OKLA. CITY — The late Richard Hofstadter was a professor of American History at Columbia University in New York City. He also authored several books, one of which was titled “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.”
That work detailed how periodically in American history groups of citizens have been seized with the idea that the U.S. is threatened by a conspiracy directed by a powerful and secretive minority that is intent on taking over the country.
After the Second World War, the John Birch Society attracted thousands of citizens to its membership lists by warning against the Communists who were imbedded in influential positions in our society and were taking their orders from the Kremlin in Moscow. The founder of that organization, Robert Welch, wrote a book in which he identified Dwight Eisenhower as among those Americans who were secretly doing the bidding of the Kremlin.
In the middle of the 19th century, when waves of Catholic immigrants were arriving in American cities, Hofstadter documents how some native-born Americans became convinced that the Roman Catholic pope had directed those immigrants to the U.S. as part of a plan to take over the American Republic. Proponents of that view included prominent politicians and other influential public figures of that era who often spoke publicly on the subject.
While some of those politicians may have really believed that the Catholic Church had designs on the U.S. government, it is possible that some of them fanned fears of the church as a means to secure votes from a gullible electorate.
The inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, we are told, often spoke and wrote about the dangers the Catholic Church posed to America, and claimed to be an authority on how the Catholic religious order of the Jesuits played in Rome’s nefarious schemes.
A Texas newspaper reported in 1855 of how the Pope had recently sent emissaries and money to Washington, D.C., to weaken the national government’s resistance to his plans. The historian quotes from pamphlets that were widely distributed at that time that spoke about how young Catholic girls were forced against their will into convents, and how the use of Latin in Catholic rituals allowed priests to give instructions to their congregants in a language that Americans could not understand.
And when a contingent of Irish Catholic conscripts known as the “St. Patrick’s Battalion” defected to the Mexican Army during the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, it was argued that that occurrence demonstrated that Catholics’ ultimate loyalty was to Rome and not to America.
The arrival of Muslim immigrants to the U.S. in recent decades is inspiring a somewhat similar wave of paranoid beliefs about the Islamic faith and those who practice it. There have been reports in the Oklahoma media that American Muslims have a plan to impose the Sharia legal code that is in place in many Muslim countries on the American legal system.
And some Oklahoma political leaders have publicly expressed an animus to Islam that is reminiscent of attacks made on Catholicism by leaders in the 19th century. Several Oklahoma politicians made a point of refusing to accept a copy of the Koran that had been offered to them by the state’s Muslims.
After a Muslim physician shot several people on a military base in Texas, an individual was interviewed on an Oklahoma City television station who said that all followers of Islam should be immediately dismissed from the U.S. military since they are not loyal to this country.
In time, such pronouncements will be seen as being just as foolish and shortsighted as the anti-Catholic statements that were chronicled by Richard Hofstadter.
WILLIAM F. O’BRIEN is an Oklahoma City attorney.
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