In The Know Nothing Campaign against Higher Learning, I tell the story of how Steve Bannon recruited Donald Trump to an America-First, anti-intellectual crusade that, on Bannon’s own account, had its roots in the anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement of the early 1850s. A central irony of that story is that Bannon’s great grandfather Lawrence Bannon was an Irish Catholic who arrived in America in the same wave of famine emigration that enraged the Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings also attacked German emigrants, who, from 1845 to 1855, came to America in even greater numbers than the one million Irish. As is well known, Trump himself is a descendent of a German immigrant to America.

Unlike the Irish, however, and the Bavarian Germans, Trump’s grandfather Friedrich was Protestant, and the Trumps have remained so. I explained in the pamphlet how Bannon brought Trump over to Know-Nothing nativism, but until recently I knew of no reason to suspect Trump himself of being anti-Catholic. Things look a bit different now that that he set himself at odds with Pope, and The Guardian has published some important background information to contextualize Trump’s early years. 

The pastor of Trump’s Protestant Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, and the man who officiated at Trump’s first wedding, was Norman Vincent Peale, Positive Thinker and foe of American Catholicism who led the effort to block JFK’s candidacy for president. In 1960, Peale presided at a meeting of 150 Protestant leaders in Washington D.C. to lodge their complaint. Their 2000-word statement objecting to the very idea of a Catholic president was published in the New York Times for September 8, two months before the election.

The Guardian notes the precedent for Peale’s actions in the efforts mounted against Al Smith, a Catholic candidate for president in 1928, flagging the irony (in light of evangelical influence in today’s American politics) that the complaint against both JFK and Smith was grounded in the separation of church and state.  The Guardian usefully connects the fact that the Ku Klux Klan was active in the attacks on Smith with the 1959 arrest of Trump’s father Fred Trump in a clash between members of the Klan and the predominantly Irish-Catholic NYPD. According to The Guardian article:

The Guardian does not make the connection of all this with the most consequential of all Nativist anti-Catholic movements—1850 Know-Nothing—nor with its explicit invocation by Steve Bannon, architect of Trump’s own election victory in 2016. For that, you can turn to my pamphlet’s Introduction.