Know-Nothing

Definitions

1. An ignorant person; one who lacks knowledge.
2. A member of a secret antiforeigner political organization in the nineteenth-century United States.
   US, historical

Examples

“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.””

CEFR level