Know-nothings, a party in the United States that sprung up in 1853 and restricted the right of American citizenship to those who were born in America or of an American parentage, so called because to those inquisitive about their secret organisation they uniformly answered “I know nothing.”
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Knowles, Sheridan * Knox, John