290 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE NEW AMERICANISM 291 political parties in the United States. This freak was known as the American Party or the Know Nothings. It proclaimed itself distinctly American and opposed to the influence of foreigners in politics and education. Its text book, The Sons of the Sires, published in 1855, is a prediction of what fearful things were in store for us from the menace of immigration and contact with foreigners. It opposed all foreigners and foreign influences and especially singled out German skepticism, French infidelity, Socialism, and Jesuitism, as the chief dangers. The reader of this will be impressed with the mental calibre of the politicians who could lump all the foregoing together and see in them a common enemy. Many of the statements in this text book of Know Nothingism read curiously like the hysterical cries of our Native Americans today. Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Wise Wood, James Beck, Samuel Gompers and company have not improved on the propaganda that raged before the overthrow of slavery in the middle of the last century.
This party of pure Americanism carried a number of states and elected a number of Congressmen in 1854. In Massachusetts, where it won practical control one year, its representatives inaugurated such a reign of graft that it was turned out of office the following year. During this period the anti slavery agitation had acquired such proportions that the Whig and Democratic parties were seething with dissensions over this question. In many sections they split into rival factions. To distract attention from this fundamental issue that was later to culminate in a bloody contest between North and South, the Whigs of the South flocked to the American Party. The southern Whigs had represented the most exclusive of the more wealthy slave owners of the black belt and looked down upon the lesser breed of slave drivers, Besides the motive of obscuring the emancipation issue these Whigs had other reasons for their alliance with the new party.
Slave labor in the South prevented that region from getting a good share of immigration. What it received was in the main the lowest type of white labor from Europe, which was diverted from northern ports to southern ports by skillful management in the North. These defectives were thrown on southern charity and were a source of expense to the taxpayers. few German revo lutionists settled in southern cities but also proved undesirable as they quietly agitated against slavery.
It will thus be seen that the slave owners had a nu er of good economic reasons for embracing the patriotic American Party. In the closing years before the Civil War this party in the South became the representative of the higher aristocracy of slave owners, the shrewdest and best educated of the black exploiters who were the first to see the value of the Americanization issue for reaction. It is significant, therefore, that the native American issue in politics until its recent revival made its final stand as the instrument of a ruling class that lived on slave labor long after slavery had been abolished by other nations.
The issue was synonymous with reaction and used to aid a dying system of human servitude.
What are the facts regarding the new Know Nothingism of today? They establish an interesting relation with this same reactionary South. It should be remembered that the South still remains the one section least affected by immigration. The purity of its blood is undefiled by the foreigner. As slave labor discouraged immigration to the South, its peonage, low wages for whites, and brutal exploitation of blacks have constituted a barrier against the coming of the foreigner.
If one will take a map of the United States and the figures on immigration as applied to the states, and will paint those states white that have little foreign blood, he will find all of the South a white shade except Texas and Maryland. The Old South has the lightest shade of all, while all of the North and West precisely those sections that have made great progress in all fields of human activity stand out in marked contrast with the South. North Carolina has less than per cent of foreigners, and by this term is meant the foreign born and children of a foreign born father or mother. Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina have from to per cent. Louisiana, Florida and Kentucky come next to