James Lewis and Charles Hart Til We Meet Again

This commodity originally appeared on Narratively.

Narratively On a stormy Monday afternoon in the bound of 1844, a stout, well-built, 35-year-old Philadelphia newspaper editor ascended a makeshift podium assembled from a stack of packing boxes. Surrounded by some 3 g of his fervent supporters — butchers, grocers, carpenters and craftsman, many armed for this occasion — Lewis Charles Levin had come up to the main market in Philly's heavily Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Kensington. He was there to rail against the rising tide of Catholic immigrants taking jobs from proud Pennsylvania-built-in Protestants, and the resulting "consequence upon American liberty" he vowed would surely come of admitting fifty-fifty more foreigners.

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Unsurprisingly, Kensington's Irish residents did not take kindly to Levin's provocation and within minutes he had more to dodge than the water pouring down from the heavens. Vegetables were hurled his way, followed past bricks and stones. Levin's livid supporters responded in kind, sending the Irish streaming into the streets, guns presently blazing on both sides. By the time they were run out of the neighborhood later that week, Levin's acolytes had set fire to some 30 homes throughout the neighborhood, even burning 2 Catholic churches to the ground. At least seven people were killed, with dozens injured on both sides.

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"The sights presented … were truly sickening," wrote John B. Perry in "A Full and Complete Business relationship of the Late Awful Riots in Philadelphia," published in 1844. "Men with their wives, and often six or vii children, trudging fearfully through the streets … seeking a refuge they knew non where … carrying away from their homes any they could pick upwards at that instant."

[explanation id="attachment_68024" align="aligncenter" width="644"] An analogy of the remains of the Nanny Goat Market in Philadelphia, which burned equally a effect of the rioting. (Image courtesy the Historical Society of Pennsylvania)[/caption]

While Levin was widely pinpointed for inciting the violence, in the days to come up the charismatic speaker accepted not a hint of blame. In a heated defense, he asserted that his followers had cypher only peaceful intentions until "an armed torso of ferocious foreigners" assaulted them. He profoundly exaggerated the number of dead on his side, blamed his rivals in the printing, and insisted a wide-ranging conspiracy was the real impetus behind the clash, while providing no existent evidence to back-up the existence of such a conspiracy. "Levin stood alone … in his attempt to justify the violence and church-burnings," wrote historian John A. Forman in his 1960 essay, "Lewis C. Levin, Portrait of an American Demagogue," describing Levin'southward argument as "characteristically emotional rather than rational." (A portrayal that more than a few observers have applied to a certain flatulent billionaire running in our electric current election season.)

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Some other thing Lewis C. Levin had in common with Donald J. Trump was his ability to continually defy those who predicted his demise. Philadelphia'south bloody calendar week was not, as some expected, the finish of Lewis Levin, but rather the kickoff of an up climb that would soon elevate him to the eye of mid-nineteenth-century American politics. The de facto leader of an angry anti-immigrant movement, Levin decried both of the era's major political parties, won a seat in Congress, sought a seat in the Senate and became an influential figure in presidential politics for several election cycles. Described by Forman every bit "a provocative and argumentative speaker" who "flung accusations, insinuations, and reproaches in all directions," he was abhorred by elites and made few friends amid Washington'due south ruling class. "A full general sentiment of disgust for the man, and detestation for his principles, fills every decent mind," reported one local newspaper, while at the Capitol, "his colleagues heaped only scorn and derision on him."

Yet far from the halls of power, Levin ignited the passions of an aggrieved working class, men who felt the America they knew and loved was endangered past an onslaught of immigrants taking their jobs, driving downward wages, and more often than not making a wreck of the place. While far from the just politician espousing such views at the time, Levin was unique in that, like Trump two centuries later, he "knew how to brand an open up and fibroid appeal to the passions of the populace," as Forman put information technology — and in this he "was aided by the applied science of the times." Not Twitter, but the steam-powered 'penny press' that had recently ushered in the age of mass-produced tabloids and thus, "enabled a ne'er-do-well like Levin to purchase newspapers and to use them equally cheap vehicles through which communication with the masses was possible."

