When did Republicans become the more xenophobic party in the north?

[Asenath Waite]

During the Civil War and the reconstruction age Democrats were the natural home in the north for racial reactionaries in the north. The GOP obviously had a Know Nothing nativist contingent but for bigots who were anti-black above all else I'm inclined to think that the Democratic Party was their natural home. What I wonder is how long it took for that to change. I know there's a cluster of rural historically copperhead counties in states like Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland that all swung R in the 20s and I've sort of theorized that perhaps it was Coolidge passing the 1924 Immigration restrictions, the Klan in northern states being much more likely to back Republicans over the state Democratic Parties that increasingly had a big city immigrant base that led to a realignment of rural northern racists.

It's also possible I guess that post-reconstruction there might have been some realignment on both sides with people who supported reconstruction and had been unionist during the Civil War but otherwise tended to agree with Democrats or weren't too happy about the GOP standing for nothing other then being pro-Business might have switched parties while some Copperheads may have gone over to the Republicans for nativist and protectionist reasons.

I'm not trying to start another "party switch" debate, just interested in this question and have been for a while.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Like 1860, after they had absorbed the Know Nothings.

Think of who were involved in the New York draft riots.

[darklordoftech]

Republicans were more hostile to European immigrants than Democrats from their formation until nativism toward European immigrants died down.

[TDAS04]

1850s

[1978 New Wave skinny trousers]

Not sure, but in 1880 the Democrats attacked Garfield for allegedly being in favor of Chinese immigration.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Since your question is in the North, the obvious answer is 1856, this is when the Northern Know-Nothings bolted to the GOP in outrage that the Southern wing of the American Party had taken over the convention and nominated Fillmore.

Lincoln was kind of like Bush in the sense that he himself was anti-nativist and curried the support of immigrant groups, while the majority of the party was in fact hostile to immigration.

If you expand it further, the Southern Know-Nothings like Vance joined the Democrats and thus in the Southern Region, the answer would be the Democrats at least in some states, depending on how the machines there interacted with or dependent on say the Irish at a given point.

Not sure, but in 1880 the Democrats attacked Garfield for allegedly being in favor of Chinese immigration.

And just a couple of years prior, in 1874, Republicans got hammered for some rather nativist and anti-Catholic proposals, which helped cost them the House for the first time in 16 years.  Also remember that Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, so it is not like there was some uniform pro-Chinese sentiment among Republicans. In fact, you could make a case that Garfield was just following in Lincoln's footsteps and pulling a Bush, meanwhile his party was decidedly not along for the ride.

I think the best way to do look at this is:

Republicans were the primary vehicle for nativists against the Catholics in the North until this got them into trouble and they put something of a lid on it. The fact that it keeps coming back is emblematic of that. The primary tribal jousting match during this period would be the established protestant groups being challenged for dominance by the rising number of Catholics, and this creating the expected political reaction thus. This happened in 1874 and 1884.

Democrats, already being the party tied to race politics in this period was fully willing to play the race card in any given context and this included the Chinese Exclusion situation, since this wouldn't harm them with the Irish and other European immigrant groups necessarily, many of whom saw the Chinese as competition (which also informed their views about African-Americans as well).

Southern Democrats, being neck deep in segregationist politics would also be rather anti-immigrant and would at times join with Northern Republicans, like what happened in the 1920s, to restrict immigration.

Gets back to what I said before about how the Know-Nothings split up. Southern Know Nothings became Southern Bourbon Democrats, while Northern Know-Nothings became Republicans. The Republican base being largely protestant had a natural preclusion towards nativist outbursts facing direct competition from the new arrivals on their party's home turf (the North). Southern Democrats had a natural preclusion about anything that would change the racial makeup of the country.

[1978 New Wave skinny trousers]

Since your question is in the North, the obvious answer is 1856, this is when the Northern Know-Nothings bolted to the GOP in outrage that the Southern wing of the American Party had taken over the convention and nominated Fillmore.

Lincoln was kind of like Bush in the sense that he himself was anti-nativist and curried the support of immigrant groups, while the majority of the party was in fact hostile to immigration.

If you expand it further, the Southern Know-Nothings like Vance joined the Democrats and thus in the Southern Region, the answer would be the Democrats at least in some states, depending on how the machines there interacted with or dependent on say the Irish at a given point.

Not sure, but in 1880 the Democrats attacked Garfield for allegedly being in favor of Chinese immigration.

And just a couple of years prior, in 1874, Republicans got hammered for some rather nativist and anti-Catholic proposals, which helped cost them the House for the first time in 16 years.  Also remember that Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, so it is not like there was some uniform pro-Chinese sentiment among Republicans. In fact, you could make a case that Garfield was just following in Lincoln's footsteps and pulling a Bush, meanwhile his party was decidedly not along for the ride.

