Penner wrote:Smitty-48 wrote:The Know Nothings came about in response to a massive and sudden influx of Nordics, the Forty Eighters, the Germans fleeing the German Revolution in 1848, the Scots-Irish of America in the 19th century despised the Nordic foreigners just as much as they despised the Catholics and Jews.
The No Nothings were against the Catholic Irish and were a response to the Irish. No one gave a damn about the Germans. There were loads of Germans in the US well before the mid-1800s in America but what made the No Nothings was the Catholic Irish. Also, good portions of Germans were Lutherans- which are not what the No Nothings were afraid of. They thought that Catholics and Irish were taking over the US so they banded together to try to get rid of them.
You don't know your own history.
You can see a Know Nothing propaganda poster from the time, right here, note the Irish Catholic and German Forty Eighter featured hand in hand, and note the emphasis on alcohol, Irish Whisky and German Beer, the Devil's work, the Know Nothings were the nascent Temperance leagues.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 180961915/
And it's Know Nothings, not "No Nothings", by the way, since you fancy yourself knowledgeable on the subject, might want to get that right, eh?
FYI, the Know Nothings were just as opposed to the German influx, because they saw them as drunkards, the whole point was Temperance, it wasn't racism, they were all white people, they just the saw the Catholics and Germans, and all Europeans really, as being drunkards who did not live up to the strict hyper protestant teetotaling values of the Great Awakening.
Yes, the Protestants in America brought their anti-Catholic zeal with them on the boat from England, although it's not that they thought that the Catholics were going to "take over", their position was simply that a Catholic was loyal to the Pope in Rome first, and so could never be loyal to the republic.
It's been an urban-rural divide all along, the Catholics and immigrants lived in the cities, they might be able to take over in New York, but they couldn't take over the country, because the Anglo-Saxon Protestant Scots-Irish ran the whole rest of the country, particularly in the South and Mid-West, electoral college for the win.
The Know Nothings however, were on about the wickedness of alcohol and how it was destroying America, which all arose, again, from the Great Awakening starting around 1820, the baseline anti-Catholic rubrics were taken to another level, and it expanded beyond Catholics to anyone who did not follow the strict Protestant teetotaling of Temperance, to include Germans and their beer. Particularly the brewers, Miller, Schlitz, Anheuser, Busch, etcetera.
This all built up for a century, culminating in 1920 with Prohibition, when the Know Nothings, which by then had evolved into the Anti Saloon League, finally got the 18th amendment, banning the Devil's work, drinking, which was destroying America according to them, and the chief offenders were the immigrants and descendants of, Irish, Italians, and Germans, but the biggest nemesis by far to the Know Nothings and their Temperance, wasn't the Irish, nor the Italians, it was the Germans, led by the brewers.