For all his bellicose rants and doomsday proclamations, Levin was more than than a two-dimensional caricature of an angry white man. For one thing, he seemed content to juggle public prejudice with private tolerance. The noted Ground forces captain and author John Gregory Bourke, whose parents were sometime friends of Levin's in Philadelphia, surprisingly described "a very close intimacy" between the scorching anti-Catholic populist and Bourke's ain Roman Catholic father. (Although perhaps no more surprising than a candidate professing dearest and respect for his Jewish son-in-law while retweeting an image of the Star of David atop a pile of money).

Levin himself was no Mayflower descendant, simply in fact a outset-generation American. Even more confounding, he was built-in not to a Protestant family but to a Jewish one, with a father who emigrated from England. Even so his determination to preserve America for "Native Americans" (in those days the term referred to native-born whites) steered the class of his life while upending the politics of the time.

"Parties reeled, politicians changed and cowered earlier the fiery eloquence of this daring reformer," wrote John W. Forney, the Clerk of the Firm of Representatives during Levin's era. The passion of his followers was eclipsed but past the fervor of those who hated him. Eventually, he even drove himself mad.

* * *

Built-in in 1808 in Charleston, S.C., a boondocks that had a large Jewish population, little is known about Levin's babyhood. The man who would come to be known for his "superabundant physical energy" and "lusty, long-winded style," as Forman stated, left home at the age of xvi. He worked as a teacher and studied law, converted to Methodism and moved to Woodville, Miss., a bucolic settlement among the rolling hills of Wilkinson County, but north of the Louisiana border.

Woodville would not be home for long. Subsequently surviving an armed duel with a nemesis who claimed Levin had stole 1 of his speeches, a severely wounded Levin fled the state. (It was reported in some sources that his opponent in the duel was none other than Woodville'southward hometown hero, Jefferson Davis, futurity president of the Confederacy.) Levin next lived briefly in Vicksburg, Miss., where he was reportedly "embroiled in a number of serious quarrels before moving on again," at 1 signal spending vi months in jail for an unpaid debt. He married Ann Christian Hays in 1833, only she died just a year later. Levin remarried a young widow named Julia Ann Gist, whom he once said he met while each of them was shopping for tombstones for their deceased spouses.

[caption id="attachment_68036" align="alignright" width="320"] Lewis C. Levin, from an 1834 portrait by Rembrandt Peale..[/caption]

Levin practiced police in three states before settling in the urban center of brotherly love, where, equally Forman writes, "because of the Panic of 1837 and other factors, Philadelphia had lost most of her prosperity; hard times now seemed the rule." The sharp economical downturn made his adopted city ripe footing for the political movement Levin would soon spark.

An avowed American exceptionalist who wrote that "we stand apart from, and above all other people," Levin was passionate well-nigh three things: his home country, his adopted religion, and the plight of the working homo — a personal holy trinity that would spark the crusade spanning the residue of his life. Just like so many politicians, Levin was known more than for what he opposed than for what he supported. He became a passionate anti-duel advocate following his own misadventure, and also denounced the vile, immoral nature of the theater.

Merely even worse, to Levin, was booze, which he saw every bit a device to go along the working class down while supporting the corrupt aristocracy. To advance his calendar Levin founded the Temperance Abet newspaper. Liquor was the enemy of choice for his first major public spectacle, held in Jan of 1842. Seeking to raise the profile of his local temperance club, which boasted a scant 15 members, Levin staged "a spectacular bonfire of booze," wrote the historian David Montgomery. After confiscating a cache of alcohol from a saloon in Kensington and "gathering equally much of his audience as would fit into a nearby church," Levin lit the hooch afire and "demanded that the public be allowed to vote on whether taverns should be tolerated in neighborhoods."

He would soon plough his attention from booze-burning to Irish gaelic-bashing — a pastime that attracted significantly more interest than destroying perfectly good adult beverages. He sold Temperance Advocate and bought the Philadelphia Daily Dominicus, which became a vehicle for his anti-immigrant screeds, and he helped found America'southward first nativist political party, apace tapping into a pervasive sense of outrage most mainstream politicians had overlooked. "Lewis Levin stepped over from the temperance movement to take control of the American Republican Political party and led information technology with such skill that inside 1 yr it was in full control of the political life of the county," wrote Montgomery.

