Know-Nothing

See also: know-nothing

English

Etymology

Party members claimed to know nothing about the party when questioned.

Noun

Know-Nothing (plural Know-Nothings)

1. (historical) A member of a secret antiforeigner political organization in the nineteenth-century United States.
   • 1964, John F. Kennedy, “Immigration Policy”, in A Nation of Immigrants‎^[1], Revised and Enlarged edition, Harper & Row, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 71:

     The legacy of the Know-Nothings lived beyond its life as an organization. The seeds of bigotry, fear and hatred bore fruit again in the years after the Civil War. […]
     The First World War led to another outbreak of nativism. A new group, adopting the program of the Know-Nothings and the name of the Ku Klux Klan, came into being, denouncing everything its members disliked—Negroes, Catholics, Jews, evolutionists, religious liberals, internationalists, pacifists—in the name of true Americanism and of “Nordic superiority.”

Derived terms

• Know-Nothingism