More than a decade of Know Nothing violence and propaganda had a dramatic impact on the immigrant communities that were attacked by the nativists in the 1840s and 1850s.
To understand the trauma, imagine yourself a young Irish immigrant. You have fled the Famine in your homeland after watching family members starve to death. You arrive in the land of freedom only to see the newspapers brand you a criminal and to watch preachers lead upstanding native-born men through hate-filled prayers against your people in the streets of the ghetto you are forced to live in. You read about church burnings and hear stories of men and women who were beaten by roving mobs on “Paddy hunts.” Your religion is openly denounced in your child’s public school and she is taught that the path to salvation is cut off to her because of her papist idolatry.
You have the choice of hiding your identity and trying to pass yourself off as someone you are not, or walling yourself off from the danger and discrimination of nativist America and seeking shelter in the solidarity of the emerging Irish-American subculture…