Read Online Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics by Terry Golway - Free Book Online Page B

dominant culture, and he advised his flock to align with other minority groups rather than assimilate the dominant culture’s values. “If the Jew is oppressed,” he told his fellow Catholics, “then stand by the Jew.” New York’s Irish Catholics certainly did not always heed that advice, but Hughes’s exhortation spoke to his vision of a society that included those who were not Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. “There is no such thing as a predominant religion,” he said, “and the small minority is entitled to the same protection as the greatest majority.” 50
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    There were approximately eighty thousand Catholics in New York City in 1844, an increase of some forty-five thousand since 1830. About two-thirds were Irish. Protestants in New York and elsewhere believed that American society was doomed as the foundation stone of Plymouth Rock eroded with the crash of each immigrant wave. Evangelical groups with titles that would have sounded familiar to Irish-Catholic immigrants, like the American Tract Society, sprang up in hopes of converting the immigrant Catholics to Protestantism, just as tract societies sought to convert Irish Catholics in Ireland to the state religion of Protestant Britain. A U.S. senator from New Jersey, Theodore Frelinghuysen, descendant of one of his state’s oldest families, saw no future for people like him in the new America of the 1840s. “The tide is constantly swelling and breaking over us,” he said, speaking of his fellow Protestants. “We cannot repel it now.” 51
    Not everybody was willing to concede the cultural and political field to immigrants. In New York, noted publisher James Harper campaigned for mayor in 1844 as the candidate of the American Republican Party, an avowedly anti-immigrant political faction that emerged in the 1840s, not long after Dagger John Hughes successfully challenged the Public School Society. Harper was a reformer, a member of the city’s mercantile elite, and a committed anti-Catholic nativist. In 1836, his family’s publishing house, Harper Brothers, had secretly printed the memoirs of a French-Canadian woman who told of all manner of sexual depravities in a Catholic convent. The inflammatory tract, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk , prompted a fresh round of nativist outrage against the city’s growing Catholic population. The tale was quickly proven to be a hoax, but that did not prevent sales of Maria Monk from reaching three hundred thousand, a spectacular publishing success.
    Harper and his supporters were far more determined than Senator Frelinghuysen to fight back against the un-American hordes. The American Republican Party demanded laws barring immigrants from holding public office and extending the naturalization process to twenty-one years, meaning that immigrants would have to wait that long to become citizens and, thus, voters. The party’s executive committee published a long tirade against “foreign influence” in the United States, stating that “these aliens and adopted citizens” cared “little or nothing for the purity and permanency of our institutions.” The “masses that flood our country,” the committee stated, were determined to commit “rash, blind and anti-American acts.” For that reason, the party pledged that it would “not appoint to any office . . . any person who is not an American by birth.” 52
    Harper cloaked his nativist rhetoric with the language of a business-minded reformer who vowed to bring efficiency and competence to City Hall. Not for the last time did the language of political reform and the rhetoric of nativism blend seamlessly into a single platform.
    Dagger John Hughes—not Tammany Hall, and certainly not the Whig Party—emerged as the immigrants’ champion in the face of aggressive nativism. Hughes bombarded antagonists like Harper and William Stone, editor of the anti-Catholic Commercial Advertiser newspaper, with long letters arguing that the promise of the United States was not