rfmcdonald | [BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On ""No Irish Need Apply":`A Myth of Victimization" (Reply)

Those of you who've read me may know that I tend to be exasperated by ethnic myths. This, you'll not be surprised to know, is particularly true where the ethnicity concerned is one that I could conceivably lay claim to (#ohmybelovedhomeland). Thanks why I'm thankful that Facebook's Tom linked to Richard Jensen's 2002 paper from the Journal of Social History which takes apart the myth that "No Irish Need Apply" signs in the United States were regularly used to keep young Irish and Irish-American men from finding work. What signs, Jensen asks?

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it.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 youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries it was used by English to indicate their distrust of the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant. For example the Anglican bishop of London used the phrase to say he did not want any Irish Anglican ministers in his diocese. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. It is possible that handwritten NINA signs regarding maids did appear in a few American windows, though no one ever reported one. We DO have actual newspaper want ads for women workers that specifies Irish are not wanted; they will be discussed below. In the entire file of the New York Times from 1851 to 1923, there are two NINA ads for men, one of which is for a teenager. Computer searches of classified help wanted ads in the daily editions of other online newspapers before 1923 such as the Booklyn Eagle, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune show that NINA ads for men were extremely rare--fewer than two per decade. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America, at any time. NINA signs and newspaper ads for apartments to let did exist in England and Northern Ireland, but historians have not discovered reports of any in the United States, Canada or Australia. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The overwhelming evidence is that such signs never existed.

Irish Americans all have heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had "legs": people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O'Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up. Historically, physical NINA signs could have flourished only in intensely anti-Catholic or anti-Irish eras, especially the 1830—1870 period. Thus reports of sightings in the 1920s or 1930s suggest the myth had become so deeply rooted in Irish-American folk mythology that it was impervious to evidence. Perhaps the Irish had constructed an Evil Other out of stereotypes of outsiders—a demon that could frighten children like the young Ted Kennedy and adults as well. The challenge for the historian is to explain the origins and especially the durability of the myth. Did the demon exist outside the Irish imagination—and if not how did it get there? [T]he myth originated and will explore its long-lasting value to the Irish community as a protective device. It was an enhancement of political solidarity against a hostile Other; and a way to insulate a preindustrial non-individualistic group-oriented work culture from the individualism rampant in American culture.

I like this summary of the paper's import:

In History and Memory, Geoffery Cubitt talks of “distorted memories,” memories that assimilate memory detail from one experience into the context of another, often imbued with additional meaning.[2] Such is the case with NINA signs. As Jensen notes, Irish-America harbors deep beliefs in their victimization in the United States, including job discrimination, stemming from the trials of the Irish Potato Famine. In the United States, the Irish needed to foster a new ethnic community and identity, one that did not place the villains of their story as the distant and overseas British. That villain became Americans holding access to jobs. The NINA sign embodies that transference, a distorted memory with deep symbolic meaning that overshadows the historical record.

Anti-Irish racism certainly did exist--I blogged this Sunday just past about how some Victorians believed in the "negrescence" of the Irish and other Celts--but it's also important to actually use, you know, facts when you're talking about history. Unless you're not talking about objective reality, but that's a separate matter.

And if you're curious, Irish Canadians seem to have undergone similar experiences of alienation, particularly in the urban areas where they settled following the island's social and economic breakdown, where they became one of the first distinctive, feared, urban underclasses.

Canadian cities and larger towns quickly developed Irish sections or wards. The Anglo-Protestant majority measured the Irish contribution economically and the Irish deficiencies socially, religiously and racially. On the one hand, many of the Irish created a labour force ready and able to fill the seasonal employment demands of a newly expanded canal system, lumber industry and burgeoning railway network; on the other hand, because of their low income, their Catholicism, the seasonal separation from their families and differences in their way of life, they were a conspicuous minority group. They filled working-class neighbourhoods and inflated majority fears of social evils previously dismissed as peculiar to the US.

For some years the Irish supplied the base of a working-class labour force necessary for the slow advance of communication, commerce and industry, but they remained an adjunct to, rather than a central component of, mainstream North American economic and social life - the basis of which was commerce and agricultural activity. Policy tied population increase to land settlement. Gradual commercial and industrial development usually serviced the agricultural sector, and, because many Irish were not farmers, Irish labourers were seen as rootless.

Toronto's neighbourhood of Cabbagetown, named after the vegetable the Irish-Canadians labourers grew in their yards to supplement their diets, was one of these districts.