Levin's fatalist fervor went across basic anti-immigrant sentiment. He savaged Catholicism as an establishment, denouncing the "Roman Catholic slavery" that he believed kept the Irish gaelic in fealty to the Pope, and accusing the "odious" Vatican leaders of "an object so monstrous, and so bloodcurdling, and then hideous, equally the possible overthrow of American Freedom." The Holy Father, he insisted, was hell bent on flooding the New World with a stream of Catholic voters who would topple our young democracy at the ballot box, the finish goal an insidious plot to force Catholicism on all. He railed confronting "political wire-pullers" who bought the votes of these new immigrants, despite the fact that "these men had not been sufficiently long in the country to take lost the odor of the steerage of the ships that brought them across the Atlantic."

Levin's newspapers steadily gained him a zealous readership in Philadelphia, reaching a fever pitch with the so-called "Bible riots" that erupted after his Kensington market place speech. The lead-up to the violence was a dispute over whether Catholic public schoolchildren could be excused from classes that utilized the Bible (a common practice at the time) because they objected to the use of the Protestant King James Bible. Levin and his ilk vehemently objected to such politically correct coddling of minorities. The lethal clashes, during which some nativists vowed to burn every Catholic church in town, stretched on through the summer of 1844. While Philadelphia was even so blazing, Levin appear he would run for Congress under the banner of his new American Republican Party. Despite being arrested that summer on charges of inciting a riot, he won a big majority in a three-mode race.

The livid lawyer from Philadelphia striking Washington like a freight railroad train on fire. In his time there, "The House seemed to live from day to day in a country of constant and irritating uncertainty as Levin led a insatiable and exultant denunciation of the Cosmic Church," wrote Forman. For him, nativism trumped all bug. "In debate, he was well-nigh ever humorless, blunt in language, and provoking in speech communication." He passionately depicted a country "on the very verge of overthrow by the impetuous force of invading foreigners."

Levin was the only member of Congress to oppose a beak meant to relieve the sickening conditions on overcrowded ships transporting immigrants across the Atlantic. Information technology was clearly a losing battle, but in characteristic pomp Levin snarkily proposed the language of the law at least be amended to read: "A bill to afford additional facilities to the paupers and criminals of Europe to immigrate to the United States."

While he supported American expansionism, he wasn't crazy almost the thought that the Mexican-American War and resulting territorial acquisitions could lead to significantly more than Catholics among the U.S. population. "If nosotros look towards Mexico," read an 1846 article published in his Daily Lord's day (although non written by Levin himself), "we are menaced by the accession of eight millions of foreigners, not but entirely ignorant of our institutions, but ignorant of everything, uncultivated in mind, roughshod in manners…" Mexico, Levin surely would have agreed, was non sending its best people.

While Levin fabricated fiddling headway in Congress, in the widespread dissatisfaction with both the Democratic and Whig parties he saw an opening for a new, nativist tertiary political party. The contrarian congressman traveled state by state to build support for the get-go Native American convention, slated for Philadelphia on July 4, 1845. The new party'south platform included proposals to extend the period of naturalization for new citizens from five to 21 years and to bar immigrants from holding whatsoever political offices.

Rather than running their own presidential candidate in the election of 1848, the nascent Native Americans formed a cautious alliance with the conservative Whigs, successfully pushing Democrats from power and electing President Zachary Taylor. Levin seemed poised for college office himself, "but his megalomania, his ambition, was to prove his undoing," wrote Forman. From the showtime he ostracized even many in his ain Native American party by his refusal to compromise on any issue, and, by 1850, enough of his party members had turned confronting him that he lost his own Congressional seat.

His move, yet, continued to influence politics in pre-War America. Clubby "clandestine societies" of Native American groups started to popular up around the northeast; every bit fable goes, when i fellow member was asked about the party he deceptively replied, "I know nada." The breezy name "The Know-Naught Party" stuck. While some argued that the moniker more accurately reflected the party's grasp of major issues, the Know-Nothings successfully elected a mayor in Philadelphia, racked up several electoral wins in Massachusetts, and fielded competitive candidates from coast to coast. In the 1852 presidential election, they turned against the Whig Party, whose candidate, Full general Winfield Scott, had Catholic family members and rumored connections to the Vatican. Even more than objectionable to Levin, in an attempt to broaden the political party's appeal, Scott went after the votes of immigrants. During i campaign stop he fifty-fifty complimented the "rich Irish gaelic brogue and sugariness German accent." Appalled, Levin vowed that his political party would sway the election to Democrat Franklin Pierce, who was indeed victorious in the fall.