I think the best way to do look at this is:

Republicans were the primary vehicle for nativists against the Catholics in the North until this got them into trouble and they put something of a lid on it. The fact that it keeps coming back is emblematic of that. The primary tribal jousting match during this period would be the established protestant groups being challenged for dominance by the rising number of Catholics, and this creating the expected political reaction thus. This happened in 1874 and 1884.

Democrats, already being the party tied to race politics in this period was fully willing to play the race card in any given context and this included the Chinese Exclusion situation, since this wouldn't harm them with the Irish and other European immigrant groups necessarily, many of whom saw the Chinese as competition (which also informed their views about African-Americans as well).

Southern Democrats, being neck deep in segregationist politics would also be rather anti-immigrant and would at times join with Northern Republicans, like what happened in the 1920s, to restrict immigration.

Gets back to what I said before about how the Know-Nothings split up. Southern Know Nothings became Southern Bourbon Democrats, while Northern Know-Nothings became Republicans. The Republican base being largely protestant had a natural preclusion towards nativist outbursts facing direct competition from the new arrivals on their party's home turf (the North). Southern Democrats had a natural preclusion about anything that would change the racial makeup of the country.

In response to the first part of your post, Fremont was actually married to a Catholic and accused by Democrats of being one himself, as well as a socialist and a feminist. Also that same year, a Democratic congressman named Philemon T. Herbert shot and killed an Irish waiter for being too slow to serve him, outraging Republicans and winning the praise of Southern Democrats.

In fact, Republicans were more than accepting of immigrants of a radical or liberal persuasion like Carl Schurz and the other Forty-Eighters. Those like the New York City draft rioters, however, held racist and reactionary viewpoints more at home in the Democratic party. This is clear in their attack on the offices of the New York Tribune, the nation's premier left-wing and pro-Republican newspaper.

There was some division among the New York Irish community, though, with Republicans clearly on the left and Democrats on the right. John Mitchel aligned himself with the Southern slavers in his pro-Democratic New York Daily News, whereas David Bell's pro-Republican Irish Republic made the case for liberty, equality, and Reconstruction.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Hasn't the Democratic party always tended to win immigrants?

[Asenath Waite]

I guess I should have been clearer in that I was wondering when the GOP also absorbed the more virulently anti-black racists in the north who would have explicitly sympathized with the confederacy. Like the Know Nothings were clearly a different strand of bigot then people like Clement Vallandingham and George Pendleton. The latter types would probably have remained Democrat for some time after the civil war (especially if you look at the explicit white supremacy in the 1868 party platform) but at some point their natural home became the GOP. Like I’ve often wondered if you can find direct links between them and some of the midwestern Taftite isolationists in the 30s.

[darklordoftech]

I guess I should have been clearer in that I was wondering when the GOP also absorbed the more virulently anti-black racists in the north who would have explicitly sympathized with the confederacy. Like the Know Nothings were clearly a different strand of bigot then people like Clement Vallandingham and George Pendleton. The latter types would probably have remained Democrat for some time after the civil war (especially if you look at the explicit white supremacy in the 1868 party platform) but at some point their natural home became the GOP. Like I’ve often wondered if you can find direct links between them and some of the midwestern Taftite isolationists in the 30s.

I’m not sure about this, but I suspect that parts of rural America that supported the union during the Civil War later came to see the Confederacy as having been the good guys. This might have been a reaction to Italian and Eastern European immigration in the 1920s.

[The Mikado]

Like everyone else is saying, sometime between 1854 and 1860, continuously to present. The entire existence of the Republican Party it's been the nativist anti-immigrant party, while in that era the Democrats were the pro-immigration party. The 1924 immigration law basically sealing off immigration from countries outside of northern Europe was a GOP action to try to combat Democratic immigrants.

While there were a few areas where immigrants voted Republican (Philadelphia up until the 1930s comes to mind) in most of them immigrant votes were solidly Democratic.

[beaver2.0]

I’m not sure about this, but I suspect that parts of rural America that supported the union during the Civil War later came to see the Confederacy as having been the good guys. This might have been a reaction to Italian and Eastern European immigration in the 1920s.

I think you have a point here and there's a very real phenomenon of rural areas becoming culturally closer than nearby urban areas, but I don't think the Confederate flag was really seen outside the south until the 80s, 90s, or maybe later.

[KaiserDave]

Since your question is in the North, the obvious answer is 1856, this is when the Northern Know-Nothings bolted to the GOP in outrage that the Southern wing of the American Party had taken over the convention and nominated Fillmore.

Lincoln was kind of like Bush in the sense that he himself was anti-nativist and curried the support of immigrant groups, while the majority of the party was in fact hostile to immigration.

If you expand it further, the Southern Know-Nothings like Vance joined the Democrats and thus in the Southern Region, the answer would be the Democrats at least in some states, depending on how the machines there interacted with or dependent on say the Irish at a given point.

Not sure, but in 1880 the Democrats attacked Garfield for allegedly being in favor of Chinese immigration.

