By latching onto the invasion trope, Trump and his allies were tapping into a grim American tradition whose history predates and inspires modern iterations of both the white genocide myth and the great replacement theory. For some two centuries, invasion rhetoric has fueled nativist vigilantism and anti-immigrant state violence.
One of the early proponents of the invasion conspiracy theory was Samuel FB Morse, a prominent painter and inventor who contributed to the creation of the single-wire telegraph and Morse Code. A strict New England Puritan, Morse wrote a series of articles in 1834 that amounted to a blistering attack on Catholic immigration from Europe. Those articles were later collected and reprinted as the 1835 book The Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. Writing under the pen name Brutus, Morse sounded the alarm on an “insidious invasion” through which the Catholic Church sought to infiltrate and destroy the United States. Without action to stop new arrivals, the country would soon fall “completely under the control of a foreign power.”
According to Morse’s argument, Catholics could never move past their supposed allegiance to the Vatican, and were unable to either understand or embrace the spirit of the American republic. As a solution, he proposed a melding of the Protestant church and the state and an overhaul of the country’s naturalization laws, which had produced “alarming evil.” The Catholic immigrants arriving in the country, in his words, were ignorant, indoctrinated, and neither loyal nor capable of loyalty to the United States. “At this moment the ocean swarms with ships crowded with this wretched population,” he wrote, “bearing them from misery abroad to misery here.”
Morse’s militant stance against Catholic immigration made him an easy fit for the Native American Party, for which his writing provided an intellectual basis. In 1836, Morse ran as a nativist candidate in the New York City mayoral elections and lost. The Native American Party was often referred to as the Know Nothings — if asked by an outsider about the group, a member was meant to reply only that they “knew nothing.” Between 1850 and 1855, the Know Nothings became the fastest-growing party in the United States, and by late 1854, the party had grown to more than a million members around the country. The Know Nothings’ rise led to both institutionalized discrimination and violence. In San Francisco, a party member who became a judge barred Chinese immigrants from testifying against white citizens in court. In Chicago, a Know Nothing mayor banned immigrants from city employment. In Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Louisville, and elsewhere, nativist propaganda against immigrant communities led to brutal attacks and deadly riots. Immigration, the party warned, was an assault on the country, and so-called native-born Americans had a duty to fight back. “Rise, brothers, spurn invasion,” went one of the party’s songs, “let’s die or save the nation.”