By this fourth dimension, Levin'southward years of constant confrontation had plain started to take a price on his mental health. Friends and family members grew alarmed at his increasingly erratic behavior, and he gradually retreated from public life. But when the next presidential election rolled around in '56, the eternal firebrand could non resist ane more rodeo. Dorsum on the campaign trail, he delivered a blistering indictment of the new Republican Political party'due south nominee, John C. Fremont, for his refusal to protect what Levin deemed traditional American values. "Americans are now fighting a new revolution!" Levin declared. "Wait at your Custom House and your Postal service Office. They are filled with foreigners." A spoken communication blasting Fremont at Philadelphia'due south National Hall (now Independence Hall) would be the last major public advent of his life and it was vintage Levin, catastrophe with Fremont supporters literally dragging him off the stage.

Later that year Levin suffered a complete mental breakdown and was placed in the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane. "For some time past," reported the Evening Journal on September 27, 1856, "Mr. Levin has been laboring nether mental aberration, and the worst fears of his friends have at present been realized."

In 1859, on a trip to visit family unit in Southward Carolina, he became violent and had to be subdued and detained in the railroad train's mail car. The man who once made parties reel and politicians cower was institutionalized a second time, dying at the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane in March of 1860. His official cause of decease was listed as but "insanity."

* * *

Fiftyast calendar week, just a few miles from the spot where Levin ascended a makeshift podium 172 years ago, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney strolled to a real 1 at the Democratic National Convention to speak ominously of Levin's motion – and its potential return. "In 1844, an early version of the Know-Nothing party held a rally hither to protest the threat that Irish-Catholic immigrants posed to the American fashion of life," Mayor Kenney remarked. "They claimed these immigrants — people like my family unit — were more likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. Does that audio familiar…? I'm telling you this story for one reason: it's happening again. The Know-Nothings have returned, and, last week in Cleveland, they vowed to 'take their country dorsum' this November."

Trump is by no ways the start candidate since Levin to ride a moving ridge of angry anti-immigrant rage. In his 1960 essay, Forman compared Levin to Joseph McCarthy and even Adolf Hitler, arguing that, "Levin is typical of the frothing emotional psychopath in political life, 1 who tries to comport people along a path of detest until his star begins to fade and his 'medicine' fails." While many local anti-immigrant ordinances were passed during his time period, when information technology came to the national level, none of Levin's major anti-immigrant proposals ever came to fruition. For all the fear and loathing he inspired, in the end a majority of Americans were in fact content with the growing multifariousness that would reshape the nation, and continues to practise so today. The America he and so passionately pined for was already a thing of the by.

However the echoes of Lewis Levin that Forman heard in Joseph McCarthy are unmistakably found in Trump, who told his own convention that "Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our state, are tonight roaming gratuitous to threaten peaceful citizens… They are beingness released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the touch on public safety or resources… History is watching us now… Information technology's waiting to come across if we will rise to the occasion, and if nosotros will show the whole world that America is still free and contained and strong… We volition make America safe once more. And we will make America bully again!"

One hundred and sixty-eight years earlier, an outraged outsider stood before Congress and declared, "The overflowing of immigration is sweeping its millions of foreign Roman Cosmic voters over the land… The past is gloomy enough, the nowadays clumsily portentous — but the future is black… Shall nosotros brand a stand at present… Or shall we surrender?"

Levin lost his battle, only the state persevered. He was survived by his wife Julia and his daughter Louisa, who soon married a Brazilian diplomat and converted to Catholicism.

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Additional sources that proved tremendously valuable when researching this article include Tyler Anbinder's "Nativism & Slavery," Frank Gerrity'southward "The Disruption of the Philadelphia Whigocracy," The Historical Society of Pennsylvania's "Riots in the Metropolis of Brotherly Dear," Unlearned History's "The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844," Villanova University'due south "Chaos in the Streets: The Philadelphia Riots of 1844," The American Catholic Historical Researches, Dictionary of American Biography, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, and Lewis Charles Levin'south "A Lecture on Irish gaelic Repeal."

James Lewis and Charles Hart Til We Meet Again

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