TC
30th May 2011, 16:19
Not totally sure what to make of this article, but it is provocative (I found it on a link from slate.com):
Journal of Social History 36.2 (2002) 405-429
"No Irish Need Apply":
A Myth of Victimization
Richard Jensen
Retired Professor of History, University of Illinois, Chicago
write the author at [email protected]
slightly revised version 12-22-2004
Abstract Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.
Introduction
The Irish American community harbors a deeply held belief that it was the victim of systematic job discrimination in America, and that the discrimination was done publicly in highly humiliating fashion through signs that announced "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply." This "NINA" slogan could have been a metaphor for their troubles—akin to tales that America was a "golden mountain" or had "streets paved with gold."
But the Irish insist that the signs really existed and prove the existence of widespread discrimination and prejudice. 1 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, 2 archivist, or museum curator has ever located one 3 ; no photograph or drawing exists. 4 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 5 Historically, [End Page 405] 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? This paper will explain how the 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.
We must first ask if the 19th century American environment contained enough fear or hatred of the Irish community to support the existence of the NINA sentiment? Did the Irish-American community constitute an "Other" that was reviled and discriminated against? Did more modern Americans recoil in disgust at the premodern Irish immigrants? The evidence suggests that all the criticism of the Irish was connected to one of three factors, their "premodern" behavior, their Catholicism, and their political relationship to the ideals of republicanism. If the Irish had enemies they never tried to restrict the flow of Irish immigration. 6 Much louder was the complaint that the Irish were responsible for public disorder and poverty, and above all the fears that the Irish were undermining republicanism. These fears indeed stimulated efforts to insert long delays into the citizenship process, as attempted by the Federalists in 1798 and the Know Nothings in the 1850s. Those efforts failed. As proof of their citizenship the Irish largely supported the Civil War in its critical first year. 7 Furthermore they took the lead in the 1860s in bringing into citizenship thousands of new immigrants even before the technicalities of residence requirements had been met. 8 The Irish claimed to be better republicans than the Yankees because they had fled into exile from aristocratic oppression and because they hated the British so much. 9
The use of systematic violence to achieve Irish communal goals might be considered a "premodern" trait; it angered many people and three bloody episodes proved it would not work in conflict with American republicanism. In 1863 the Irish rioted against the draft in New York City; Lincoln moved in combat troops who used cannon to regain control of the streets and resume the draft. In 1871 the Irish Catholics demanded the Protestant Irish not be allowed an Orange parade in New York City, but the Democratic governor sent five armed regiments of state militia to support the 700 city police protecting the one hundred marchers. The Catholics attacked anyway, and were shot down by the hundreds. In the 1860s and 1870s the Molly Maguires used midnight assassination squads to terrorize the anthracite mining camps in Pennsylvania. The railroad brought in Pinkertons to infiltrate the Mollys, twenty of whom were hung. In every instance Irish Catholics law enforcement officials played a major role in upholding the modern forms of republicanism that emphasized constitutional political processes rather than clandestine courts or mob action. In each instance the Irish leaders of the Catholic Church supported modern republicanism. 10 After the [End Page 406] 1870s the Irish achieved a modern voice through legitimate means, especially through politics and law enforcement. Further enhancing their status as full citizens making a valuable contribution to the community, the Catholics built monumental churches (which were immediately and widely praised), as well as a massive network of schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages and other charitable institutions. 11
Regardless of their growing status, something intensely real was stimulating the Irish Catholics and only them. The NINA myth fostered among the Irish a misperception or gross exaggeration that other Americans were prejudiced against them, and were deliberately holding back their economic progress. Hence the "chip on the shoulder" mentality that many observers and historians have noted. 12 As for the question of anti-Irish prejudice: it existed but it was basically anti-Catholic or anti-anti-republican. There have been no documented instances of job discrimination against Irish men. 13 Was there any systematic job discrimination against the Catholic Irish in the US: possibly, but direct evidence is very hard to come by. On the other hand Protestant businessmen vigorously raised money for mills, factories and construction projects they knew would mostly employ Irishmen, 14 while the great majority of middle class Protestant households in the major cities employed Irish maids. The earliest unquestioned usage found comes from the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, using the phrase in Pendennis, a novel of growing up in London in the 1820s. The context suggests that the NINA slogan was a slightly ridiculous and old-fashioned bit of prejudice 15 Other ethnic groups also had a strong recollection of discrimination but never reported such signs. The Protestant (Orange) Irish do not recall "NINA signs. 16 Were the signs used only against Irish targets?
