What I Am Reading: "The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts" by John R. Mulkern

Of all of the minor political parties in American history, the American Party, also known as the "Know-Nothings" from the response they were alleged to give when asked about the secret party, is one of the most commonly invoked. This is a lay-up, rhetorically speaking, as the party was inherently nativist and the name gives opponents of nativism well-earned opportunities for word-play. Less commonly known is that Massachusetts was the state where the party saw its greatest political successes.

The party was a minor party at a time when the existing antebellum paradigm of elections between the Whigs and the Democrats, the Second Party System, was collapsing. The Know-Nothings and other parties arose to fill the gaps in the political order, and most did not survive the shake-out as the fragmented system re-coalesced into a contest between the Democrats and the Republicans, followed immediately thereafter by the American Civil War. The author of this book, John R. Mulkern, argues that the gap that the Know-Nothings filled in Massachusetts was a critical one, that of a party, the only party, responsive to the needs of the newly-birthed industrial order. This aspect accounted for the party's dramatic success in the Bay State for a few years in the mid-1850s, and its absence accounted for the party’s equally dramatic fall and a shift of its electorate to the Republican party. It is wrong, Mulkern says, to view the Massachusetts branch of the party as strictly a nativist organ, though nativism was an integral part of their platform and the author doesn't neglect its hostile and bigoted policies. Its pro-labor stance, though, is proposed as what led to its great success in Massachusetts, the most industrialized state in the nation at the time.

In order to understand the brief appeal of the Massachusetts Know-Nothings, it is important to understand the state's paradigm prior to their rise. For several decades, the state was dominated by the Whig Party. They ran a conservative, actively pro-business hegemony whereby the state's rapidly expanding industrial economy allowed them to coerce workers into voting Whig on the grounds that they, as employees, benefitted as well and should not rock the boat. The party preached prosperity for all, and a common cause between bosses, workers, farmers, and all other sectors of the economy, with everyone pulling together and staying in their own lane under the hierarchy. The minority Democrats were mostly ineffective in opposition, pursuing laissez-faire capitalism as opposed to the Whigs' interventionist crony capitalism. This establishment perpetuated itself for a time, but was not able to outrun the social costs of rapid industrialization: the crowded, unsafe, unhealthy cities, the underpaid and powerless workers, uprooted from their traditional trades and forced to roam across the state in search of work, the tension from the influx of immigrants. The Whigs pursued some morality-based social policies (the construction of insane asylums and the like) but were resistant to anything that would loosen their grip on political or economic power, such as repealing the poll tax, enacting a secret ballot, or instituting a 10-hour workday. Tensions simmered.

Discontent first boiled over in 1850. After the Whigs won with only a plurality in 1848, their enemies smelled blood, and the Democrats and the Free Soil Party, a group of mostly upscale abolitionists, ran joint tickets in the 1850 legislative elections. Much of the credit for the negotiation and organization of this Coalition goes to Free Soil leader Henry Wilson, one of that movement's most deft and pragmatic politicians, who started life as a shoemaker in a small town and eventually went on to be Ulysses S. Grant's Vice President. When in office, the Coalition had some successes, including putting Charles Sumner into the Senate (as this was the most viable place to debate the slavery issue) and enacting some state-level reforms, including a secret ballot and a general procedure for creating corporations (as opposed to having each one chartered by a friendly legislature). However, they let their own largely-agrarian base down by failing to reapportion the legislature in their favor, and failing to otherwise break the concentration of power in Boston by, among other things, moving the state capitol to Worcester, which would have made the rest of Central Massachusetts history very interesting indeed. The coalition survived into a second term by championing the 10-hour workweek, but proceeded to renege on this promise. Unable to transcend the agendas of the two party's respective bases, the coalition lost power in the 1852 elections.

In addition to the coalition's successful reforms, they had called a constitutional convention for 1853 to reform the state's electoral process, which was biased toward Whig power by electing legislators by towns and requiring election by majority, determined by either successive runoffs (for legislative races) or by legislative vote (for statewide races). The Whigs, seeing which way the wind was blowing, took up some of the reforms, including the switch to a district-based legislature over expanding the use (if I understand correctly) of town-based elections, which the agrarian Democrats (especially the more radical Locofoco wing, as opposed to the more copasetic and patronage-based Hunker wing) supported and placed on the ballot. Eventually, the constitution's proposals were decisively rejected at the ballot box.

