This caught my eye the other day. ““The conspirators against
our liberties who have been admitted from abroad through the liberality of our
institutions, are now organized in every part of the country.” Another
well-known author on the same topic, I learned, believed that these
conspirators religious doctrines demanded compliance, with the result that they
were more committed to their faith than to the principles of American democracy
such as republicanism, liberty, and individual rights.
The author of the first sentence quoted above was Samuel
F.B. Morse, the inventor of the Morse Code. The second author I cited was one
of Illinois’s heroes, pamphleteer Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist martyr of
Alton. Our Muslim neighbors might be consoled, and their neighbors surprised,
to learn that the villains that excited
these views were Roman Catholics, who in Morse and Lovejoy’s day had begun
arriving in the form of Irish, German and Italian migrants. (I learned this
from “Elijah P. Lovejoy, Anti-Catholic Abolitionist” by John A. Duerk in the
current number (Summer 2015) of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical
Society.)
The reminder than the U.S. has survived such
deliriums with its liberties more or less intact is cheering. The fact that
such deliriums keep recurring, that they are apparently born of resident
viruses that have infected our body politic from the first, is not.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2015.