An electronic search of all the text of the several hundred thousand pages of magazines and books online at Library of Congress, Cornell University Library and the University of Michigan Library, and complete runs of The New York Times and The Nation, turned up about a dozen uses of NINA. 17 The complete text of New York Times is searchable from 1851 through 1923. Although the optical character recognition is not perfect (some microfilmed pages are blurry), it captures most of the text. A search of seventy years of the daily paper revealed only two classified ads with NINA—one posted by a Brooklyn harness shop that wanted a boy who could write, and a request for a couple to take charge of a cottage upstate. 18 Unlike the employment market for men, the market for female servants included a small submarket in which religion or ethnicity was specified. Thus newspaper ads for nannies, cooks, maids, nurses and companions sometimes specified "Protestant Only." "I can't imagine, Carrie, why you object so strongly to a Roman Catholic," protests the husband in an 1854 short story. "Why, Edward, they are so ignorant, filthy, and superstitious. It would never do to trust the children alone with one, for there is no telling what they might learn." 19 Intimate household relationships were delicate matters for some families, but the great majority of maids in large cities were Irish women, so the submarket that refused to hire them could not have been more than ten percent. 20
The first American usage was a printed song-sheet, dated Philadelphia, 1862. 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. 21 [End Page 407]
NO IRISH NEED APPLY.
Written and sung by Miss KATHLEEN O'NEIL.
WANTED.—A smart active girl to do the general housework of a large family, one who can cook, clean plates, and get up fine linen, preferred. N. B.—No Irish need apply
—London Times Newspaper, Feb. 1862.
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."
Alas! for my poor country, which I never will deny, How they insult us when they write, "No Irish need apply." Now I wonder what's the reason that the fortune-favored few, Should throw on us that dirty slur, and treat us as they do, Sure they all know Paddy's heart is warm, and willing is his hand, They rule us, yet we may not earn a living in their land,
. . . .
Ah! but now I'm in the land of the "Glorious and Free," And proud I am to own it, a country dear to me, I can see by your kind faces, that you will not deny, A place in your hearts for Kathleen, where "All Irish may apply." Then long may the Union flourish, and ever may it be, A pattern to the world, and the "Home of Liberty!"
In 1862 or 1863 at the latest John Poole wrote the basic NINA song that became immensely popular within a matter of months. 22 http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Erjensen/poole.gif
NO IRISH NEED APPLY.
Written by JOHN F. POOLE, and sung, with immense success, by the great Comic-Vocalist of the age, TONY PASTOR.
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.
Whoo! says I; but that's an insult—though to get the place I'll try.
So, I wint to see the blaggar with: No Irish need apply.
I started off to find the house, I got it mighty soon;
There I found the ould chap saited: he was reading the TRIBUNE.
I tould him what I came for, whin he in a rage did fly:
No! says he, you are a Paddy, and no Irish need apply!
Thin I felt my dandher rising, and I'd like to black his eye—
To tell an Irish Gintleman: No Irish need apply!
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! and to get away did try,
And swore he'd never write again: No Irish need apply.