The Free Soil party had their ideological niche, and the Democrats, even the Locofocos, focused mainly on their agrarian and their Irish bases. Neither had formulated an agenda to appeal to the new working-class vote, and the Whigs still just preached the status quo on that subject. However, at that time, the American Party was rising as a political force. The book doesn't have much to say about the origins of the party itself, as the party was a national phenomenon and the book focuses on Massachusetts, but it spread rapidly in 1853. The party's two distinguishing traits at the beginning were its focus on a nativist agenda, and its secrecy. The party practiced "dark lantern" politics, with all organizational meetings conducted in secret, and membership in a locally-based lodge necessary for participation. The party did not publish platforms or hold rallies. This secrecy was condemned by its opponents as anti-democratic, but if anything the strong lodge system and the institutional feedback that lodges were able to give on the party's platform and nominees, even if out of the public eye, made the party more susceptible to grassroots feedback than its rivals.

The party's single-issue focus on nativism was soon diluted by political opportunists who viewed a rising force as a vehicle to move their own agendas, in a positive feedback loop where more groups joined to graft their niche electorates onto a larger one. The Free Soil Party was moribund by now in the face of obvious electoral limitations, so some of its leaders such as Henry Wilson joined. Prohibitionists, similarly, had no other parties to turn to, and they joined as well. The party's membership grew as members of the lodges pledged to vote for the ticket sight unseen. The party was the only game in town for the many people dissatisfied with the existing system, and was helped along by a troubled economy at the time (inflation from the California gold rush). The Know-Nothings shocked everyone by winning overwhelmingly in 1854, carrying all statewide offices and all but three seats in the legislature. Their votes were concentrated especially in industrial towns and working-class neighborhoods, and Mulkern runs through the election results and concludes that economic discontent was the only thing that could have fueled this victory; not just slavery, not just nativism, not just a backlash of Coalition voters against the Irish who defeated them.

The new delegation, much derided by their social betters, reflected the party's demographics. Many were from industrial backgrounds; they caused a temporary reduction in lawyers and merchants in the legislature from their anti-elite vote, and a permanent reduction in the farmers and fishermen, reflecting the state's changing economy. Everything was inchoate as the new legislature took its seats, the historians that Mulkern contradicts weren't the only ones with divergent views of the reasons for the Know-Nothings' victory. Their Governor, an opportunistic formerly-Whig merchant from Boston named Henry Gardner, thought that the party's future was in nativism. He had one eye on the American Party national scene anyway. He gave some sops to the party's other constituencies, though he was often at odds with the Free Soil veterans, and Henry Wilson had to outmaneuver him to claim a Senate seat (making a brief and temporary foray into nativism to do so). On one hand, the party in its first term passed a bunch of oppressive nativist laws (including dismissing Irish militia units and state workers, horrifically deporting "paupers" to their country of origin, and banning the teaching of foreign language), as nativism was its one common denominator. On the other hand, the Free Soilers were the best politicians that the inexperienced group had, and the result was a series of abolitionist laws (including forbidding state authorities from assisting in slave hunts). The factions were all still interested in working together at this point, and also passed were a draconian prohibitionist law, and the passing of the Coalition's former constitutional amendment proposals on to public referendum, including those on electoral reform that were "the most significant expansion of democratic government in the constitutional history of Massachusetts." (p. 106). These were ratified by the voters. They also passed some present-pleasing reform laws such as the abolition of debtor's prisons and the right of married women to divorce or own their own property.

Fittingly, their original sin, nativism, was what came back to bite them in the end. In addition to their discriminatory and cruel laws, the legislature also formed a "Joint Special Committee on the Inspection of Nunneries and Convents." This Nunnery Committee combined overzealous and abusive pursuit of its task with louche, corrupt public behavior, and quickly became a public scandal. This scandal and the disrepute that it threw the nativist cause into was part of the reason that the Free Soil faction decided to go big or go home, and try to gain power in the party at the expensive of the "Native American" faction that focused on nativist policies. Henry Wilson, having gained his Senate seat, toned down the nativism and encouraged the rest of the party to do the same. This led to a rupture after the national-level American Party condemned the Massachusetts leadership, and produced a pro-southern platform at its national convention. Wilson and the former Free Soilers bolted to pursue fusion with other anti-slavery and abolitionist parties. They had more success at this than the last time this was attempted, prior to the Coalition days, and many of the former Free Soil members, largely elites who did not like the Know-Nothings anyway, joined the Republicans.

However, the handoff wasn't flawless: Gardner, more of a Native American anyway, kept the party alive (though he too had split with the national level, their platform too pro-Slave Power for even him) and ran for another term as Governor in 1855. This election was thus a four-way split between the Know-Nothing incumbent, a Republican challenger, the Democratic perennial candidate, and a rump Whig candidate, for those members of the old order who had not cottoned to either the Know-Nothings or the Republicans.