And just a couple of years prior, in 1874, Republicans got hammered for some rather nativist and anti-Catholic proposals, which helped cost them the House for the first time in 16 years.  Also remember that Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, so it is not like there was some uniform pro-Chinese sentiment among Republicans. In fact, you could make a case that Garfield was just following in Lincoln's footsteps and pulling a Bush, meanwhile his party was decidedly not along for the ride.

I think the best way to do look at this is:

Republicans were the primary vehicle for nativists against the Catholics in the North until this got them into trouble and they put something of a lid on it. The fact that it keeps coming back is emblematic of that. The primary tribal jousting match during this period would be the established protestant groups being challenged for dominance by the rising number of Catholics, and this creating the expected political reaction thus. This happened in 1874 and 1884.

Democrats, already being the party tied to race politics in this period was fully willing to play the race card in any given context and this included the Chinese Exclusion situation, since this wouldn't harm them with the Irish and other European immigrant groups necessarily, many of whom saw the Chinese as competition (which also informed their views about African-Americans as well).

Southern Democrats, being neck deep in segregationist politics would also be rather anti-immigrant and would at times join with Northern Republicans, like what happened in the 1920s, to restrict immigration.

Gets back to what I said before about how the Know-Nothings split up. Southern Know Nothings became Southern Bourbon Democrats, while Northern Know-Nothings became Republicans. The Republican base being largely protestant had a natural preclusion towards nativist outbursts facing direct competition from the new arrivals on their party's home turf (the North). Southern Democrats had a natural preclusion about anything that would change the racial makeup of the country.

In response to the first part of your post, Fremont was actually married to a Catholic and accused by Democrats of being one himself, as well as a socialist and a feminist. Also that same year, a Democratic congressman named Philemon T. Herbert shot and killed an Irish waiter for being too slow to serve him, outraging Republicans and winning the praise of Southern Democrats.

In fact, Republicans were more than accepting of immigrants of a radical or liberal persuasion like Carl Schurz and the other Forty-Eighters. Those like the New York City draft rioters, however, held racist and reactionary viewpoints more at home in the Democratic party. This is clear in their attack on the offices of the New York Tribune, the nation's premier left-wing and pro-Republican newspaper.

There was some division among the New York Irish community, though, with Republicans clearly on the left and Democrats on the right. John Mitchel aligned himself with the Southern slavers in his pro-Democratic New York Daily News, whereas David Bell's pro-Republican Irish Republic made the case for liberty, equality, and Reconstruction.

Henry this doesn't make any sense. You are trying to use anecdotal evidence to claim the Republicans were more pro-immigrant than the Democrats in the late 19th century. This is a lie. The Republicans have been almost always consistently more anti-immigrant than the Democratic Party since 1856.

Garfield being attacked for supposedly supporting Chinese immigration doesn't make it true. Some Democratic congressman shooting an Irishman doesn't make it true either. This is individual anecdotes not broad characterizations. This is not serious historiography. If I said that Hitler was a socialist because some of his detractors said so, would that be serious or legitimate? Of course not.

As for your second paragraph. You are right that Republicans did not reject all immigrants, they were often perfectly happy to accept Northern European Protestants and Anglo-Saxons. Nativists believed that immigrants could not be good Americans because they had been raised on the "traditions of absolutism" (Catholicism). It was not about whether someone was a principled little-r republican, or a liberal egalitarian. This stuff was important to certain intellectuals and few else. It is a happy and glorious thing that thousands of European republicans and radicals joined the Union cause and the Republican Party, but nativist attitudes in the GOP weren't based on this.

But even this argument of certain immigrants being politically favorable to liberal democracy and therefore good and some not and therefore bad, is in the end based on the belief that certain cultures, certain races, certain religions, are incapable of practicing democracy. It reminds me of Nativists today who claim Muslim immigrants are can never be good Americans because of autocracy and fundamentalism in the Middle East. This is a racist argument. You should discard it immediately.

As said before me, Lincoln strongly anti-nativist, but he did not characterize the whole of his party and broadly speaking, the Republicans were still far more anti-immigrant than the Democrats. The Democrats for the most part wanted an open door to Irish and Southern European immigration, the Republicans did not. It is impossible to get around that. Does this mean I prefer the Democrats to the Republicans in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s and 1880s? Hell no! 1856, 1860, 64, and 68 are some of the easiest and most important election decisions ever! But the Republicans were the more anti immigrant party. Nativists largely preferred them.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I guess I should have been clearer in that I was wondering when the GOP also absorbed the more virulently anti-black racists in the north who would have explicitly sympathized with the confederacy. Like the Know Nothings were clearly a different strand of bigot then people like Clement Vallandingham and George Pendleton. The latter types would probably have remained Democrat for some time after the civil war (especially if you look at the explicit white supremacy in the 1868 party platform) but at some point their natural home became the GOP. Like I’ve often wondered if you can find direct links between them and some of the midwestern Taftite isolationists in the 30s.