He made a big apology; I bid him thin good-bye,
Saying: Whin next you want a bating, add: No Irish need apply! [End Page 408]
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. 23
Though fools may flout and bigots rave, and fanatics may cry,
Yet when they want good fighting-men, the Irish may apply,
And when for freedom and the right they raise the battle-cry,
Then the Rebel ranks begin to think: No Irish need apply
After a few rounds of singing and drinking, you could easily read the sign. Note that in the New York City 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. The lad starts his job search by scanning the want ads in the city's leading Republican newspaper, the New York Tribune, which seems an unlikely resource for a new arrival from a remote village. In the draft riots of 1863 the Tribune was a special target of Irish mobs. 24
Did the Irish feel discriminated against before the NINA slogan became current? First note the last stanza of the 1862 London song shown above. If the NINA 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 second evidence comes from the Confederacy in 1863. The Rebels hailed and incited Irish unrest in the North. A major editorial in the Richmond Enquirer May 29, 1863 enumerated multiple reasons for the Irish to hate the Yankees, such as convent attacks and church burnings. The catalog of grievances focused on anti-Catholicism and did not mention job discrimination or NINA—probably because the Poole song had not yet reached Richmond. 25
We can now summarize our explanation of where the NINA myth comes from. There probably were occasional handwritten signs in London homes in the 1820s seeking non-Irish maids. The slogan became a cliché in Britain for hostility to the Irish. Tens of thousands of middle-class English migrated to America, and it is possible a few used the same sort of handwritten sign in the 1830—1850 period; the old British cliché was probably known in America. There is no evidence for any printed NINA signs in America or for their display at places of employment other than private homes. Poole's song of 1862 popularized the phrase. The key change that made the second version such a hit was gender reversal—the London song lamented the maid's troubles, the New York City version called for Irishmen to assert their manhood in defiance of a cowardly [End Page 409] enemy. By 1863 every Irishman knew and resented the slogan—and it perhaps helped foment the draft riots that year. The stimulus was not visual but rather aural—a song about NINA sung only by the Irish. There was indeed such a song, and it became quite popular during the 1863 crisis of the draft riots of the Civil War; it still circulates. The song was a war cry that encouraged Irish gangs to beat up suspicious strangers and it warned Irish jobseekers against breaking with the group and going to work for The Enemy.
Recollection is a group phenomenon—especially in a community so well known for its conviviality and story telling. Congressman Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts grew up hearing horror stories of how the terrible Protestants burned down a nearby convent school run by the Catholic Ursuline nuns. When O'Neill went to college he was astonished to read in a history book that it happened a century earlier in 1834—he had assumed it was a recent event. 26 It is most unlikely that businesses in Boston routinely displayed NINA signs in the 20th century and yet left no trace whatever in the records. People who "remember" the signs in the 20th century only remember the urban legend. 27
Political mobilization against the Irish was never successful. The most important effort was the Know Nothing movement, which swept the Northeast and South in 1854—56. It was a poorly led grass roots movement that generated no significant or permanent anti-Catholic or anti-Irish legislation. There was no known employment discrimination. Know-Nothing employers, for example, were never accused of firing their Irish employees. The Know-Nothings were primarily a purification movement. They believed that all politicians were corrupt, that the Democrats were the worst, and that Irish support for Democrats, plus their growing numbers, made them highly suspect. The party lasted longer in the South where it was the anti-Democratic party but only slightly anti-Catholic. Ray Billington concludes "The almost complete failure of the Know-Nothings to carry into effect the doctrines of anti-Catholic and anti-foreign propagandists contributed to the rapid decline of this nativistic party." 28 Likewise there were few visible effects of the APA movement of the 1890s, or the KKK in the 1920s. The conclusion is that, despite occasional temptations, Americans considered their "equal rights" republicanism to be incompatible with systematic economic or political discrimination against the Irish. Given the overlap of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudice how can historians tell the difference? In both cases, the anti's would attack on political grounds—elections, candidates, appointments, bosses, machines, election frauds, registration laws, civil service reform. 29 Anti-Catholics would focus on certain issues, especially saints and Mariolatry, parochial schools, sacramentalism, convents, missions to the Indians, and Bible-reading in schools. 30 They also were intensely alert to activities of the Papacy, and the political power of priests and bishops. The Vatican certainly controlled ecclesiastical affairs, but it carefully avoided American political issues. 31 By 1865 politicians realized that bishops and priests largely avoided even informal electoral endorsements of any kind—they were far less active than pietistic Protestants, as the annals of temperance and anti-slavery demonstrate. 32
Were Irish men the victims of job discrimination in reality? That was possible without any signs of course. The evidence is exceedingly thin—the Irish started poor and worked their way up slowly, all along believing that the Protestant world [End Page 410] hated them and blocked their every move. Contemporary observers commented that the Protestant Irish were doing well in America, but that preindustrial work habits were blocking progress for the Catholics. As Thernstrom has shown, Irish had one of the lowest rates of upward mobility. 33
A likely explanation is the strong group ethos that encouraged Irish to always work together, and resist individualistic attempts to break away. (The slogan tells them that trying to make it in the Yankee world is impossible anyway.) No other European Catholic group seems to have shared that chip on the shoulder (not the Germans or Italians—not even anti-Irish groups such as the French Canadians). Historians agree the political hostility against the Irish Democrats in the Civil War Era was real enough. Critics complained that the Irish had poor morals and a weak work ethic (and hence low status). Much more serious was the allegation that they were politically corrupt and priest-controlled, and therefore violated true republican values. The Irish could shoot back that The Enemy did not practice equal rights. The Irish community used the allegation of job discrimination on the part of the Other to reinforce political solidarity among (male) voters, which in any case was very high indeed—probably he highest for any political group in American history before the 1960s.
