The Know-Nothing Tide
In the 1850s, at another moment of American unease, the Know Nothings swept Massachusetts and won mayoral elections in Philadelphia and Washington on a nativist platform to “purify” national politics by stopping the influx of Irish and German Catholics.
.. “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”
.. American isolationism is an oxymoron because America is a universal idea.