Some of them in the 1920s, some more in the 1960s, and then of course some in the more recent period as well.

A lot of this moved on the growth of the urban-rural divide. A number of anti-Republican rural counties began to flip in the 1920s in opposition to the growing urban centric nature of the Democrats. This pattern accelerates thanks to issues like busing in the 1960s, but I would think the last of them were probably either in the 1990s or with the Trump.

[lfromnj]

Like 1860, after they had absorbed the Know Nothings.

Think of who were involved in the New York draft riots.

I still don't get how they didn't word the 14th amendment better with regards to citizenship.

[1978 New Wave skinny trousers]

Since your question is in the North, the obvious answer is 1856, this is when the Northern Know-Nothings bolted to the GOP in outrage that the Southern wing of the American Party had taken over the convention and nominated Fillmore.

Lincoln was kind of like Bush in the sense that he himself was anti-nativist and curried the support of immigrant groups, while the majority of the party was in fact hostile to immigration.

If you expand it further, the Southern Know-Nothings like Vance joined the Democrats and thus in the Southern Region, the answer would be the Democrats at least in some states, depending on how the machines there interacted with or dependent on say the Irish at a given point.

Not sure, but in 1880 the Democrats attacked Garfield for allegedly being in favor of Chinese immigration.

And just a couple of years prior, in 1874, Republicans got hammered for some rather nativist and anti-Catholic proposals, which helped cost them the House for the first time in 16 years.  Also remember that Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, so it is not like there was some uniform pro-Chinese sentiment among Republicans. In fact, you could make a case that Garfield was just following in Lincoln's footsteps and pulling a Bush, meanwhile his party was decidedly not along for the ride.

I think the best way to do look at this is:

Republicans were the primary vehicle for nativists against the Catholics in the North until this got them into trouble and they put something of a lid on it. The fact that it keeps coming back is emblematic of that. The primary tribal jousting match during this period would be the established protestant groups being challenged for dominance by the rising number of Catholics, and this creating the expected political reaction thus. This happened in 1874 and 1884.

Democrats, already being the party tied to race politics in this period was fully willing to play the race card in any given context and this included the Chinese Exclusion situation, since this wouldn't harm them with the Irish and other European immigrant groups necessarily, many of whom saw the Chinese as competition (which also informed their views about African-Americans as well).

Southern Democrats, being neck deep in segregationist politics would also be rather anti-immigrant and would at times join with Northern Republicans, like what happened in the 1920s, to restrict immigration.

Gets back to what I said before about how the Know-Nothings split up. Southern Know Nothings became Southern Bourbon Democrats, while Northern Know-Nothings became Republicans. The Republican base being largely protestant had a natural preclusion towards nativist outbursts facing direct competition from the new arrivals on their party's home turf (the North). Southern Democrats had a natural preclusion about anything that would change the racial makeup of the country.

In response to the first part of your post, Fremont was actually married to a Catholic and accused by Democrats of being one himself, as well as a socialist and a feminist. Also that same year, a Democratic congressman named Philemon T. Herbert shot and killed an Irish waiter for being too slow to serve him, outraging Republicans and winning the praise of Southern Democrats.

In fact, Republicans were more than accepting of immigrants of a radical or liberal persuasion like Carl Schurz and the other Forty-Eighters. Those like the New York City draft rioters, however, held racist and reactionary viewpoints more at home in the Democratic party. This is clear in their attack on the offices of the New York Tribune, the nation's premier left-wing and pro-Republican newspaper.

There was some division among the New York Irish community, though, with Republicans clearly on the left and Democrats on the right. John Mitchel aligned himself with the Southern slavers in his pro-Democratic New York Daily News, whereas David Bell's pro-Republican Irish Republic made the case for liberty, equality, and Reconstruction.

Henry this doesn't make any sense. You are trying to use anecdotal evidence to claim the Republicans were more pro-immigrant than the Democrats in the late 19th century. This is a lie. The Republicans have been almost always consistently more anti-immigrant than the Democratic Party since 1856.

Garfield being attacked for supposedly supporting Chinese immigration doesn't make it true. Some Democratic congressman shooting an Irishman doesn't make it true either. This is individual anecdotes not broad characterizations. This is not serious historiography. If I said that Hitler was a socialist because some of his detractors said so, would that be serious or legitimate? Of course not.

As for your second paragraph. You are right that Republicans did not reject all immigrants, they were often perfectly happy to accept Northern European Protestants and Anglo-Saxons. Nativists believed that immigrants could not be good Americans because they had been raised on the "traditions of absolutism" (Catholicism). It was not about whether someone was a principled little-r republican, or a liberal egalitarian. This stuff was important to certain intellectuals and few else. It is a happy and glorious thing that thousands of European republicans and radicals joined the Union cause and the Republican Party, but nativist attitudes in the GOP weren't based on this.

But even this argument of certain immigrants being politically favorable to liberal democracy and therefore good and some not and therefore bad, is in the end based on the belief that certain cultures, certain races, certain religions, are incapable of practicing democracy. It reminds me of Nativists today who claim Muslim immigrants are can never be good Americans because of autocracy and fundamentalism in the Middle East. This is a racist argument. You should discard it immediately.

As said before me, Lincoln strongly anti-nativist, but he did not characterize the whole of his party and broadly speaking, the Republicans were still far more anti-immigrant than the Democrats. The Democrats for the most part wanted an open door to Irish and Southern European immigration, the Republicans did not. It is impossible to get around that. Does this mean I prefer the Democrats to the Republicans in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s and 1880s? Hell no! 1856, 1860, 64, and 68 are some of the easiest and most important election decisions ever! But the Republicans were the more anti immigrant party. Nativists largely preferred them.

Fair points all, but I'd merely note that Republican nativism was not an inherently conservative impulse as so many automatically assume, but rather an outgrowth of Protestant liberalism. Many Catholic immigrants were, in fact, conservative traditionalists and thus melded well with the illiberal proslavery Democratic Party, which was only too happy to accept them:

Not only did Church officials perceive the Republicans to be anti-Catholic and associate them with the nativist riots that occurred during the prewar period, but prelates and priests also argued that the party of Lincoln represented the ill-effects of Protestantism in American society. Clergy considered the Republican antislavery platform and the party’s association with abolitionism to be examples of Protestant fanaticism. Although by 1860 nearly all Protestant sects contained an antislavery faction, almost all members of the Church—in both the United States and Europe—denounced abolitionism as a radical movement that opposed Catholic teachings. Catholic leaders considered abolitionism to be a product of Protestant liberalism which threatened to upend the social and legal status quo in the country. As abolitionists demanded an immediate end to slavery, despite American laws that protected the institution, Catholic leaders sought to preserve order by upholding the sanctity of the Constitution. Thus, prelates and priests believed that the Republican Party—the party of northern Protestants—endangered the stability of the country by advancing its antislavery platform. In particular, ultramontane clergy—like Francis Patrick Kenrick and Spalding—adhered to the belief that slavery remained a legitimate human relation that fit within a structured social hierarchy. Clergy referenced Catholic theology, doctrine, and dogma to offer an alternative course of action than the one pursued by abolitionists and antislavery Republicans. According to members of the American hierarchy, Catholicism defended national laws, protected the social order, and prevented political factionalism because it provided a central authority—the Church—to settle internal disputes. On the other hand, prelates and priests contended that Protestantism allowed for lawlessness, fomented social disorder, and led to political disunion because, without the acceptance of a central moral authority, Protestantism allowed each man (or woman) to become a law unto himself (or herself). Thus, not only did clergy oppose the Republican Party because of its perceived anti-Catholic stance, but prelates and priests also disparaged the party of Lincoln because it represented the interests of northern Protestants, a group that Catholics considered uninformed religious fanatics that fomented disunion.

[...]

Although the clergy in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri did not publicly endorse or campaign for a candidate in the presidential election of 1860, the majority of prelates and priests privately supported Stephen Douglas, the northern Democratic candidate from Illinois. The clergy’s antebellum experiences with nativism and anti-Catholicism forged a strong bond between members of the Church and Democrats. However, by the summer of 1860, the Democratic Party had divided into northern and southern wings, forcing Border State Catholics to decide between Douglas and John C. Breckinridge of the southern Democratic Party. Although some Catholics backed Breckinridge—particularly fellow Kentuckians from the western portion of the state—most members of the Church in the region supported Douglas. The northern Democratic candidate promoted unionism and vowed to uphold the status quo, which, to Catholic clergy, meant an adherence to the law and the preservation of social order. As Catholic historian William B. Kurtz explained, “Catholics’ faith and religious worldview, which emphasized stability over reform, also made them predisposed to favor a conservative and national party.” Douglas gained the support of Catholics because he advocated the policy of popular sovereignty to decide the fate of slavery in the West, opposed abolitionism, promised to protect the rights of immigrants, and promoted the sanctity of the Union by running a national campaign. For example, regarding the dispute over slavery in the western territories, the Douglas Democratic platform pledged to “abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States [the Dred Scott decision] upon these questions of Constitutional law.” Thus, clergy from the Border States viewed Douglas as the candidate least influenced by Protestant liberalism and most committed to the interests of the Church and the nation.

By midcentury many leading American Catholics held that Catholicism melded more easily with the hierarchical and illiberal culture of the slaveholding South than with the ultra-democratic and commercial values of the Yankee North. This notion of the South as a kind of “quasi-Catholic society,” flawed and superficial as it was, would soon spread beyond American shores and exert a powerful hold over the Catholic elite of Europe. As the United States descended into Civil War, many of the Catholic monarchists, nobles, and reactionaries of the Old World came to regard the struggle between an abolitionist North and slaveholding South as a mirror image of the longstanding struggle between liberal democracy and reactionary monarchism that had roiled Catholic Europe since 1789. The Confederacy, on this view, was a traditional, aristocratic society besieged by the modern forces of democracy and industrialism embodied in the “Yankee Leviathan” of the North. Eager to witness the dissolution of the American Republic, the Catholic elite of France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Italy, including many of the leading representatives of the Holy See itself, would prove among the most stalwart allies of the Confederacy.

