Protestant Irish immigrants supplied much of the hardest anti-Catholic nativist organizing.

Evidence

Few Americans hated the Catholic Irish more than did the Protestant Irish. They had composed most of the membership of the American Protestant Association ever since its formation in the 1850’s, and about 1870 they transplanted the more bellicose Loyal Orange Institution from Great Britain. To these fraternal orders was added the politically conscious British-American Association in 1887. “It is the honor of the Anglo-American and British-American organizations,” declared a nativist journal, “that they are the only foreign-born element that can be regarded in any sense as an organized part of this movement.” … The fact that the foreign societies gave less attention than the native ones to immigration restriction did not stand in the way of an entente between the two types, though the native-born groups sometimes fretted that their allies could not become “wholehearted Americans.” — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 371

Categorization

• QUESTION: Nativism by non-native groups complicates the tidy native-versus-foreigner frame; worth checking whether this recurs in racial nativism later.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-Catholic nativism peaked after mass Catholic immigration, not before it — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 287; Anti-Catholic nativism required a specific religious crisis beyond general economic tension — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 352

Broader Connections

• Anti-Catholic nativism required a specific religious crisis beyond general economic tension #complicates (0.75) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 352
• Anti-Catholic nativism peaked after mass Catholic immigration, not before it #expands (0.72) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 287