by Simon Schama
When Olmsted arrived in 1854, he found a society of conquerors and subjects. The protections of Guadalupe Hidalgo were already a joke. “Ignorant of their rights and of the new language,” Olmsted wrote, the Tejanos had “allowed themselves to be imposed on by the newcomers who seized their lands and property without a shadow of a claim and drove hundreds across the Rio Grande.” He had hardly been there a few days when he ran into a white woman who let it be known that she regarded the Mexicans “not as heretics or heathens to be converted with flannel and tracts but rather as vermin to be exterminated. The lady was particularly strong in her prejudices [saying that] white folks and Mexicans were never made to live together anyhow and the Mexicans had no business here. They were getting so impertinent and were so well protected by the laws that the Americans would just have to git together and drive them all out of the country.” That process, Olmsted believed, was already under way. “Last year a large band of Texas Free Companies plundered and burned in mere wantonness a peaceful Mexican town on the Rio Grande; 400 United States troops listening to the shrieks of fleeing women and looking on in indolence. This has passed without a rebuke and with entire public and official indifference.”
San Antonio was the town where Olmsted, with his shrewd eye and ear, tested the Texan future. With a population of some 10,000 in 1850, it was the one place where the Tejano population had mostly stayed put after the war, believing, after all, it was still their city. But what the increasingly mordant Olmsted saw was “the first of a new class of conquered cities into whose decaying streets our rattling life is to be infused.” The hard-bitten Yankee reporter became romantic, drawn to a place that, from the way it went about its days, resisted wholesale Anglo makeover. The “easy lollopy sort of life” others brushed aside as a barrier to hustling progress, Olmsted, who was not especially lollopy himself, saw had “been adopted as possessing on the whole the greatest advantages for a reasonable being.” In San Antonio he let go his puritan striving. Instead Olmsted’s enthusiasm rose to the sound of drums and trombones heralding the “Mexican mountebank” street entertainers who played three times a week, wearing glittering short coats and spangled tights. He walked among the crowds of children and adults, his hands happily greasy with tamales, letting the sounds and smells take him. The mountebanks were a brilliant contrast to the “thin local company” of tragedians who oiled their hair and flourished rapiers for the Anglos, to the usual accompaniment of “peanuts and yells.”
Though Mexican laborers earned a paltry eight dollars a month, Olmsted admired the way their lives in the town had stayed unchanged. The ruined Alamo already stood as a holy place for the Anglo-Texan version of their history, but surrounding it were streets in which house doors and windows stayed open; where cats, dogs and gamecocks strutted to and fro; and strangers like himself were received “with gracious and beaming politeness and dignity.” In the warm evenings Olmsted took pleasure watching the affection lavished on children as they walked or ran with the family promenades, as serenades would suddenly burst forth on a street corner.
There was a good deal of picturesque sentimentality and condescension in Olmsted’s portrait of Tejano San Antonio, and, looking for good news, he may have exaggerated the degree to which Mexicans made “no distinction from pride of race.” But in San Antonio he did at least find a “jumbled” America that he thought ought to be celebrated rather than abhorred as degenerate in keeping with the race theory of the age. And the big surprise for Olmsted was the part that Germans played in this cultural mosaic. Over a third of San Antonio was German immigrant, and there were another 5,000 in the settlement town of New Braunfels some fifteen miles away. Their Texan immigration had begun in the mid-1840s, when much of the south German countryside suffered from the same potato blight and tenant insecurity that drove the Irish to leave for America. Another kind of natural disaster had taken its toll on the German countryside: catastrophic flooding in the Rhine, Mosel, and Elbe valleys that had made land unworkable and wiped out harvests years in a row. Governments in both Britain and the German states had actually subsidized emigration in calculated attempts to lighten the burden of the poor on their middle-class taxpayers; a practice that hostile American nativists would characterize as “dumping.” Those same governments in Germany were equally glad to be rid of unwanted troublemakers from the failed revolutions of 1848–49: journalists, professors, physicians, poets—the usual crowd.
To Olmsted it was perfectly clear that it was immigrants brought to Texas by remote relatives of Queen Victoria (the princes of Leiningen and Solms-Braunfels) who showed the way to cultural neighborliness. While less racist toward the Tejanos than, the Anglos, the Germans had created their own world in town and country: reading the San Antonische or the Neu-Braunfels Zeitung; living first in log cabins and then in sturdier brick houses; opening hotels where the rooms were embellished with dark oak chests and wardrobes, and lithographic prints of American and German scenery on the walls. Olmsted noticed that some of the farmers practiced the kind of intensive agriculture that had worked in Germany, irrespective of the acreage spreading away to the Texan horizon, and rather admired them for it, notwithstanding the ridicule they sometimes got from Anglo ranchers. It all seemed a fine little version of America. The farmers’ wives churned butter and cured famously savory ham; the children were sent to Lutheran or Catholic free schools; agricultural societies, mechanics’ institutes, horticultural clubs, and of course Harmonie societies all flourished. All of which might have vindicated Benjamin Franklin’s fears that the Germans would create their own closed-off world within Anglo-America; impervious if not hostile to the political values embodied in the Constitution. But that was not the little Germany that Olmsted reported on in south Texas. Instead it was the Germans who best managed to square true American republicanism with liberal coexistence alongside the older Tejano society. When an ugly race riot flared up in San Antonio in 1854 and the sheriff called on a posse of 500 volunteers to clear the town of Mexicans, it had been the young Germans who had balked and shamed the Anglos into desisting, saying, “it was not the right republican way.” Even more provocative to the Anglo majority that had, after all, become American to protect slavery, were German farms producing cotton with free labor, even daring to send the crop to market clearly labeled as such.