[...]

Moreover, the view of the Confederacy as a traditional, aristocratic society besieged by a revolutionary and ultra-democratic North was itself a key article of Confederate propaganda during the Civil War. Eager to enlist foreign allies and shape public opinion overseas, the Confederacy between 1862 and 1864 funded an extensive agitprop campaign in Europe aimed at reinforcing the perception of the American South as a conservative, traditional society at war with the radical and materialistic “Yankees” and “Puritans” of the industrial North. Particularly in France, Ireland, Spain, and Italy, a central pillar of this propaganda campaign was the argument that the aristocratic South was, in terms of culture, religion, politics, and national origins, a kind of colonial outpost of the Catholic Old World. To help disseminate this message, the Confederate government enlisted a number of American Catholic churchmen, including Rev. John Bannon of St. Louis and Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston, to travel to Europe as diplomatic agents. But this propaganda campaign also benefited from the more informal support of a wide array of pro-Confederate American Catholic clergymen, including Martin John Spalding, the intellectual luminary of the American hierarchy, who sought to leverage their Old World influence into stronger diplomatic ties between Richmond and Rome.

[...]

The ultramontane assault against the secular world, however, rarely applied to the world of urban machine politics, where support for the Democratic Party remained a hallmark of immigrant life. If anything, the ultramontane revolution actually strengthened Irish-Catholic attachment to the increasingly reactionary Democrats, which amid the bitter sectional debates of the 1850s emerged as the de facto party of the South. By steadfastly denouncing abolitionism as an outgrowth of “the Lawless liberalism” that had convulsed Europe, the ultramontane Church legitimized the proslavery stance of Southern Democrats and further estranged Irish-Catholics from the reformist impulse of the Whig and Republican parties. In truth, the democratic-republicanism of Irish-born radicals like Thomas Addis Emmet and Thomas O’Connor had always mixed uneasily with the proslavery apologetics of Jefferson and Jackson, and in this respect the ultramontane emphasis on tradition, order, and hierarchy helped resolve longstanding cultural differences between aristocratic Southern elites and hardscrabble working-class Irish. When Charles O’Conor in 1859 praised African slavery as an “institution ordained by nature,” he voiced a sentiment that would have rattled his father, the former political radical, but hardly seemed out of place to the reactionaries who dominated both the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party at midcentury.

[...]

In 1863 Father John Bannon of Missouri, an Irish-American Catholic priest serving as a Confederate agent abroad, published a series of pamphlets in Ireland addressed to the local Catholic clergy. Intended to quell Irish-Catholic support for the Union Army, which relied heavily on the enlistment of immigrant Irish, the letters cast the American Civil War as epic spiritual struggle between the “all-domineering materialism” of the Yankee North—a society purportedly defined by vulgar industrialism, rampant individualism, and a tawdry ultra-republican political culture—and the “remnant of Christian civilization” that still prevailed in the rural South. The spiritual conflict between North and South, Bannon insisted, owed to the very origins of the European settlement in North America. Whereas New England Yankees were the spiritual heirs of anti-Catholic Protestant radicals like Oliver Cromwell, the planters of the South were descended from the aristocratic families of Catholic Europe, and retained many of the pieties and prejudices of their Old World ancestors. In an age of ever-advancing secularism, liberalism, and materialism, the Southern planter class, much like the Roman Catholic Church itself, remained a pillar of conservative Christian culture. "The Southern People,” Bannon affirmed to his Irish-Catholic audience, were “by race, religion and principles, the natural ally of the foreigner and Catholic.”

[...]

But perhaps nothing more strongly influenced the rise of ultramontanism in the American Church than the outspoken support of Protestant nativists, middle-class reformers, and urban evangelicals for the political convulsions that had roiled Catholic Europe. Covering the uprisings in Italy as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, one the leading organs of the Whig Party, Margaret Fuller, the Massachusetts-born reformer and litterateur, wrote glowingly of the Italian “cause for freedom” while condemning the backwardness and conservatism of the Catholic clergy. (She was particularly critical of the Jesuit Order, which she accused of being “always against the free progress of humanity.”) After nationalist forces conquered the Papal States and drove Pius into exile, a wide array of American Protestant luminaries, including Horace Greeley, voiced vigorous support for the Roman Republic, much to the horror of the nation’s Catholics. “They have plundered the churches—they have extorted money from the people—they have almost legalized assassination where ever their authority,” Hughes said of nationalist uprising in Italy. “And this is the phalanx recognized by Mr. Greeley as the Roman Republic.” Such objections, however, did little dampen American Protestant support for liberal nationalism. In the aftermath of the Roman revolution a number of leading European radicals, including Louis Kossuth of Hungary and Alessandro Gavazzi of Italy, made extended tours through North America, denouncing “popery” as a threat to human freedom while soliciting financial contributions for nationalist insurgents in Europe. Typically sponsored by leading American evangelicals, these lecture tours only reinforced the obvious parallels between anti-Catholic nativists in the U.S. and secular liberals in Europe. By the mid-1850s, the apparent links between European liberals and American Know-Nothings had all but extinguished the radical democratic strain of Irish Catholicism.

