Anti-English feelings among Irish-Americans spread to American culture through Irish-American performers in popular blackface minstrel shows. These imparted both elements of the Irish-American performers' own national bias, and the popular stereotypical image that the English people were bourgeois, aloof, or upper class. Sentiments quickly turned into direct and violent action when in the 1860s the Fenian Brotherhood Society invaded Canada to provoke a United States-British war in hope it would lead to Irish freedom. Violence is said to have included direct action by Fenian sympathisers, with the assassination of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, himself an Irish Canadian and Irish nationalist who was against the invasion, although he was very critical of the Orange Order, and it has long been suspected they were his true killers. Goldwin Smith, professor at Cornell University, wrote in the "North American Review" that "hatred of England" was used as a tool to win the Irish-American vote. A similar observation was made in 1900 by U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, who criticised the Prairie Populist and his own Democratic party's political pandering to attract the support of the Irish diaspora: