The two-party system 65attack may turn to this very same political weapon as a means of asserting
themselves in the community. Thus in the 1850s Catholics and immigrants
came under attack by the Know Nothing, or American, Party, which was able
to achieve 25 per cent of the vote in the presidential election of 1856. The Ku
Klux Klan, although notorious for its efforts on behalf of white supremacy,
was also actively anti-Catholic. By the 1930s, however, many Catholics in their
turn were giving strong support to the anti-Semitic movement led by Father
Charles Coughlin, which ended up with the expression of outright support
for Hitler. By the 1950s the emphasis had changed again and, although the
attacks upon communism by Senator Joseph McCarthy drew strong support
from Irish and Italian Catholics, McCarthy avoided attacking Jews and other
ethnic minorities.
The greatest source of ethnic conflict in the 1960s was of course the battle
for equality by blacks, and the resultant explosions of violence in Northern
cities as well as in the Southern states. The problem of the status of the
black community is one that the normal political machinery failed to solve. It
represents a classic example of the way in which the American political ma-
chinery can be used to prevent a solution from emerging, so that the problem
becomes progressively more and more difficult, until only a violent resolu-
tion seems open to the group that feels its demands are not being registered
through the normal channels. The movement for ‘black power’ represented
a demand for action to short-circuit the ponderous and complicated constitu-
tional system with all its built-in checks and balances. In the Southern states
the Ku Klux Klan were blamed for murders, beatings, bombings and church
burnings, and Klan members were put on trial for the murder of blacks and
civil rights workers. As a natural reaction blacks in Southern states formed
themselves into armed organisations to defend themselves. The Deacons for
Defence and Justice was formed in Louisiana and spread into Mississippi
and other Southern states to give blacks the protection that they felt they
could not depend upon from the normal law enforcement agencies. More
recently the extensive Latino immigration, particularly in California, has
exacerbated racial tensions between blacks and Latinos. Los Angeles County
has an estimated one thousand gangs, mostly Mexican, and gang warfare
makes the area one of the most dangerous in the United States.
Race riots have long been a feature of the fringes of the American political
process. In the early years of the twentieth century these were mainly at-
tacks by whites on the black community, as in 1906 in Atlanta and in Chicago
in 1919. However, after the Second World War the increasing frustration of
blacks with their depressed economic and social position led to a series of
riots. In 1964 there were outbreaks in Harlem, Chicago and Philadelphia. In
1965 five days of violence in Watts, a district of Los Angeles, followed allega-
tions of police brutality against blacks. During the course of the riots, there
were thirty-four deaths, 1,000 injuries and 4,000 arrests. They were brought
to an end only when the governor of California brought in 20,000 soldiers of
the National Guard to restore order. 1967 saw extensive violence in many