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Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know Nothing Conspiracy 1820-1860
Book by Beals, C.
Hardcover
First published June 1, 1960
16 people want to read
About the author
Carleton Beals
69 books2 followersFrom Wikipedia: Carleton Beals (November 13, 1893 – April 4, 1979) was an American journalist, writer, historian, and political activist with a special interest in Latin America.[1] A major journalistic coup for him was his interview with the Nicaraguan rebel Augusto Sandino in February 1928.[2] In the 1920s he was part of the cosmopolitan group of intellectuals, artists, and journalists in Mexico City. He remained an active, prolific, and politically engaged leftist journalist and is the subject of a scholarly biography.[3]
Early years
Beals was born in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. His father, Leon Eli Beals (1864–1941), lawyer and journalist, was the stepson[4] of Carrie Nation,[5] the temperance movement advocate.[5] His mother was Elvina Sybilla Blickensderfer (1867–1954).[6] His brother, Ralph Leon Beals (1901–85), was the first anthropologist at University of California, Los Angeles.[7]
The family moved from Kansas when Beals was age three, and he attended school in Pasadena, California. After graduating from high school in 1911, he worked a variety of jobs while attending the University of California, Berkeley where he studied engineering and mining. He won the Bonnheim Essay Prize and the Bryce History Essay Prize.[8] After graduating in 1916,[9] cum laude,[8] he attended Columbia University on a graduate scholarship, earning a master's degree in 1917.[5]
Early years
Beals was born in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. His father, Leon Eli Beals (1864–1941), lawyer and journalist, was the stepson[4] of Carrie Nation,[5] the temperance movement advocate.[5] His mother was Elvina Sybilla Blickensderfer (1867–1954).[6] His brother, Ralph Leon Beals (1901–85), was the first anthropologist at University of California, Los Angeles.[7]
The family moved from Kansas when Beals was age three, and he attended school in Pasadena, California. After graduating from high school in 1911, he worked a variety of jobs while attending the University of California, Berkeley where he studied engineering and mining. He won the Bonnheim Essay Prize and the Bryce History Essay Prize.[8] After graduating in 1916,[9] cum laude,[8] he attended Columbia University on a graduate scholarship, earning a master's degree in 1917.[5]
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 17, 2024
Carleton Beales' Brass-Knuckle Crusade is the most readable book I've encountered on the Know-Nothing movement. Beales, a left wing journalist who specialized in Latin America, dubs the Know-Nothings "America's first fascist movement." Beales justifies this by showing its evolution from cranks and evangelicals playing on religious bigotry to politicians exploiting anti-immigrant fears, the emergence of nativist secret societies and its apotheosis in the 1850s. The book's written as polemic, which makes it engaging yet hectoring, and Beales makes numerous avoidable errors (calling English actor William Macready Irish actor Charles McReady). Still, its fast pace and jabbing, sarcastic prose makes it an enjoyable, if not scholarly read.
November 23, 2015
NOW COMPLETED AND EDITED:
America is in turmoil. Many patriotic politicians warn of the danger of new floods of immigrants whose religious history is steeped in violence and forced conversion. These immigrants can never truly be American, for their beliefs bind them to foreign influences inimical to democracy. They are at best pawns of darker forces that would destroy us and our way of life.
Islamic immigrants in 2015?
No. Catholic immigrants in 1840.
This book is long out-of-print, and has many flaws, but the parallels to today's situation (AND YES, I KNOW THEY ARE NOT EXACT) are all the more striking because I know Beals could not have been influenced by them when writing this book more than 50 years ago. (Because the book was published in 1960, Beals MAY have been responding to the possibility of a Catholic president in JFK, but he doesn't directly allude to it at all.)
I picked this up for background information in regards to another topic I'm studying. I had no idea there would be so many places where the rhetoric of today and the that of 180 years ago were so closely matched. And the irony that some of the worst contemporary demagogues would have been targets then is not lost on me. I fear it would be lost on them.
If you can get access to a copy of this book (and you can, from the same place I did, which is to say, through Interlibrary Loan), give it a look and see what YOU think.
Above I mentioned flaws without being specific: let me say a little more now that I have finished. Beals is (as you might expect from someone writing at this time) casually and unexadminedly (the spell check says that isn't a word, but I'm still going with it) sexist and racist; interestingly, he also seems to be somewhat passively anti-Catholic. He assumes that the Know-Nothings were in fact correct about the anti-democratic tendencies of the Church, and has few kind words to say about the bishops who were prominent in these struggles. So be ready for that.
America is in turmoil. Many patriotic politicians warn of the danger of new floods of immigrants whose religious history is steeped in violence and forced conversion. These immigrants can never truly be American, for their beliefs bind them to foreign influences inimical to democracy. They are at best pawns of darker forces that would destroy us and our way of life.
Islamic immigrants in 2015?
No. Catholic immigrants in 1840.
This book is long out-of-print, and has many flaws, but the parallels to today's situation (AND YES, I KNOW THEY ARE NOT EXACT) are all the more striking because I know Beals could not have been influenced by them when writing this book more than 50 years ago. (Because the book was published in 1960, Beals MAY have been responding to the possibility of a Catholic president in JFK, but he doesn't directly allude to it at all.)
I picked this up for background information in regards to another topic I'm studying. I had no idea there would be so many places where the rhetoric of today and the that of 180 years ago were so closely matched. And the irony that some of the worst contemporary demagogues would have been targets then is not lost on me. I fear it would be lost on them.
If you can get access to a copy of this book (and you can, from the same place I did, which is to say, through Interlibrary Loan), give it a look and see what YOU think.
Above I mentioned flaws without being specific: let me say a little more now that I have finished. Beals is (as you might expect from someone writing at this time) casually and unexadminedly (the spell check says that isn't a word, but I'm still going with it) sexist and racist; interestingly, he also seems to be somewhat passively anti-Catholic. He assumes that the Know-Nothings were in fact correct about the anti-democratic tendencies of the Church, and has few kind words to say about the bishops who were prominent in these struggles. So be ready for that.
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