Irish Immigrants and the 'Know-Nothing' Era
Early 19th century anti-immigrant racism found its fullest expression in the platform of the American or Know-Nothing Party, which rose and fell almost entirely within a two-year span, from 1854 to 1856. The Know-Nothings formed in response to the continued immigration of Germans and the sudden rise of Irish immigration after the potato famine in the late 1840s. About 2.3 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1830 and 1850, the largest group coming from Ireland. The Know-Nothings promised to stop what they called as a cultural and racial invasion by the Catholic Irish, who, because of their religion, supposedly owed first allegiance to the Pope. In addition to seeing them as disloyal citizens, Know-Nothings saw the Irish as promiscuous drunks, a potent charge at a time when the Prohibition movement emerged as a political force.Know-Nothings accused the Irish of lowering wages for “American” workers and accepting filthy living conditions. The Know-Nothing and the broader anti-immigrant movements in the 1840s and 1850s sought to end legal immigration, ban Catholics from holding elective office, diminish the voting strength of new Americans by extending the period of naturalization from five to 21 years, and supported the use of the Protestant King James Bible in the public schools.
The Know-Nothing Party fell apart because its Northern and Southern wings couldn’t agree on slavery. Mid-19th century nativism lost salience as an issue because of the nation’s rush towards the Civil War, the decline of Irish immigration in the late 1950s, and the rising assimilation of Irish Americans into the American political system through what was then a white supremacist Democratic Party. The Irish North of the Mason-Dixon line, locked in competition with African Americans for low-wage jobs, spectacularly displayed the negrophobia required for higher status in this country’s caste system, violently resisting the draft in an1863 New York City riot. Insisting they would never fight a war to free black men, Irish rioters burned a black orphanage and shot and beat to death African Americans men and women, young and old, in the city streets. Once racial outsiders, by the late 19th century the Irish rose to leadership positions in politics and the labor movement. Irish union leaders banned black members, called strikes if black employees were hired, and insisted on higher “white men’s wages” for themselves as they forced African Americans to remain on the outside of the factory gate.
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