Political Nativism in New York State

olic church as a consequence of the flurry in England over the subject of Catholic emancipation. The hostility to the Roman church which was awakened in English pulpit and press by the emancipation idea found an echo in the United States, and political anti-Catholicism came fairly upon the scene at last. The warning was raised by the religious press against danger from papal power. It met very little response indeed from the people, but it at least reinforced the distrust which had been growing against the Irish Catholics and the church to which they belonged. The idea was broached here and there that the presence of Catholics in an American community might be a political danger, on account of the obedience that they owed to the Pope. The essential features of nativism had been brought before the people of New York by 1830 as a natural result of the social conditions of the time. The Irish-Catholic element had become disliked because it exemplified the most objectionable features of alien manners and an alien church. The dislike only needed formulation and a theory to become open and active nativism. The vague antagonism against the foreign Catholics which had gradually grown up in New York city out of existing conditions finally reached the point of organization in 1835. The impulse which brought this about was the publication by the New York Observer, early in 1834, of a series of twelve letters signed by " Brutus," under which pseudonym was concealed the personali...