Echoes of Fillmore and the GOP Know-Nothings

SARAH PALIN'S Alaska still belonged to czarist Russia when the Know-Nothings were spewing their peculiar brand of bigotry in the 1850s. But Palin's ugly rants this fall stirred echoes of Know-Nothing demagogue Millard Fillmore.

Fillmore blamed turmoil in pre-Civil War America not on tension over slavery, but on Catholics, immigrants, and other "unpatriotic" undesirables. Old Millard's spirit must have smiled as Palin, with (literal) wink-wink innuendo, smeared opponents as anti-American, claiming - as Fillmore once did - that some sinister outside force was at work.

Like Palin, Fillmore was a head-scratching vice presidential pick - General Zachary Taylor's sop to the Whig Party's northern reactionary wing in 1848. A nightmare scenario ensued when war hero Taylor suddenly died. Fillmore became chief executive, presiding over two rudderless years that brought the country closer to chaos. (Now there's a McCain-Palin what-if to contemplate.)

When the Whigs, whipsawed by the slavery issue, disintegrated soon after Fillmore left the presidency, he became the leader of an ultra-secretive (read paranoid) band of immigrant-haters. When approached by outsiders, Fillmore's followers were ordered to say that they "knew nothing" - which, for most of them, wasn't a stretch. Hence the moniker, Know-Nothings.

All of which brings us to the (very) temporarily beached Sarah the Barracuda and the tenuous state of today's GOP. "Aw, c'mon," you say, "the Republicans are not going the way of the Whigs." Sure?

The Republican Party that emerged from the wreckage of the 1850s was fortunate. Onetime "Conscience Whigs," led by Abraham Lincoln, became the party's dominant leaders, appealing to the better angels of America's nature. Lincoln's Republicans crushed a rebellion, abolished slavery, saved the Union, passed the Homestead Act, and (not incidentally) acquired Alaska - none of which would have happened had the Fillmore xenophobes been in charge.

Will the current party get as lucky? Republicans just suffered their most debilitating top-to-bottom defeat since 1964; the bloodletting is only now beginning. Which faction will come out on top? The modern successors to the Conscience Whigs: Tom Ridge, Susan Collins, the old Mitt Romney, Mike Murphy, and David Brooks? Or today's Know-Nothings: Sarah Palin, Lindsey Graham, the regrettably "new" Mitt Romney, Steve Schmidt, and Bill Kristol?

How much longer can traditional Republicans - heirs to the party of common sense, fiscal prudence, and Main Street; inheritors of the legacy of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower - allow themselves to be bushwhacked by a bunch of zealots and theo-cons that deny scientific evolution and would, in a heartbeat, eviscerate the separation of church and state?

To be sure, Lincoln had to make concessions to the far-right but kept them at bay. Ronald Reagan knew how to stiff-arm right-wing firebrands, too. If only George W. Bush and John McCain had displayed similar guts and foresight.

Instead, the last two GOP standard bearers have not only wooed the extremists - they've handed them the keys to the party. As Palin's craven candidacy showed, they hold veto power over the national ticket, dictate the party's platform, impose ideological litmus tests, and conduct witch hunts to weed out non-believers. For decades, they've been hoarding power. They're not going to give it up without a nasty fight.

We'll all have ringside seats for the political donnybrook of the century. "In this corner, wearing the dark (but stylishly appointed) robe of intolerance, and weighing in as one of the lightest lightweights in history, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Disasta' from Alaska! And in that corner, sporting the sparkling red-white-and-blue, and weighing in as defenders of a heavyweight legacy, ladies and gentlemen, please greet the sad remnants of what was once a truly grand old party!"

We know who ought to win this bout - but will they?

Timothy M. Gay is a writer and historian.