The Know-Nothings
State politics is a yawn these days. The players are tiny and bloodless. Beacon Hill rivals the QVC Shopping Network for drama.
Hungry for the good old days -- any good old days -- the Observer calls Peter Drummey, librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society and my one-stop historical shopping source. Talk to me, Peter, when was it really wild around here?
Try 150 years ago today, he replies, when Henry J. Gardner gave his inaugural address as the new governor of Massachusetts. Gardner, who won by a landslide, was a Know-Nothing. Know-Nothings had a hell of a year in 1854. They swept the entire congressional delegation, every statewide office, all 40 state Senate seats, and all but three State House seats, which numbered 379 at the time. A mere 34 House members had served before the election, and none of the 40 new senators.
The results stunned the Massachusetts establishment. (What else would they do?) Charles Francis Adams wrote in his diary the day after the vote: ''The political news is amazing. The new mysterious order has carried every office in the state . . . There has been no revolution so complete since the organization of government."
Adams referred to the Know-Nothings as ''the mysterious order" because they were a mysterious lot. They had no platform or recognized leader. ''Know-Nothing" was the nickname given by its enemies to the American Party, a nativist group that wanted no part of the immigrant hordes. Its members were hatched in secret societies and were trained to respond, ''I know nothing about it" when asked about their organizations.
The most famous of these secret societies was the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, founded in New York in 1849. (Think Daniel Day Lewis and his crew in ''Gangs of New York.") The Order grew by hundreds of thousands across the country in the six months preceding the November elections of 1854, according to Timothy Meagher, curator of American Catholic history collections at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
The Know-Nothings were breathtaking political schizoids -- progressive abolitionists who desegregated Boston's public schools on one hand, and virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic bigots on the other. They tried to institute a 10-hour workday, yet wanted immigrants to wait 21 years for citizenship.
They tried, again unsuccessfully, to eliminate prison sentences for debtors, then had the gall to investigate nunneries. (More on this later.) They were temperance folks who drastically limited the availability of booze, and then required that the King James Bible, which was offensive to Catholics, be read in public schools every day.
''How people could hold all of those things together under their hats is amazing," notes Drummey.
The Know-Nothings came and went from the scene like a supernova. By 1858, they had all but disappeared as a political force. Historians are still trying to unravel their legacy. On this, all can agree: They were among the weirdest birds in the history of the strange and wondrous aviary of Massachusetts politics.
If they rose on nativism, they thrived on abolition. Their DNA was closer to Abraham Lincoln's emerging Republicans than Andrew Jackson's Democrats. The KnowNothings were, in Meagher's words, ''a way station" to the Republican Party for Free Soiler Democrats who opposed slavery and abolitionist Whigs. And, let's be clear here, slavery was the issue of the day.
''Race," says Meagher, ''has never been as big as it was in the 1840s and 1850s because of slavery."
But Irish immigrants in Boston were targets, too. Drummey has a poster warning the populace against bands of Irish. The men were deputized by a local judge to curb potential rioting after he ruled that a runaway slave must be returned to its owner. It reads: ''Americans To The Rescue! Irishmen Under Arms!" and ''Shall we submit to have our citizens shot down by a set of Vagabond Irishmen!"
Once in office, the Know-Nothings embraced political hypocrisy with brio. The most delicious case involved a joint legislative committee created to investigate nunneries. (Who could make this up?) According to Drummey, the members descended on a Catholic school in Roxbury and harassed the nuns there for no good reason, then repaired to the Norfolk House for dinner.
According to journalist Charles Hale, the bill came to $74, an astonishing amount of money for a mere dinner in those days. It was later found that champagne was imbibed -- booze, remember, was all but outlawed by the Know-Nothings. Also included in the tab, rumor had it, were fees for the favors of women of easy virtue. All in all, conspicuously low-rent consumption for a group professing moral reform.
Meagher points out that the Know-Nothing juggernaut had the effect of uniting warring Irish factions in communities around the state like Worcester, where he has done research. In Lowell, he adds, it led to the ascendancy of a group of powerful priests known as the O'Brien Dynasty.
We can trace an anti-Catholic animus back to the Puritans who were, in so many ways, an unpleasant lot. ''There was anti-Catholicism before there were any Catholics," notes Drummey.
The Know-Nothings ultimately fell to a stronger abolitionist alternative: the Republican Party. Gardner was defeated by a Republican, Nathaniel Banks, in 1857. All in all, though, it was quite a ride.
Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com.
