A "Tyranny Unparalleled in History": Anxious Laughter and Projection of the Nation in the John-Donkey (January–October 1848)

This article intends to explore the constitutive role of US satirical periodicals in nation-building by focusing on the John-Donkey. In 1848, sixty years after the ratification of the American Constitution, the young United States was imagining itself into a nation. American periodicals were crucial in conveying competing ideas of what America should be, mirroring and amplifying widespread aspirations and preoccupations. In particular, the John-Donkey fostered a discussion with coeval papers on subjects such as mass immigration and the widespread sympathy for Pius IX in the United States. Although maintaining a desecrating attitude toward the papacy, the John-Donkey ridiculed those who deemed such sympathy and the rising number of Catholics (and Catholic voters) in the United States a threat. In doing so, the periodical indirectly expressed and expelled the anxieties fuelled in the readership by the Nativists as much as its editorial staff's preoccupation that those anxieties might result in intolerance and even fanaticism. A detailed analysis of the texts and images related to these themes reveals conflating thoughts on international and domestic policies, indicating to what extent the projection of a specific "America" implied the definition of oneself as opposed to non-Americans and political opponents.