For the Germans, being Texan was about two things: the possibility of a better economic life, but most of all about freedom. Olmsted spoke to a shoemaker who admitted that he had less “comfort” than in the old country but when asked why he liked it in America, replied “because here I am free. In Germany I cannot say how I shall be governed. They govern the people with soldiers. They tried to make me a soldier too but I ran away.” He planned to return to Germany to find his sweetheart and bring her back to Texas. Won’t you be arrested? Olmsted asked. Oh no, replied the shoemaker, full of simple American faith, “for then I shall be a citizen.”
29. The German threat—again
The shoemaker of New Braunfels was lucky not to be in Louisville, Kentucky, the following August, or he might have had his belief in American justice and freedom badly shaken. In fact, he might not have gotten out of town alive. On 6 August 1855, in Louisville, a riot destroyed houses and stores in the German and Irish sections of town and killed at least twenty-two immigrants. Some were burned alive in their houses; some were stoned, others knifed or lynched. Only the mayor of the city, commandeering churches as refuges, stood between the rioters and a much more deadly toll of victims. Like a similar three-day riot in Philadelphia in 1844, the violence was above all anti-Catholic, but anyone with a German name, be they Lutheran or even Jewish, was a likely target of attack. The Germans of Texas were fortunate, in the climate of hysterical xenophobia that swept through the United States in the mid-1850s, that angry Anglo-Americans had someone else to ride: the Tejano Mexicans.
The paradox was this: at the same time that immigration to the United States reached a peak, with 655,000 arriving in the single year of 1855, i
n hope of a new life beyond the reach of despotism and destitution, American cities were in the grip of nativist hatred. The percentage of the total American population constituted by the foreign-born rose in that year to 14 percent, a proportion that would remain more or less constant right through the nineteenth century until the restrictive legislation of the 1920s reduced immigration to a quota-monitored trickle. A full 50 percent of the newcomers in 1855 were German; a majority of them Catholic, but outnumbering the more highly publicized Irish immigration two to one. In cities like Louisville, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Chicago, they built bigger versions of New Braunfels, with German-language newspaper presses, German-language schools, and their own churches, which did not, however, prevent them from creating beer gardens where bands oompahed and steins flowed freely on Sundays, much to the horror of temperance-minded Protestants. Worse still, German Catholic schools replaced the King James Bible with the Counter-Reformation, Jesuit-approved Douai Bible.
For the nativist journalists and politicians who claimed to embody authentic American values, the addition of south German Catholics to an already swollen Irish Catholic population in cities like Boston and New York spelled the doom of democracy in the United States. “A Romanist,” one of those journalists wrote, “is, by necessity, a foe to the very principles we embody in our laws, and a foe to all that we hold dear.”
These views were not gutter politics. As early as 1834, Samuel Morse (painter and inventor of the telegraph, from Charlestown, Massachusetts) had warned, in a series of letters to the New York Observer, of a popish conspiracy to undermine the American Constitution. Morse was said to have had a Protestant epiphany in Rome when, refusing to remove his hat in the presence of the pope in St. Peter’s Square, a Swiss guard had knocked it off his head. The affronted head became hot with indignation. “Surely,” he wrote, “American Protestant freemen have enough discernment to see beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy.” Hordes of illiterate credulous Catholics were being mobilized—from Austria, apparently—to invade America and enthrall it to “a system of darkest political intrigue and despotism.” Collected as Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, Morse’s published letters did little to help his own run for mayor of New York in 1836, but they lit a fire under influential preachers like Lyman Beecher, the Presbyterian clergyman whose Boston sermon against the Catholic invasion of the West was duly followed by the burning of an Ursuline convent in that city. Beecher was the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and himself an ardent abolitionist and temperance reformer; all of which interestingly complicates anti-immigrant history, for the likes of Morse and Beecher and many that followed believed themselves to be acting in defense of liberal democracy, and against Catholic reaction, when they demonized Irish and German immigrants. The revolution they looked to was as much the “Glorious” English Revolution of 1688 as the American revolution. The latter, they reasoned historically, was the fruit of the former. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had, after all, removed the Catholic James Stuart from the throne and replaced him with Protestant Dutch William, and had been necessary for the survival of English parliamentary liberty. Had not Lord Macaulay (immensely popular in the United States) said as much? Sometime in the eighteenth century, Hanoverian oligarchy and “ministerial despotism” had irreversibly perverted that precious constitution. It had been left to the Founding Fathers to rescue English Liberty from the British and give it a second life on the far side of the Atlantic.
