Mobs don’t think, as the adage goes, but they have often substituted for thinking by playing a leading role in fomenting political disagreements and deciding political questions.
Mobs fill vacuums. They arise and pose a threat in multiple circumstances: when government is weak or ineffective; where government actively participates in actions that a large proportion of the population perceives to be unjust; and when mobs and governments join forces to assault an out-of-favor group. American history is replete with examples of each.
In May and July 1844, the streets of Philadelphia were witness to combinations of these circumstances to deadly effect. In The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation, George Mason University history professor Zachary M. Schrag offers a meticulously detailed blow-by-blow account of how a dispute ostensibly over Bibles in public schools inspired deadly rage.
Although the tinder that sparked the so-called Bible Riots was—as is so often the case—alleged concern about “the children,” the debate regarding which Bible kids should read in school was actually a proxy for a more insidious divide in which “nativists” strove to deprive new Catholic immigrants of the full rights of citizenship.
The “nativists” of the subtitle is unfortunate. Although the perpetrators often referred to themselves this way, they were in fact much more anti-Catholic than anti-foreign. Some Protestant Irish immigrants lined up with the so-called nativists. Almost all the rhetoric was sectarian. And Schrag admits as much, even as he persists in using “nativist” to describe the Protestant side. “Calling opponents of immigration ‘nativists’ may give too much credit to their own branding,” he writes. “As a Catholic newspaper explained, ‘There is no disguising the fact at this moment, that the soul, and animus, of the Native American party is hostility to the Catholic citizens, whether of native or foreign birth.”
The Protestant Whig ascendancy was doing what all ascendancies do—protecting their ascendancy, and the political and economic privileges that go along with it. As Catholic immigrants poured into America over the following decade, the anti-Catholic vitriol would grow more hostile and more organized.
Among Philadelphia’s most vitriolic was the central character in Schrag’s tale: newspaper editor Lewis Levin, editor of the Philadelphia Daily Sun. In another time and place, Levin, a Jewish convert to a vague sort of Protestant Christianity, might have been a candidate to lead a crusade in support of religious toleration. But as it was, Levin’s journalism left no doubt that the target was not foreigners in general, but the Papists who had left a trail of “blood-prints; human victims; civil wars; tortures; burnings; fire; desolation” wherever they wielded political power. Levin was determined they would not wield that power in Philadelphia.