When was no irish need apply

Only Irish Catholics could see the sign: No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. Only Irish Catholics could see the sign. This is especially strange since the ostensible message of the signs was directed toward them--saying that employment was available here and inviting Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to apply.

From the other side, the business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent.

The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry Irish youth tossing a brick through the window that holds such a sign. What we have is all the signs of an urban legend. Wealthy Protestants who summered in Maine brought their servants along and asked the bishop to help arrange for Catholic services for them.

Historically actual signs could have flourished only in intensely anti-Catholic or anti-Irish eras, especially the period. Thus when Irishmen recalled seeing them in the 20th century it suggests the myth is so deeply rooted in folk mythology that it is impervious to evidence.

And it suggests that the same myth was prevalent years ago. In other words, when someone said "I saw the sign in the s" that misperception is itself suggestive that the misperception went back decades. The myth had "legs": people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O'Neill said he saw the signs as a youth in Boston in s; Senator Ted Kennedy has the most recent sighting: he told the Senate he saw them when growing up he was born in and grew up in a highly protective family.

An answer is that the stimulus was not visual but rather aural--a song sung only by the Irish. It became quite popular during the crisis of the draft riots of the Civil War, and still circulates. The downside of the myth is that it gave Irish gangs a good reason to beat up strangers the song explicitly encouraged this response and it warned Irish jobseekers against breaking with the group and going to work for The Enemy. The myth fostered among the Irish a misperception or gross exaggeration that other Americans were prejudiced against them as Irish, and were deliberately holding back their economic progress.

Hence the "chip on the shoulder" mentality that many observers and historians have noted. As for the question of anti-Irish prejudice: it existed but it was anti-Catholic or political and had no links to employment.

The Irish tended to equate themselves with Catholicism, so that anti-Catholicism equalled anti-Irish prejudice. Other Catholics groups, especially the French Canadians, greatly resented this attitude. Was there job discrimination against the Catholic Irish in the US: possibly, but no one has offered any direct evidence whatever.

On the contrary, Protestant businessmen vigorously raised money for mills, factories and construction projects they knew would mostly employ Irishmen.

Did actual "No Irish" signs exist? The evidence is overwhelming, no. Other ethnic groups also had a strong recollection of discrimination but never report such signs. Were the signs used only against Irish targets? Newspaper ads for personal household workers nannies, cooks, maids, companions sometimes specified religion or ethnicity. Intimate household relationships were delicate matters for some, but the vast majority of maids in large cities were Irish women, so there cannot have been many matrons refusing to hire them.

Faye E. The first American usage was a printed song-sheet, dated Philadelphia, , online at Library of Congress. It is a reprint of a British song sheet. The narrator is a maid looking for a job in London who reads an ad in London Times and sings about Irish pride. The last verse was clearly added in America.

London Times Newspaper, Feb. I'm a simple Irish girl, and I'm looking for a place, I've felt the grip of poverty, but sure that's no disgrace, 'Twill be long before I get one, tho' indeed it's hard I try, For I read in each advertisement, "No Irish need apply.

I'm a dacint boy, just landed from the town of Ballyfad; I want a situation: yis, I want it mighty bad. I saw a place advartised. It's the thing for me, says I; But the dirty spalpeen ended with: No Irish need apply. So, I wint to see the blaggar with: No Irish need apply. I tould him what I came for, whin he in a rage did fly: No!

I couldn't stand it longer: so, a hoult of him I took, And I gave him such a welting as he'd get at Donnybrook. He hollered: Millia murther!

He made a big apology; I bid him thin good-bye, Saying: Whin next you want a bating, add: No Irish need apply! Sure, I've heard that in America it always is the plan That an Irishman is just as good as any other man; A home and hospitality they never will deny The stranger here, or ever say: No Irish need apply.

But some black sheep are in the flock: a dirty lot, say I; A dacint man will never write: No Irish need apply! Sure, Paddy's heart is in his hand, as all the world does know, His praties and his whiskey he will share with friend or foe; His door is always open to the stranger passing by; He never thinks of saying: None but Irish may apply.

And, in Columbia's history, his name is ranking high; Thin, the Divil take the knaves that write: No Irish need apply! Ould Ireland on the battle-field a lasting fame has made; We all have heard of Meagher's men, and Corcoran's brigade. After Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on Sept 22, , support from Irish Catholics fell off drastically, suggesting that the song was written before then.

After a few more rounds you could see the leprechaun. Note that in the Philadelphia version, Poole changed the London maid to a newly arrived country boy; the maid lamented, but the lad fights back vigorously. This is a song to encourage bullies. Note the reference to New York Tribune newspaper, the leading Republican paper of the day; note also that he starts his job search in a new country by looking at the newspaper ads, which is very unlikely for a new arrival from a remote village.

The narrator is male but the ad still seems to be for a houseworker, because it gives the house address. The term "donnybrook" for a fracas dates from the s; "Spalpeen" means rascal and was current only in Ireland; "Millia murther" meant million murders.

There are two versions available through www. That by Brendan Nolan is a variant of the Poole version. When O'Neill went to college he was astonished to read in a history book that it happened a century earlier in -- he had assumed it was a recent event. Farrell, Tip O'Neill p 55 - an excellent source.

O'Neill, Farrell says, "also saw the No Irish signs" - which since he was born in , would have been circa s; but Farrell does not quote O'Neill directly on this. Scientific American a national magazine for machinists and factory owners, often carried help-wanted ads in the s and s, with no discrimination noted.

Anti-Irish sentiment was strongest from s to s. Any signs would have happened then, and it's inconceivable that any business in Boston put one out in Can you imagine what the Irish toughs would have done? When did the slogan become current? We have two bits of negative evidence in indicating that it was not salient with people highly conversant with Irish American affairs. First note the last stanza of the London song shown above.