Gardner was re-elected, partially through the strength of the personal patronage machine he had built up. However, this was a pyrrhic victory. Gardner's takeover spelled the doom of the party, as it was bereft of a positive platform and his fastening of a patronage machine superseded the lodge system that had provided a direct connection to the grassroots. Mulkern invokes the "iron law of oligarchy" to explain the concentration of power in the hands of the party's elite. Much of the legislative delegation was swept out in favor of fusion tickets with Democrats and Republicans who promised Gardner their support, a return of professional politicians to the legislature. The Americans held on to power on paper, but popular momentum was clearly with the Republicans.

Next came plotting. There was a brief rapprochement with the national-level party, but this collapsed again after Millard Fillmore was nominated on a pro-southern ticket in 1856, with no Vice Presidential nomination for Gardner. Instead, he started dealing with the Republicans, and amid a dizzying array of conventions, walk-outs, rump conventions, and walk-outs from rump conventions, the Gardner machine ended up supporting the John C. Frémont ticket in exchange for the Republican nomination for Governor, after his Senate option was also foreclosed upon by Sumner's popularity in the aftermath of his caning by Preston Brooks. The Native American faction was not pleased about this, as many of them leaned toward Fillmore. The Republicans carried Massachusetts decisively, with victory for both Gardner and Frémont. The statistics point to clear Know-Nothing support for the Republican ticket, helped along by sectional feelings (and the increased prominence of abolitionism, especially in Massachusetts after Sumner's caning), but also to the party's sops to nativism.

Despite another victory for Gardner, almost as big as his first two years earlier, this was precisely the same elite wheeling-and-dealing that the original Know-Nothing vote had mobilized in opposition to. It showed in enthusiasm, as non-Presidential turnout was way down, and the Know-Nothings hemorrhaged support in all municipal elections after 1854. It also came back to bite Gardner specifically, as the Republicans who had stormed the legislature broke with the Know-Nothings, specifically on their pursuit of a 14-year residency requirement for citizenship. The Republicans were powerful enough in Massachusetts to go it alone now, because beyond just the increasing abolitionist vote, they also had their own support on grounds of (more moderate) nativism and had attracted the temperance voters. Gardner doubled down on nativism as the "only" option that he had, and tried to make deals with vestigial national American and Whig groups for support. Everyone had a convention or two in those days. However, his machine and nativism were not popular enough to carry the day, especially in the teeth of a recession, which Gardner responded to only with fiscal conservatism. He was defeated in 1857 by Nathaniel Banks, himself an opportunistic party-hopper who had run for Congress as both a Democrat and a Know-Nothing in the past.

This was, for all intents and purposes, the end of the party. A candidate ran with the American Party label in the next two gubernatorial elections, but received negligible support each time. With no party offering an economic message that the working class could rally behind, turnout dropped off in Massachusetts, and the Republicans took over the state for the foreseeable future.

Thus is the legacy of the Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts. There was a time when they contended with the Republicans for supremacy and survival in the emerging Third Party system, but their leadership's misdiagnosis of the reasons for their support led them to double down on unproductive and toxic nativism rather than pursuing a more explicitly pro-labor course. The Republicans became the party of Yankee Protestantism instead, as they appealed to a wider constituency and were abetted by a national party that embraced anti-southern sectionalism rather than be dragged down by the compromises that the Fillmore wing tried to make in order to win southern votes.

I've spent the last couple of years collecting histories that bear the imprint of the Trump era that they were written in. This book, from 1990, was not one of those, but I could see the subject receiving a new look in that context. They can serve as a microcosm of the Republicans themselves: starting by filling a niche, enacting good policies and bad, but ultimately taken hostage to a single man who used them for his own ends and pushed the nativism to the forefront when he thought that that was the easiest vote-getter. Eventually: left behind by history, frozen in time as antebellum bigots, with their revolutionary economic agenda forgotten. Make no mistake: the Know-Nothings were bad guys. However, though they inflicted considerable persecution, damage and pain upon the (mostly Irish) immigrants whom they did not regard as their countrymen, they also enacted important electoral, political, and economic reforms in Massachusetts and paved the way for the anti-slavery Republican party that, despite its own flaws and failings, won the Civil War and broke the slave power. This makes them, at least, an interesting force in Massachusetts political history, one of the state’s unique, if decidedly mixed, contributions to the national scene.