Michael’s Reviews > The Party Of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement > Status Update

It was only a few days after the Oklahoma City bombing that most Americans became aware of a strange new presence in their midst. The revelation that the bomb had been detonated by home-grown terrorists, not some band of sinister foreigners, led to news stories about groups of heavily armed people in camouflage uniform, often meeting in secret, practicing military maneuvers in the countryside near their towns.

In the end, the man who offered the victims of earlier antialein crusades a program that pinned the alien, un-American label on the former oppressors, fell victim himself to the charge of alien, un-American activity.

In the tumultuous 1920s, the setting was right for traditional nativism's last stand. The vehicle was a fraternal organization, a secret society, a movement reminiscent in many ways of the "patriotic" orders of the 1850s and 1890. But it owed its name and its liturgy to a very different source. It was the Ku Klux Klan.

The crushing defeat of 1856 was a blow to nativists in New York, but to the men who had led the Know Nothing movement in New England it was a fitting climax to a party that had fallen from grace. In Massachusetts, nativism won its greatest victories, yet it was there that the national order had found its angriest critics.

"No potatoes." In that simple statement buried in a somber report from Galway lay the central fact of an economic catastrophe. For so many in Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere, no potatoes meant famine, and famine brought with it unspeakable suffering.