Now that liberty was being threatened by something much worse than a Stuart monarch: millions of unstoppable foot soldiers of the pope. Following Pius IX’s declaration that freedom of conscience was anathema, this army of immigrants was poised to install, through sheer weight of numbers, a Catholic absolutism in America. By refusing the reading of the King James Bible, they had begun the process of indoctrinating their children and inoculating them against the Constitution. There was worse. Ignorant, they bred like rabbits, lived in filth, and generated disease and crime. Already poor or semi-criminal when they came, they were turning American cities into verminous tenements where the rum-hole and the criminal gang ruled. They ran, ratlike, in packs to the polls, and because they were useful to the unscrupulous ward bosses of the Democratic Party, were rewarded with disproportionate positions in the police, so that crime and “law enforcement” were indivisibly part of the same racket. Worst of all, for Morse and Beecher and the much more powerful politicians who built an entire popular movement on this anti-Catholic creed, the Irish in particular were notoriously hostile (not just indifferent) to the sufferings of the enslaved Negro. Put all this together and what did you get? A whiskey-soaked, priest-governed, black-hating, socially delinquent city swarm, numerous enough to impose their will at the polls. Good-bye liberty; farewell America.
Catholics couldn’t win. Hispanics in the South were attacked by the defenders of Anglo-Saxon America as being altogether too friendly with blacks; while in the North the Germans and Irish were attacked for not being friendly enough. The tide of hostility that rose alongside the immigration figures in the late 1840s and early 1850s initially took the form of semi-secret “lodges” like the Organization of United Americans and the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. Though “mechanics” (artisans) and workmen supplied many of the rank and file, members of the professional and commercial classes joined in droves in the big eastern and midwestern cities. To qualify, members had to take an oath that they were Protestant and the children of Protestants and when asked by outsiders about their organization were to reply that they “knew nothing,” hence the name of what became the briefly formidable political party of the Know-Nothings. At their height they had a million members and elected the mayor of Chicago, who immediately banned immigrants from city posts. The Know-Nothings were pressing in the first instance to make the waiting period before naturalization a full twenty-one years, corresponding to the age of maturity. In effect this was to confine citizenship to those who had either been born in the United States or managed to demonstrate their unswerving allegiance over a long period. Paupers and criminals were to be denied admission, and some of the more extreme of the Know-Nothings wanted to deny Catholics both office and the vote.
They did not have the floor to themselves. Other high-minded members of the New England intellectual elite were equally resolute in defending the Crèvecoeur and Tom Paine tradition of asylum. In 1851 Edward Everett Hale wrote a series of articles for his Boston newspaper the Daily Advertiser in which he depicted the helpless Irish peasants, victimized by cruel landlords and British heedlessness, as standing with their backs to the sea at Galway, finally driven to the ships “by a charge of bayonets.” If the survivors were poor and wretched, Hale said, that was all the more reason for America to do everything it could to give them a new life. “The state should stop at once its efforts to sweep them back; it cannot do it; it ought not to do it. It should welcome them, register them, send them at once to the labor-needing regions; care for them if they are sick.”
In the early 1850s, though, this was a minority view. And in a peculiar moment of party political giddiness, Know-Nothing prejudices coalesced into an actual political party and program. The Democrats were tagged as the party of immigration, and as the party that would leave the slave South alone. Against them were the heirs to Hamilton’s Federalists, the (slightly) higher-minded Whigs. But Whig unity collapsed over the tactics to be adopted to preserve a nation bitterly divided over slavery. The Whig president Millard Fillmore, who had come to the White House after Zachary Taylor had died from his iced milk on 4 July, believed he could manage the pressures pulling north and south. His compromise was to admit California to the Union as a free state but allow federal agents to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, hunting down runaways and returning them South. Instead, Fillmore succeeded in destroying his own party. Horrified northern Whig abolitionists searched for somewhere to go. The Protestant intensity of the Know-Nothings—their devotion to abolitionism a
nd temperance—gave them a place to pitch their tent, and into that camp they poured in their hundreds of thousands. So the most peculiar political party in American history was at once violently xenophobic and the friend of African Americans. Either way, they were no fans of Catholics.
The head-spinning contradiction only makes sense through the Know-Nothing insistence that both attitudes were the Protestant way. The reformed religion presupposed an educated Bible-reading Christian in personal communion with his God—blacks most certainly included—just as true American democracy presupposed an informed, educated man in communion with his vote and the spirit of the Founding Fathers. Both were inimical to receiving orders from priests and popes.
Once a new Republican Party became organized on the ruins of the Whigs, committed to halt, even at the cost of conflict, the spread of slavery in the Union, the Know-Nothings had served their turn and fell apart as quickly as they had arisen. But they left a bad smell behind. The view expressed by one militant Know-Nothing, Daniel Ullmann in The American in April 1855, would turn out to endure well beyond the life of his quixotic party: “Where races dwell together on the same soil and do not assimilate they can never form one great people, one great nationality…[America] must mold, absorb the castes, races and nationalities into one homogeneous American race.”