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Anti-immigrant politics could lead to violence in Kentucky. It’s happened before. • Kentucky Lantern

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Donald J. Trump, meet Charles S. Morehead, the man who was elected governor of Kentucky in 1855 on the anti-immigrant ‘Know-Nothing’ ticket.

Charles S. Morehead, the do-nothing governor of Kentucky. (Kentucky Historical Association)

“Americans must rule America” was the motto of the Know-Nothings. Translation: white, native Protestants like her.

Officially, the American Party was called the “Know-Nothing” Party because its members had to answer – like Sgt. Schultz on “Hogan’s Heroes” – “I don’t know anything” when asked about the party by a possibly hostile journalist or suspicious stranger.

The party faithful shouted that foreigners loyal to a “bloated … despot” were threatening to take over the country. Translation: German and Irish born Catholics.

According to the Know-Nothings, these “Papist” foreigners were determined to impose their “false religion” and its “anti-Christian” law on America. German and Irish Catholics were “an enemy of the principles we embody in our laws, an enemy of all that we hold most dear.”

The party also claimed that immigrants were “the number one source of crime in this country.” They weren’t. Trump says “illegal immigrants” are increasing violent crime in the US. That is not the case.

Multiple “studies by academics and think tanks have shown that immigrants do not commit crime at a higher rate than native-born Americans,” according to Reuters. reported. Other “studies specifically examine crime among immigrants (who are in the U.S. illegally) and also find that they do not commit crimes at a higher rate.”

Former President Donald Trump (Photo by Chet Strange/Getty Images)

Trump has been demagoguering against “illegal immigrants” since he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015. He names them “animals.” He said migrants came from Haiti and African countries “Shithole countries.” He accused them of being ‘illegals’ “poison the blood” of the USA, meaning the blood of white people. (“The comments ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ come straight out of Hitler’s 1925 autobiographical manifesto “My camp” – his blueprint for a ‘pure Aryan’ Germany and the expulsion of the Jews,” wrote Russel Contrearas in Axios.

Trump denies that he is impersonating the German Nazi dictator who ordered the murder of six million European Jews.

If re-elected, Trump promises he will immediately order “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The ‘illegals’ he wants to kick out are black and brown.

While Trump’s appeal to nativism and xenophobia is rooted in racism, the American Party downplayed white supremacy and elevated anti-Catholic and anti-foreign bigotry above racial hatred. “You didn’t have a large enough free black voting population to make any difference in electoral politics,” says Murray State University historian Brian Clardy.

Demographically, Trump’s MAGA movement is strikingly similar to the Know-Nothings. Overwhelmingly, it is made up of conservative whites of American descent, most of whom are evangelical Protestants. In the Trump-tilting Bluegrass State, almost 87% of the population is white. Almost half of Kentuckians who say they are religious identify themselves as Protestant evangelicals, a large part of the Trump base.

Like the Know-Nothings, Trump “appeals to the baser instincts of people who subscribe to nativism and seek electoral gain at the expense of marginalized populations,” Clardy said.

In the 1855 municipal elections, Know-Nothings took control of the city governments in Louisville, Lexington, and Covington. In the August 6 state elections, Morehead won the governorship, plus his party won majorities in both houses of the General Assembly and claimed six of the 10 seats in the U.S. House, according to the Encyclopedia of Kentucky.

The party’s violent anti-Catholic and anti-foreign rhetoric led to bloodshed in Louisville on August 6. Many blamed the anti-foreign hysteria, at least in part, on editor George D. Prentice of The Louisville Daily Journal. He supported the Know-Nothing ticket and wrote vicious editorials against “the Pope of Rome, a puffed-up Italian despot who makes people kiss his toes all day long.”

Unwitting mobs rampaged through German and Irish immigrant neighborhoods, killing, beating, burning and looting. At least 19 men were killed in the violence that went down in history as ‘Bloody Monday’, the encyclopedia says.

A statue of President Abraham Lincoln stands in the Kentucky Capitol Rotunda. (Kentucky Lantern photo by McKenna Horsley)

Most Know-Nothings had been Whigs before the party collapsed in 1854. Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was an ex-Whig. He denounced Know-Nothing’s nativist bilge in no uncertain terms.

“I’m a know-nothing,” he said declared in a letter dated August 24, 1855 to his friend Joshua F. Speed ​​of Louisville. “That’s for sure. How could I be? How can someone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress on degeneration seems to me to be quite rapid.”

Ultimately, the Know-Nothings faded away and ended up in the trash heap of history, where they belong. There is also plenty of room for Trump in the dumping ground of history.

Clardy fears violence if Trump wins and carries out his mass deportation programs targeting “illegals” of color. He worries that white supremacist groups and individuals will, following the White House’s lead, “attack immigrants, native African Americans, Hispanic Americans and others. Trump is going to encourage racists to do the worst.”

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