A Distant Mirror: Nineteenth-Century Populism, Nativism, and Contemporary Right-Wing Radical Politics

Abstract

Nineteenth-century America witnessed two major waves of populist mobilization. The first started in late 1840 in response to the massive influx of immigrants, predominantly from Catholic Ireland. The second occurred in the 1880s and 1890s, provoked by large-scale structural changes affecting rural America. Both movements promoted a far-reaching social and political reform agenda, which they believed would restore the country to its foundational roots: evangelical Protestantism directed primarily against the Catholic “invasion” in the first case, Jeffersonian republicanism directed against the collusion of money and politics in the second. Although both movements failed to realize their goals, they had a profound and lasting impact on the evolution of American identity. Nineteenth-century American populism thus offers a useful model for understanding present-day populist mobilization in Western Europe.

Keywords:

• Anti-Catholicism
• Cultural Identity
• Islamophobia
• Populism
• Socioeconomic Change

Notes

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3. Robert S. Jansen, “Populist Mobilization: A New Theoretical Approach to Populism,” Sociological Theory 29, no. 2 (2011): 75–96; in a similar vein, Margaret Canovan, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47 (1999): 6. The notion of righteous indignation is borrowed from Joe Creech, Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

4. Tom Watson, “Populism,” Tom Watson's Magazine 2, no. 3 (1905): 257–260.

5. Canovan, “Trust the People!,” 3.

6. Gene Clanton, Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890–1900 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

7. Comer Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938).

8. Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 198.

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12. There are a number of reasons accounting for Irish American opposition to abolitionism. Among them were the conservative position of the Catholic Church on the question of slavery; the close association of Irish immigrants with the Democratic Party, a staunch defender of white supremacy and slavery; and the notion that the abolitionist cause would only distract from the plight of Irish immigrants in the big cities. See Gilbert Osofsky, “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism,” American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (1975): 889–912; Angela F. Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

13. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 194; David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From the Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 53.

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19. Michael Holt, “The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know-Nothingism,” The Journal of American History 60, no. 2 (1973): 323.

20. Know Nothings mobilized also in the South. There, however, the main reason for their success was the question of slavery. Southerners who supported the movement “did so, for the most part, because they thought the Democrats who favored the expansion of slavery might break up the Union.” David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 107.

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22. Cited in Philip Perlmutter, Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice (Armonk: M. E. Sharp, 1999), 88.

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30. Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party, 5; Grimsted, American Mobbing, 220.

31. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 77.

32. Thomas E. Watson, The People's Party Campaign Book, 1892: American Farmers and the Rise of Agrobusiness, reprint (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 23.

33. Mary Elizabeth Lease, “Wallstreet Owns the People,” in Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, eds., Voices of a People's History of the United States (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 226.

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36. Watson, “Populism,” 257–260. For a brief summary of Watson's vision, see Bruce Palmer, Man over Money: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 181; Richard Nelson, “The Cultural Contradictions of Populism: Tom Watson's Tragic Vision of Power, Politics, and History,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1988): 5.

37. “National People's Party Platform, adopted at Omaha, NEB, July 4, 1892,” in The World Almanac 1893 (New York, 1893), 83–85.

38. Clanton, Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 166–167.

39. Rhys H. Williams and Susan M. Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism: Civil Religion as Movement Ideology,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33, no. 1 (1994): 1; for an analysis of the role of religion in agrarian populism, see Joe Creech, Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolt (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

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41. Peter H. Argersinger, “Ideology and Behavior: Legislative Politics and Western Populism,” Agricultural History 58, no. 1 (1984): 45–46.

42. Postel, The Populist Vision, 162–166.

43. Thomas Frank, “The Leviathan with Tentacles of Steel: Railroads in the Minds of Kansas Populists,” The Western Historical Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1989): 39.

44. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 168–171.

45. Charles R. Morris, “Freakonomics,” The New York Times, June 2, 2006.

46. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955), 56–59.

47. Scott G. McNall, The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1860–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 44.

48. Martin Ridge, Ignatius Donnelly: The Portrait of a Politician (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1962), 36–38.

49. Creech, Righteous Indignation, 89.

50. Richard C. Goode, “The Godly Insurrection in Limestone County: Social Gospel, Populism, and Southern Culture in the Late Nineteenth-Century,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3, no. 2 (1993): 160.

51. Joe Creech, for instance, notes that in North Carolina, populists attacked Roman Catholicism for its institutional structure, which they deemed “inconsistent with and even a threat to American democracy. Some, moreover, were rabidly anti-Catholic and feared an imminent invasion by Rome—the soil for such an invasion having been prepared by the centralizing tendencies of American Protestants,” Creech, Righteous Indignation, 89.

52. Thomas M. Harris, Rome's Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Pittsburgh: The Williams Publishing Company, 1897).

53. John Paul Bocock, “The Irish Conquest of Our Cities,” The Forum, April 1894, 186–195.

54. Nordstrom, Danger on the Doorstep, 96; among the most passionate critics of urban political corruption and patronage was Joseph Keppler, whose popular satirical weekly Puck frequently depicted the Catholic Church in terms of a “corrupt political machine, with the pope tantamount to a boss.” Samuel J. Thomas, “Mugwump Cartoonists, the Papacy, and Tammany Hall in America's Gilded Age,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 14, no. 2 (2004): 214.

55. Ridge, Ignatius Donnelly, 331.

56. Christopher C. Lund, “The New Victims of the Old Anti-Catholicism,” Connecticut Law Review 44, no. 3 (2012): 1015.

57. Nordstrom, Danger on the Doorstep, 88.

58. Robert M. Saunders, “The Transformation of Tom Watson, 1894–1895,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1970): 340.

59. Thomas E. Watson, The Italian Pope's Campaign against the Constitutional Rights of American Citizens (Thomson: The Tom Watson Book Company, 1915), 9.

60. Woodward, Tom Watson, 363.

61. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Tom Watson Revisited,” The Journal of Southern History 68, no. 1 (2002): 23.

62. Robert B. Rackleff, “Anti-Catholicism and the Florida Legislature, 1911–1919,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1972): 356.

63. Charles P. Sweeney, “Leo Frank and Bigotry in the South,” The Nation, August 31, 1021, http://www.thenation.com/article/leo-frank-and-bigotry-south.

64. Woodward, Tom Watson, 419–422.

65. Charlton Moseley, “Latent Klanism in Georgia, 1890–1915,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (1972): 373.

66. Dean R. Hoge, The Future of Catholic Leadership: Responses to the Priest Shortage (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1987), 48.

67. Will Herberg, Protestant – Catholic – Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955).

68. Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 2 (2006): 215.

69. See Michael Kazin, “Democracy Betrayed and Redeemed: Populist Traditions in the United States,” Constellations 5, no. 1 (1998): 77.

70. Hans-Georg Betz and Susi Meret, “Revisiting Lepanto: The Political Mobilization against Islam in Contemporary Western Europe,” Patterns of Prejudice 43, nos. 3–4 (2009): 313–334.

71. See Nonna Mayer, “From Jean-Marie to Marine Le Pen: Electoral Change on the Far Right,” Parliamentary Affairs 66, no. 1 (2013): 171–175.