial gentlemen” — Protestant ministers — took her up on her challenge and demanded access to her Montreal convent. When they visited, they realized that Monk’s description of the convent differed so much from the building’s design that she had probably never even visited the place. It seems likely that anti-Catholic ghostwriters manipulated a vulnerable, pregnant, single, and possibly mentally disabled young woman to spin this over-the-top tale.
The ministers’ debunking of Maria’s story didn’t matter all that much. Her book continued to sell well for decades. Historian Richard Hofstadter said it was “probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
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Misinformation like Maria Monk’s “memoir” found an eager audience in the United States because many Americans were looking to confirm their suspicion of the Catholic immigrants who were entering the country in larger and larger numbers. These immigrants hailed moistly from Ireland and parts of central Europe, and many Anglo-Saxon Protestants thought that Catholics’ culture and religion were incompatible with the United States.
It didn’t take very long for anti-Catholic propaganda to spread beyond the pages of books like Maria Monk’s. In 1844, a (false) rumor spread through Philadelphia that Catholics wanted to get the Bible out of the schools. Nativists formed the American Republican Party (it later renamed itself the Native American Party) to run in local elections. The party’s ideology was clear:
The incident in Philadelphia culminated in violence, as rioters tried to burn Catholic churches and fought against soldiers who attempted to prevent the arson. The rioters managed to burn two churches to the ground.
This lithograph shows a bloody clash between the militia and the nativists:
A nativist named George Shifler died in the fighting; the movement tried to turn him into a martyr:
The Philadelphia riots were widely condemned; the American Republican Party, many of whose members had participated in the violence, lost some of its influence. But the nativists didn’t disappear; they simply slipped into the shadows.
After Philadelphia, anti-immigrant extremists decided to change tactics. They were still convinced that the Pope’s agents were everywhere, secretly conspiring against the United States. Consumed by paranoia, they felt they should go underground to escape supposed Catholic spies. The movement became a secret society like the Masons. Members had to go through a vetting process and swear a solemn oath:
I, _______, hereby solemnly swear eternal fidelity to the vows I have taken in this Order. I also swear that I will advance the interests of every native born American citizen, especially the members of this Order, to the entire and absolute exclusion of all aliens and foreigners, and more especially those who belong to or approve of the Roman Catholic faith. So help me God!
“Examiners” would follow a strict script when initiating new members:
The nativists came up with secret codes and handshakes and conducted elaborate rituals in dark chambers. Like all such movements, this group’s rituals — undertaken in deadly seriousness — seem pretty stupid in the light of day. Members of this Organization of the Star-Spangled Banner were sworn to absolute secrecy. Because they were instructed to profess ignorance about the organization when asked, people called them the “Know Nothings.”
Eventually, the movement came out of hiding again and organized itself as a political party. They created symbols:
They published a Know Nothing Almanac:
The strange book combined weather predictions with lurid tales of Catholic crimes, especially against young women:
They printed newspapers:
They ran slates of candidates:
And anti-immigrant business owners even tried to capitalize on the anti-immigrant fervor (this soap ad tries to equate the nativists with Native Americans):
Meanwhile, cartoonists spread the idea that drunken Catholic immigrants were stealing elections:
And that the only thing standing between the agents of the pope and the spiritual enslavement of the American people were a few brave patriots:
They even wrote songs:
I guess these nativists loved music — there are a surprising number of songs:
Some of them make light of the group’s shadowy nature:
While others are just instrumental odes to nativism:
The Know Nothings’ influence peaked in the mid-1850s. For the 1856 election, their American Party nominated former Whig President Millard Fillmore, who ran as a third-party candidate against the Republican John Fremont and the Democrat James Buchanan.
Though he kept the extremists and their secret societies at arms’ length, Fillmore won 21.5% of the vote. During the campaign, his supporters spread the false rumor that Fremont was a secret Catholic. Fillmore’s presence in the race helped the Democrats secure victory for Buchanan — who would go on to secure infamy as America’s worst-ever president (so far).
This was the beginning of the end for the Know Nothings. As slavery consumed the national imagination, there wasn’t much room for anti-immigrant fervor. Cartoonists made fun of Fillmore for taking his political career into the “dark & gloomy caverns of Know Nothingism:”
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If you know anything about American history, you know that anti-immigrant sentiment didn’t die with the Know Nothings. Their ideas were resurrected in the 1880s by groups like the American Protective Association and in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan. They’ve come roaring back once again in the 2010s and 2020s.
Each time, the accusations are the same. Immigrants aren’t just taking jobs from Americans, they’re fundamentally undermining the country. They’re engaged in strange and unusual acts. Their men are a threat to the young women of America. They’re “poisoning the blood of our country.” They’re taking part in elaborate conspiracies to undermine American democracy.
In each of these moments, nativists have told the American public that the threat from immigration was so great that violence and cruelty were the only way to protect the country from the scourge of immigrants. Each time, the nativists’ wild-eyed conspiracy theories turned out to be wrong, and their movement has looked ignorant and dangerous in retrospect.
The nickname “Know Nothing” has, with time, become a double-edged sword. Members of the original movement thought it was a clever way to wink at the secret nature of their group, but it’s also become a pretty good encapsulation of their hold on reality. The Know Nothings, well, knew nothing — they believed a bunch of stuff that wasn’t true and fundamentally misunderstood the effects of immigration on the country.
Though there are a lot of similarities between our current nativist moment and previous anti-immigrant movements, there is one big difference. The Know Nothings lost the 1856 election, and the KKK never got close to having one of its own in the White House. Now, America has elected a Know Nothing president — one who freely spouts the kind of falsehoods that the original Know Nothings only discussed in secrecy.
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Thanks for bringing this history to the forefront. I taught immigration history, and students, especially Irish and Germans were flabbergasted to know that their great-grandparents had been so badly treated in the 19th century, and that they were described in the very terms that contemporary immigrants were, or people of Italian ancestry were surprised that the first major attempts to limit immigration for European immigration (which is why there is now a difference between documented and undocumented migrants) were because they were believed to be "bad" immigrants, and these laws effectively made it very difficult for Italians and Eastern Europeans to come to America legally from the 1920s on.
Anti immigration or anti illegal immigration? There's a difference.