Member-only story
Flag Pin Patriots
Once upon a time, in 1940, an organization called the America First Committee was founded in opposition to both broad and ambitious domestic policies designed to pull Americans out of the Great Depression and foreign policies to confront the threat of fascism in Europe and Asia.
Before the rise of the MAGA faithful, the Firsters built upon a long American tradition of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant nationalism. In the turbulent decades before the American Civil War, a secretive fraternal organization called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner grew into the moderately successful American Party. Instead of a ban on Muslim immigrants, the American Party reacted to a perceived threat of Catholic immigrants as harbingers of Papal domination over American sovereignty.
Long before the phrase “cancel culture” entered our political vocabulary, an American Party manifesto of sorts was published in 1856 by Thomas R. Whitney titled A Defence of the American Policy, as opposed to the encroachments of foreign influence, and especially to the interference of the papacy in the political interests and affairs of the United States. From its cultic origins, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner developed initiation rites, passwords, hand signs and, when asked anything about the Order by outsiders, members were compelled to reply “we know nothing.” The name stuck and the American Party would go down in…