[Asenath Waite]

I’m not sure about this, but I suspect that parts of rural America that supported the union during the Civil War later came to see the Confederacy as having been the good guys. This might have been a reaction to Italian and Eastern European immigration in the 1920s.

I think you have a point here and there's a very real phenomenon of rural areas becoming culturally closer than nearby urban areas, but I don't think the Confederate flag was really seen outside the south until the 80s, 90s, or maybe later.

I think that's partly because it's only in recent decades that it's come to be seen primarily as symbolic of white supremacy. In earlier decades in a lot of those same places it would have been seen as the flag of a vanquished battlefield enemy and thus frowned on.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Many Catholic immigrants were, in fact, conservative traditionalists and thus melded well with the illiberal proslavery Democratic Party, which was only too happy to accept them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_United_States_presidential_election

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

If you mean to combine opposition to ethnic minorities into a single category identified more with one party or another, that's impossible to do for most of American political history because the parties interests diverged depending on the particular race and social characteristics of the minorities in question.

In the second party system, Whigs were (among other things) the party of middle class Protestant social and moral reform. This meant they were on the whole relatively more humane than the Democrats when it came to blacks and indians, but also led to opposition to what they saw an invasion of illiterate Catholics who would threaten the character of the nation. Outside the South, these Whigs mostly joined the Republicans eventually, along with free soil Democrats, and some new immigrant communities (ex St Louis Germans).

Still among the Democrats you could find plenty anti-immigrant sentiment also, leading to intraparty battles, in some elections splitting the party in two.  (iirc there was an antebellum mayoral election in New York City fought mainly between two Democratic factions over nativism.)  The 1860 split between the Democrats was mostly regional (North v South), but immigration also mattered. Immigrant communities tended to support Douglas, even in the South where most Democrats supported Breckenridge. In Connecticut, Breckenridge had the support of half of Democrats - those who held more conservative, agrarian, and nativist views.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

If you mean to combine opposition to ethnic minorities into a single category identified more with one party or another, that's impossible to do for most of American political history because the parties interests diverged depending on the particular race and social characteristics of the minorities in question.

In the second party system, Whigs were (among other things) the party of middle class Protestant social and moral reform. This meant they were on the whole relatively more humane than the Democrats when it came to blacks and indians, but also led to opposition to what they saw an invasion of illiterate Catholics who would threaten the character of the nation. Outside the South, these Whigs mostly joined the Republicans eventually, along with free soil Democrats, and some new immigrant communities (ex St Louis Germans).

Still among the Democrats you could find plenty anti-immigrant sentiment also, leading to intraparty battles, in some elections splitting the party in two.  (iirc there was an antebellum mayoral election in New York City fought mainly between two Democratic factions over nativism.)  The 1860 split between the Democrats was mostly regional (North v South), but immigration also mattered. Immigrant communities tended to support Douglas, even in the South where most Democrats supported Breckenridge. In Connecticut, Breckenridge had the support of half of Democrats - those who held more conservative, agrarian, and nativist views.

Thanks for helping answer something I asked a few days ago.
I viewed Breckinridge as the candidate of just Southern Democrats exclusively...

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

If you mean to combine opposition to ethnic minorities into a single category identified more with one party or another, that's impossible to do for most of American political history because the parties interests diverged depending on the particular race and social characteristics of the minorities in question.

In the second party system, Whigs were (among other things) the party of middle class Protestant social and moral reform. This meant they were on the whole relatively more humane than the Democrats when it came to blacks and indians, but also led to opposition to what they saw an invasion of illiterate Catholics who would threaten the character of the nation. Outside the South, these Whigs mostly joined the Republicans eventually, along with free soil Democrats, and some new immigrant communities (ex St Louis Germans).

Still among the Democrats you could find plenty anti-immigrant sentiment also, leading to intraparty battles, in some elections splitting the party in two.  (iirc there was an antebellum mayoral election in New York City fought mainly between two Democratic factions over nativism.)  The 1860 split between the Democrats was mostly regional (North v South), but immigration also mattered. Immigrant communities tended to support Douglas, even in the South where most Democrats supported Breckenridge. In Connecticut, Breckenridge had the support of half of Democrats - those who held more conservative, agrarian, and nativist views.

