1. Visions of the Never-Ending War: Mapping the State of Research on American White Nationalism
1.2 Academic Perspectives on American ‘Nativism’
Since American white nationalism grew out of American nativism and incorporated some of its tenets, mainly its fear of foreigners and foreign influences/ideology, the research regarding nativism needs to be examined. The first book to provide an overall view of American nativism was published in 1938, authored by Ray Allen Billington and entitled The Protestant Crusade: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism.38 The book was one of the first to examine the Convent Exposés that helped to stir anti-Catholic resentment and provide a basis for acts of
37 Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, NC:
University Press of North Carolina, 1994). Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
38 Ray Allen Billington. The Protestant Crusade: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism, reprint paperback edition, (Quadrangle, 1964). Originally published in 1938.
violence against Catholics in the early republic period of American history. Furthermore, these works set the precedence for other right-wing/nativist movements that propagandized their beliefs through fiction.
Billington’s work was followed by several studies on nativism in the late 1960s to late 1970s but only Carleton Beals Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy, 1820–1860 referenced any form of fiction, again analyzing the Convent Exposés.39 Among the other examples of studies on nativism in this period are John Higham’s Strangers in the Land:
Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1969), which focused on the American Protective Association, and Ira M. Leonard and Robert D. Parmet’s American Nativism, 1830–1860 (1971).40 Neither book examines any form of fiction but instead concentrate on the economic and societal fears that stoked the hatred of Catholics in the antebellum and immediate post-Reconstruction period. In a sense, this is understandable, as the second wave of American nativism produced no fictional works and by 1915, most nativists had been incorporated into the 2nd era Ku Klux Klan, the Klan of the Progressive Era, but, since nativist sentiments could be traced back to the early colonial period, such an omission seems unjustified, especially that the rather ambitious time-frame of the study covers the years in which the Convent Exposés came into existence.
However, two other works of note do deal with the Convent Exposés in particular—Jenny Franchot’s Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (1994) and Susan M. Griffin’s Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth Century American Fiction (1998).41 The most interesting fact about these studies is that both attempt to show how ingrained American anti-Catholicism was without examining the roots of anti-alien feeling, which was trauma over the religious wars that had been fought between England and her mostly Catholic enemies in the past. The passions unleashed by these wars, as well as by the early settlers’ belief that they were chosen by God to be an example, “a city upon the hill,” buttressed the anti-Catholic feeling among various groups in the early Republic, and later also within the Know Nothing Party.
39 Carleton Beals. Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy, 1820-1860 (New York: Hastings House, 1960).
40 John Higham. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), Ira M. Leonard and Robert D. Parmet. American Nativism, 1830-1860 (New York: Robert F. Krieger, 1979)—
Reprint edition, originally published in 1971.
41 Jenny Franchot. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth Century American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
Furthermore, the fear of having white Protestant women converted to Catholicism was one of the overriding factors in the anti-Catholic wave of violence that swept New England and the Mid-Atlantic states in the mid-1830s, which was reinforced by the sweeping demographic changes accompanying the first surge of Irish immigration. As stated by the author of 1855’s Danger in the Dark, Issac Kelso:
Though by no means an alarmist, the author would unveil the dark designs, insidious movements, and hidden policy of the Papal Hierarchy, and, at the same time, bring to light the duplicity, craft and trickery practiced in our midst by the order of Jesuits—a brotherhood of pious assassins, the vilest and most despicable of our race; who in every land, as well as our own are the sworn enemy of civil and religious liberty. […] Convinced that vigilance is the price of liberty, and regarding the audacious attempt of subverting the American system of education as but a prelude to yet bolder attacks, if possible, upon the free institutions of the Republic, and coming as it does from a class of men who owe allegiance to a foreign despot, and bow to a master in Rome, the author has been led to feel that every true-hearted American is called upon, and should be urged to guard, with a constantly wakeful and jealous eye, the blood-bought heritage of freedom (Kelso 1855, v-vi)!
This type of rhetoric abounds in the novels, but scholars have preferred to examine the economic motives behind the anti-Catholic riots in the North and Mid-Atlantic states, rather than to attribute this rhetoric to trauma or fear. Furthermore, no scholar has attempted to examine why the South welcomed the Irish immigrants with seemingly open arms while the abolitionist North treated the Irish worse than the few freedmen within their midst, which many white Southern slave owners at the time would use as an argument against the morality of the Northerners.
The idea of “protecting white womanhood,” one of the slogans of the 1st and 2nd KKK, has filtered through the philosophy of American white nationalism to the present day, as is further examined in later chapters. Finally, it must be remembered that the Puritans and Separatists who flocked to New England and who made up the ruling class of the area were adamant anti-Catholics, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher who wrote the famous anti-Catholic nativist polemic “The Call of the West,” while at the same time, advocating abolitionism in the antebellum South, thus setting a precedence for what in the antebellum Southern and current white nationalist mind at least, is the double standard and hypocrisy of the Northern elite, expanded in later years to include the bureaucrats in the federal government and the progressives/liberals who pushed the South to be more egalitarian.
While the first wave of American nativism was eclipsed by the sectional conflict that led to the American Civil War, it is the aftermath of that war and the Reconstruction of the South that has provided scholars with more opportunities to examine the first organization that took nascent American white nationalism to further heights—the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, most scholars
have also ignored the mythology that circulated around the Reconstruction Klan through what this work calls the Redeemer novels.