If the slogan had been current in America surely the songwriter would not have included the line "you will not deny, A place in your hearts for Kathleen, where 'All Irish may apply.

The Rebels hailed the draft riots in the North. A major editorial in the Richmond Enquirer May 29, gives plenty of reasons for the Irish to hate the Yankees-- convent burnings, church burnings, and all that. There is no mention of the sign or slogan--probably because the Poole song had not yet reached Richmond.

No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. But then in , in a piece for the Oxford Journal of Social History — the same journal where Jensen published his findings — Rebecca A. Read more: The Detroit pub that banned Irish people for St. Patrick's Day. That digitized newspaper archives are often incomplete likely made it easier for the evidence of NINA signs and advertisements to elude Jensen in the course of his research.

Consulting an array of independent newspaper archives and databases, Fried has definitively proven him wrong. The earliest example she found appeared in the New York Sun on January 15, Best of references required. One of the latest instances she discovered occurred in in Butte, Montana. No Irish need apply. You can read Professor Jensen's rebuttal here. Love Irish history? Share your favorite stories with other history buffs in the IrishCentral History Facebook group. Sign up to IrishCentral's newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything Irish!

Related: Irish American. In the words of historian Kevin Kenny, the "whiteness" question "obscured more than it clarified. Other historians protested that anti-Irish discrimination was widespread, but didn't contest Jensen's findings about NINA signs. A couple of them even corroborated his conclusions. For what it's worth, when I originally wrote this article, I did some follow-up research of my own in the Library of Congress' digitized newspaper database — and found, similar to Jensen, that there weren't any more than two wanted ads per decade that specified "No Irish Need Apply.

But the problem was that the databases being used just weren't complete enough. In spring , Rebecca Fried, a year-old whose father had brought home the article from work, checked out Jensen's claims. Fried turned up about 50 businesses putting "No Irish Need Apply" in their newspaper ads between and Of course, these were also the centers of Irish immigrant settlement at the time.

And she found several news reports that mentioned "No Irish Need Apply" signs — the ones that Jensen said there was no evidence to believe ever existed — being hung at workplaces, as well as public accommodations. So while Jensen's research turned up about 2 ads a decade, Fried's turned out closer to one a year — although that varied a lot depending on where and when you were. This obviously doesn't cover every newspaper published during the period.

But it's hard to tell how to extrapolate it. Databases like the Library of Congress', which really don't have many "No Irish Need Apply" ads, are obviously incomplete — but so are databases that do have them. What's most representative of all newspapers of the time? There's a pretty spirited academic back-and-forth between Fried and Jensen about Fried's findings, as covered in this article in the Daily Beast.

Jensen points out that any given Irish immigrant, on any given day, was unlikely to open a newspaper and see a "No Irish Need Apply" ad — which may very well still be true.

But Fried argues that the point is that they did, in fact, exist — and so it makes sense that they'd become part of how Irish Americans understand their role in American history. Three things are clearly true. There was obviously widespread prejudice against Irish Catholics during the midth-century wave of immigration to the US, and that prejudice led to actual discrimination in at least some cases and, probably, fairly often.

The second truth is that Irish Americans have been resisting discrimination for as long as they've been experiencing it. Alongside the want ads requesting "No Irish Need Apply" that Fried found were reports of Irish workers filing libel lawsuits, holding protests, or even going on strike in response to such ads.

And that's not to mention jokes that both Fried and I found in our research that would be reprinted from one paper to another, using "No Irish Need Apply" as a springboard for humor: one common joke involved an Irishman, with an exaggerated accent, pretending to be French to get around the sign. That last category included several papers reprinting the lyrics of one version or another of the "No Irish Need Apply" song that Jensen says was so important.

And remember, the version of the song that became popular wasn't the one in which coming to America was a happy ending; it was the version in which, even in America, there were bigots who needed to get beaten up. Fighting back was as much a part of Irish American history, as remembered by Irish Americans, as being held down. But here's the third truth: memory of "No Irish Need Apply" has long outlasted actual anti-Irish discrimination.

Many of the people who claimed to have seen NINA signs almost certainly didn't — just like some of the places that claim "George Washington Slept Here. And replica signs, like the one on top of this article, are so popular that maybe they really are more common than real signs ever were. Jensen might argue that this is because of the "myth of victimization" — what other pundits might call a "culture of victimhood. The "exile hypothesis" painted this as a bad thing: Irish immigrants were mostly powerless in the face of historical forces, both in Ireland and in the US.

But just as the exile hypothesis was becoming popular, in the mids, another wave of Irish immigrants were coming to the US — and the reaction to them made it clear there was a substantial upside to Irish Americans continuing to identify with victims.

During the s, tens of thousands of Irish immigrants came to the US — many of them coming on student or tourist visas and then staying after those visas expired.

Irish Americans welcomed the new unauthorized immigrants — their Irishness mattered more than their legal status. And because Irish Americans had political power, politicians set about to fix the immigration system so it would be easier for Irish immigrants to come the right way.

The law created a new visa lottery, which is today called the "diversity visa" — it gives visas to people from countries that don't otherwise send many immigrants to the US. But for the first three years of its existence, the law required that 40 percent of the visas — called "Donnelly visas" — needed to go to Irish immigrants.

Furthermore, an additional temporary program gave "Morrison visas" to Irish immigrants for the three years after the law passed. Both visas were named after the Irish-American members of Congress who had championed them. Between the two visas, most of the unauthorized Irish immigrants in the US were able to achieve legal status. Today, the Irish aren't among the top 25 countries for unauthorized immigrants living in the US.