Thanks for helping answer something I asked a few days ago.
I viewed Breckinridge as the candidate of just Southern Democrats exclusively...

There has long been something of a WASP versus ethnic/Catholic divide within the Democratic Party, even in the North and you see this impact in the 1860 election for sure, but also later on as well. You see echoes of this to the present day, especially in places like New York and Massachusetts where Democrats have absorbed so much of the former, and yet still hold so much of the latter group as well.

[Orser67]

I guess I should have been clearer in that I was wondering when the GOP also absorbed the more virulently anti-black racists in the north who would have explicitly sympathized with the confederacy. Like the Know Nothings were clearly a different strand of bigot then people like Clement Vallandingham and George Pendleton. The latter types would probably have remained Democrat for some time after the civil war (especially if you look at the explicit white supremacy in the 1868 party platform) but at some point their natural home became the GOP. Like I’ve often wondered if you can find direct links between them and some of the midwestern Taftite isolationists in the 30s.

For a couple decades after the end of Reconstruction, the Republican Party was still clearly the less-racist-towards-African-Americans party, and actually came fairly close to passing a civil rights bill in the 1890s. Post-Benjamin Harrison, Republican presidents started adopting a "lily white" strategy of courting white Southerners (culminating in Hoover's strong 1928 performance in the South), but even into the 1920s I would say they were probably still the less-racist-towards-African-Americans party. This started to change between the late 1920s and mid-1930s, when black voters started moving into the Democratic coalition.

Although FDR was popular with African-American voters and promoted anti-discrimination policies in federal hiring, as I understand it the key inflection point for the Democratic Party was 1948, when Truman ordered the integration of the military and the 1948 DNC adopted a civil rights plank. Jump to 1964, and Northern Democrats supported the Civil Rights Act at a significantly greater rate than Northern Republicans (though to be fair, some of the opposition may have been more about anti-interventionist economic views than racial animus).

I'm not especially familiar with how Northern Republican views on African Americans and civil rights shifted during the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, but I think the Republican Party clearly became the more xenophobic (to use your terminology) party in the 1960s as Goldwater and especially Nixon sought to win Democratic voters by capitalizing on racial animus and opposition to civil rights programs. Of course, it was hardly a case where one party had a perfect record and the other was motivated solely by racism (or cynical attempts to win racist voters), and Trump was able to peel off some traditionally Democratic voters by raising the salience of "cultural" issues in the 2016 election.

[Aurelius]

Since your question is in the North, the obvious answer is 1856, this is when the Northern Know-Nothings bolted to the GOP in outrage that the Southern wing of the American Party had taken over the convention and nominated Fillmore.

Lincoln was kind of like Bush in the sense that he himself was anti-nativist and curried the support of immigrant groups, while the majority of the party was in fact hostile to immigration.

If you expand it further, the Southern Know-Nothings like Vance joined the Democrats and thus in the Southern Region, the answer would be the Democrats at least in some states, depending on how the machines there interacted with or dependent on say the Irish at a given point.

Not sure, but in 1880 the Democrats attacked Garfield for allegedly being in favor of Chinese immigration.

And just a couple of years prior, in 1874, Republicans got hammered for some rather nativist and anti-Catholic proposals, which helped cost them the House for the first time in 16 years.  Also remember that Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, so it is not like there was some uniform pro-Chinese sentiment among Republicans. In fact, you could make a case that Garfield was just following in Lincoln's footsteps and pulling a Bush, meanwhile his party was decidedly not along for the ride.

I think the best way to do look at this is:

Republicans were the primary vehicle for nativists against the Catholics in the North until this got them into trouble and they put something of a lid on it. The fact that it keeps coming back is emblematic of that. The primary tribal jousting match during this period would be the established protestant groups being challenged for dominance by the rising number of Catholics, and this creating the expected political reaction thus. This happened in 1874 and 1884.

Democrats, already being the party tied to race politics in this period was fully willing to play the race card in any given context and this included the Chinese Exclusion situation, since this wouldn't harm them with the Irish and other European immigrant groups necessarily, many of whom saw the Chinese as competition (which also informed their views about African-Americans as well).

Southern Democrats, being neck deep in segregationist politics would also be rather anti-immigrant and would at times join with Northern Republicans, like what happened in the 1920s, to restrict immigration.

Gets back to what I said before about how the Know-Nothings split up. Southern Know Nothings became Southern Bourbon Democrats, while Northern Know-Nothings became Republicans. The Republican base being largely protestant had a natural preclusion towards nativist outbursts facing direct competition from the new arrivals on their party's home turf (the North). Southern Democrats had a natural preclusion about anything that would change the racial makeup of the country.

To be fair, Arthur refused to sign the initial 20 year ban, negotiated it down to 10 years, then he wanted to veto it again but signed it anyway because he knew Congress had the votes to override.

[TheReckoning]

Is there a single thread under the History board that hasn’t been transformed to a party flipped thread?