NATIVISM “To understand is not to forgive. It is only to understand. It is not an end but a beginning.” — Rebecca West During the lifespan of Henry Thoreau there existed a group of “nativist” Americans who were as mortally opposed to the immigration of Irish and German Catholics to the United States as, in a later timeframe with a later problem, they would become to the immigration of Jews. They formed a secret society which was referred to in public as the “Order of United Americans.” To be accepted into this group it was not enough merely to agree to detest Catholicism: one would also need to document the fact that one had been born here in America and that one’s family was entirely untainted by any connection with any Catholic either by blood or marriage. The code of silence of these nativists was similar to the Mafia’s “omerta”: if asked anything at all about the group, the initiate’s response was a set phrase “I know nothing.” Abraham Lincoln would warn in 1856 that “If the Know- Nothings get control, the Declaration of Independence will read: All men are created equal except for Negroes, foreigners, and Catholics.” HDT WHAT? INDEX NATIVISM KNOW-NOTHINGISM 1816 The preaching of Thomas Oxnard in Baltimore led to the organization of the Unitarian church there, at which the Reverend William Ellery Channing would deliver his famous 1819 sermon. He met every two weeks with about 20 liberal ministers in the Boston area, mostly Congregational, for discussions relating to religion, morals, and civic order. Freeman was appointed to a committee charged with considering the creation of a formal body. The work of this committee led, in 1825, to the founding the American Unitarian Association. 2 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX KNOW-NOTHINGISM NATIVISM Little Harriet Beecher, five years old, was fascinated with the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; ORTHEECCLEFIASTICAL HIFTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND, FROM ITS FIRFT PLANTING IN THE YEAR 1620, UNTO THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1698. IN SEVEN BOOKS. (Well, the mentality of the reverend author of this tome was approximately the mentality of a five-year-old, so there you are.) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX NATIVISM KNOW-NOTHINGISM Meanwhile, her daddy the Reverend Lyman Beecher, who had done so much to safeguard Boston against the spiritual errors of the Unitarians, was urging that to counter the threat of Roman Catholicism there should be created a Protestant school for each district of the community, and that there should be at least one Protestant minister available for each 1,000 residents, and that –since Roman Catholicism feared the common man with his Holy Bible and his ability to read and understand it for himself– there must be a copy of the Holy Bible in each and every home. The Reverend, it is to be mentioned, was not a member of the Know-Nothing Party: he approved of their objectives but he thought of himself nevertheless as standing aloof from the “hatreds” which that political group tended to nurture and he thought of himself as standing aloof from the “violence and secrecy” of the means they tended to employ. ANTI-CATHOLICISM (I think it is important for me here to emphasize this for you, because my sense of the matter is that very few of us now think of the development of 19th-Century “bible societies” as in any sense prejudicial or partial or sectarian. This was the year in which, in New-York, the American Bible Society was being founded and of course that was righteous. Of course it was. This was the year in which Noah Webster not only was helping found and write the constitution for a “charitable society,” but also was becoming a director of the New Hampshire Bible Society, and of course that was righteous. –It is relevant for you to recognize that what you are gazing at is the kindly countenance of American anti-Catholic prejudice.) 4 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX KNOW-NOTHINGISM NATIVISM 1825 The millennialism of the Irish “Rockites” would be absorbed because the 1771 prophesy based upon the interpretation of the Apocalypse of St. John by Bishop Charles Walmsley Pastorino, that God would destroy all Protestantism by this year 1825 –a prophecy that had been credited by these lower-class Catholic rock throwers since 1821– had become no longer functional. In England, the Catholic Relief Bill was defeated in the House of Lords. The Catholic pro-cathedral was opened in Marlborough Street, Dublin. Some 50,000 Irish were applying for some 2,000 assisted places on shipping to America, in a British Colonial Office scheme to depopulate the southern counties.1 More than a hundred periodicals had appeared by this point in the United States, three out of every four religious in nature. Of these roughly 75 American religious periodicals, fully half were anti-Catholic. During 1. By the end of the potato famine, 1/3rd of the surviving Irish population would be in the USA. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX NATIVISM KNOW-NOTHINGISM the first half of the 19th Century, American Know-Nothing nativists would produce a vast amount of propaganda against the Roman Catholic Church, propaganda which focused on the same core reason why the Nazis would be so hostile to Jews. Just as the Nazis would consider themselves to be inherently nationalistic and patriotic and Jews to be essentially internationalists and therefore implicitly disloyal and the most deadly enemy of the Fatherland, so also these American nativists were considering themselves to be patriotic nationalists and considering Roman Catholics to constitute our most mortal threat, any Catholic being essentially internationalistic, and merely another sworn servant of a foreign potentate — the Pope in Rome. The great number of Catholic immigrants, mostly German and Irish, who were finding new homes in what we now refer to as “the Midwest,” caused the Know-Nothings and other nativists to fear that the power of the Pope might be able to find a new homeland there. 6 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX KNOW-NOTHINGISM NATIVISM 1828 Washington Irving’s three-volume fiction LIFE AND VOYAGES OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, boldly termed a biography of Christopher Columbus, boldly proclaimed the earth to be a globe, against the folly of a putative medieval consensus proclaiming the earth to be flat like the floor of a tent. 1 2 4 3 Photographic proof... (The four corners have been arbitrarily numbered clockwise.) “Care should be taken to vindicate great names from pernicious erudition.” This of course would help our Know-Nothings vastly to elaborate their contempt for different others (well, that is, if they needed any help): “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX NATIVISM KNOW-NOTHINGISM WASHINGTON IRVING AND THE SPECTRE OF THE “FLAT-EARTHER” RELIGIOUS BIGOT Where did this preposterous rationalist conceit originate, that some superstitious religious people had believed that the earth was flat? If one really wants to ascribe such a geographical conception to early Christians, one can find flat-earth theories both in Lactantius (circa 265CE-345CE) and Cosmos Indicopleustes (circa 540CE), but by the Middle Ages neither of these authors were being taken at all seriously.1 What was the dominant intellectual movement of the High Middle Ages? Scholasticism. What ancient Greek author was idolized as “The Philosopher” by the Scholastics? Aristotle. And what had been Aristotle’s views on the shape of the Earth? In DE CÆLO 2:14, he had offered at least three arguments why the Earth must be spherical. First, if all falling objects are attracted to the center of the Earth, the accumulation of debris landing at the Earth’s center would naturally assume the shape of a sphere. Secondly, the Earth’s shadow, as projected on the Moon during lunar eclipses, is clearly an arc- segment of a circle. Given enough observations of such eclipses, the shape of the Earth’s shadow would be revealed as circular. Since spheres cast circular shadows, and the Earth casts a circular shadow, the Earth must be a sphere. Thirdly, the Earth must be a sphere of no great size, since even a short journey across its surface causes a considerable difference in the altitude and rising/setting times of the fixed stars. Aristotle even hazarded a guess derived from contemporary astronomers, that the Earth’s circumference was 400,000 stades (9,987 miles). So Aristotle obviously understood that the Earth was a sphere, and of course his close students among the medieval Byzantines, Arabs, and Western Europeans also understood. Though the roots of the “flat-earther” derogation of religious people may be sought among the enlightened philosophes, as Voltaire suggested that the ancient Hebrews had believed in a flat earth although he did not assert that this had been picked up by the Christian inheritors of Jewish scriptures, and then in 1737 Thomas Paine suggested that wise Europeans had been burned at the stake for believing in a spherical earth (of course without bothering to name names or specify places and dates), Washington Irving’s CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, written while he was a US official stationed at the Alhambra in Spain, played a significant role in the retroactive construction of flat-earthers whom all loyal New-Worlders could come to love to despise. Why had this preposterous tale taken root and persisted? 1. Jeffrey Russell. INVENTING THE FLAT EARTH. Praeger, 1991: “…the search for truth is long and laborious and easily set aside. And since the present is transformed day by day, minute by minute, second by second, into the past, while the future is unknown and unknowable, we are left on the dark sea without compass or astrolabe, more unsure of our position and our goal than any of Columbus’s sailors.