“The alien and the Jew must be kept under control, too,” said Parkins. Hamilton knew that Jews were ineligible for membership, but had not read the pamphlet dealing with that phase of propaganda and was uncertain whether they were to be actually objects of attack, like the Negroes. In fact, it was not quite clear to him whether Jews and Catholics were to be lumped together with Negroes as undesirables or simply to be attacked whenever they attempted to control the government.
“In the little suburb where I chance to have found my place,” said Parkins, “the Jews are already invading business. They are bankers, merchants and professional men. They are crowding out the dominant Protestant element—the element that founded our little city and which still remains the bulwark of its morality. Not satisfied with getting a foothold into business there, as, I have no doubt, they are doing everywhere else in this country, the Jews are bringing their families into the most exclusive residential district and cheapening it. They are like the camel in the little story, which you have no doubt heard. It seems that an Arab in crossing the Sahara had pitched his tent one night near a beautiful and verdant oasis.”
He continued, with relatively few errors, the fable of the camel, who, having been allowed by the Arab to stick its head through the window of the tent, next entered through the front door, and then gradually ousted the sheik from his humble mat of rushes before the hearth.
“It was a mistake for our forefathers ever to open this land of the free to all the nations of Europe to use as a dumping ground for their worst elements and as a breeding place for un-Americanism and Radicalism. It is too bad that the American party, I believe that was the name of that splendid party that flourished in the middle of the last century, should ever have been allowed to perish; and, if I mistake not the pulse of the people, the revival of the Trick Track Tribe will, in effect, also resurrect Americanism.”
Robert remembered hazily reading of the American party. It had sometimes been referred to contemptuously by its enemies as the Know Nothing party, and the oddity of the name and the fact that it had been organized in Georgia had emphasized it sufficiently to make it stick among the other oddities of American political history in his brain. As they discussed the old Know Nothing party, little details of it came gradually back, and the resemblance between its platform, drawn up before the Civil War, and the present platform of the Trick Track Tribe struck him. One plank restricted all political offices to native Americans. Another would prevent persons swearing allegiance to any foreign potentate or power—by George, almost the same phrasing!—from office. A third would make it more difficult for aliens to become naturalized, extending the residence requirement to twenty-one years.
“The program of the Tribe is like the old American party,” said Hamilton. “Why, there’s even something about separation of church and state in it!”
“State’s rights” was another plank of the old Know Nothing party. But here was something peculiar—the old plank, allowing states to preserve institutions, had been drawn (Robert remembered it distinctly now, both from his American history class and from conversations at home), for the purpose of preserving slavery. Had Griffith and Lister simply lifted the old platform of the Know Nothing party? Parkins, of course, would probably not remember the pro-slavery sentiment behind the old states’ right plank. He was always misquoting phrases. He had a prodigious capacity for remembering things inaccurately. But, in general, Robert wondered, would it be wise to speak to other Northerners of the similarity of the Tribe’s program with the old Know Nothing party? In the South, he knew, it would be untactful, to say the least, to introduce a political party or secret organization as one that Abraham Lincoln had favored or that Jefferson Davis had repudiated. It wouldn’t stand a ghost of a show. But the old Know Nothing party, the object of which was practically the same as that of the Trick Track Tribe had been repudiated by Lincoln and, of course, by all abolitionists.
Parkins did not remember the pro-slavery flavor of the old American party.
“I believe the party actually elected a few representatives to Congress,” said Parkins, pursing his lips and coming as near as he could to scowling in an effort to remember. “Through the Tribe the American party might actually be revived. Yes, it could. If the American party had only triumphed fifty years ago we should not now have to face the problem raised by the hordes of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.”
Robert remembered that the party was active not fifty, but seventy years ago, and that at that time it was not southern and eastern European immigrants who were being opposed, but western Europeans. The aliens whom the Know Nothings referred to as the scum of Europe and would have disenfranchised were English, Germans and Irish.