Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A member of a
secret antiforeigner political organization in the nineteenth-centuryUnited States .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The "Know-Nothing" party was once a big deal back in the 1850s.
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They are getting more involved in taking over the Republican Party at the precinct level, taking it back to its Know-Nothing core.
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The Tea Party is a muddled movement that resembles the old Know-Nothing Party most of all.
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Many native-born Americans, particularly rural folks, feared that the Irish would never assimilate and racism against the Irish led to a powerful nativist counterforce that eventually coalesced in the Know-Nothing movement.
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Sectional disagreements over the morality of slavery, the scope of democracy and the economic merits of free labor versus slave plantations caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse, and new ones to arise (the Free Soil Party in 1848, the Republicans in 1854, the Constitutional Union in 1860).
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Bets are on whether the third party will be the Moderate-Big Business guys or the Know-Nothing Teabaggers.
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For a little education, they should call themselves the new Know-Nothing Party.
We don't tolerate racist behavior, Tea Party organizer says 2010
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In the 1840s and 1850s, amid dark forebodings about Catholic plots against American democracy, the Know-Nothing political movement sought to keep immigrants from voting until they'd been in the country for 21 years, withhold "grave diplomatic and political trusts" from persons of foreign birth and impose "stringent penalties" for fraud in the naturalization process.
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Amid economic anxiety, the Know-Nothing Party peddled bias against immigrants, mostly German and Irish Catholics.
Martin Nolan: The GOP Platform: No Muslims, No Mexicans 2010
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No one looks back fondly on the 19th-century nativist Know-Nothing Party or groups that opposed civil rights or racial integration.
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