It is easy to identify job discrimination in the 19th century against blacks and Chinese (the latter indeed led by the Irish in California). Discrimination against the Irish was invisible to the non-Irish. 34 That is perhaps why this urban legend did not die out naturally. Benign Protestant factory owners could not soften the tensions by removing signs that never existed. When Protestants denied NINA that perhaps just reinforced the Irish sense of conspiracy against them (even today people who deny NINA are suspected of prejudice.) The slogan served both to explain their poverty 35 and to identify a villain against whom it was all right retaliate on sight—a donnybrook for the foes of St. Patrick. 36 The myth justified bullying strangers and helped sour relations between Irish and everyone else. 37 The sense of victimhood perhaps blinded some Irish to the discrimination suffered by other groups. 38
Perhaps the slogan has reemerged in recent years as the Irish feel the political need to be bona-fide victims. The Potato Famine of course had all the ingredients to make them victims, 39 but it will not do to have the villains overseas: there must be American villains. 40 If we conclude the Irish were systematically deluding themselves over a period of a century or more about their primary symbol of job discrimination, the next question to ask is, was it all imaginary or was there a real basis for the grievances about the economic hostility of Protestants to Irish aspirations? Historians need to be critical. Because a group truly believes it was a victim, does not make it so. On the other hand, the Irish chip-on-the-shoulder attitude may have generated a high level of group solidarity in both politics and the job market, which could have had a significant impact on the on the occupational experience of the Irish.
How successful were the Irish in the job market? Observers noticed that the Irish tended to work in equalitarian collective situations, such as labor gangs, longshoremen crews, construction crews, or with strong labor unions, usually in units dominated numerically and politically by Irishmen. Wage rates were often heavily influenced by collective activity, such as boycotts, strikes and [End Page 411] union contracts, or by the political pressures that could be exerted on behalf of employees in government jobs, or working for contractors holding city contracts, or for regulated utilities such as street railways and subways.
The first arrivals formed all-Irish work crews for construction companies in the building of railroads in the 1830s. 41 Sometimes the Irish managed to monopolize a specific labor market sector—they comprised 95% of the canal workers by 1840, and 95% of the New York City longshoremen by 1900. 42 The monopoly of course facilitated group action, and once a crossing point was reached it was possible to exclude virtually all Others. Solidarity (with or without formal union organization) made for excellent bargaining power, augmented as needed by the use of intimidation, strikes, arson, terrorism and destructive violence to settle any grievances they may have had with their employers, not to mention internal feuds linked to historic feuds back in Ireland. Direct evidence that employers did not want Irish workers is absent. By the early 20th century major corporations had personnel offices and written procedures. If the Irish had a reputation for being unsatisfactory, the personnel managers never commented upon it. Job discrimination against blacks and Asians continued, and was quite visible in the corporate records and the media. Discrimination against newer immigrant groups can be identified as late as 1941 (when it was banned for government contract holders). No trace of anti-Irish hostility has turned up in the corporate records of the literature of personnel management. Can we prove there was no job discrimination against the Irish? Zero is too hard to "prove"—though no historian has found any evidence of any actual discrimination by any business or factory. 43 The main "evidence" referenced in the historical literature is three fold:
First, the NINA myth was so convincing that the Irish saw no need to investigate further, or to document the discrimination, or to set up a protective organization. (They of course organized extensively, in both Ireland and America, to protest maltreatment back in Ireland.) 44
Second, historians point to contemporaries who commented unfavorably on the Irish, generalizing from a handful of cases to create a stereotype of the dominant views of all of American society. Now indeed the 19th century literature is filled with eyewitness and statistical descriptions of Irish drunkenness, crime, violence, poverty, extortion, insanity, ignorance, political corruption and lawless behavior. The reports come from many cities, from Catholics and non-Catholics, social scientists and journalists, Irish and non-Irish. 45 The question is not whether the Irish were admired. (They were not.) The argument that the dominant popular stereotypes of the Irish were especially nasty does not hold up under careful examination. There is no evidence that more than one in a thousand Americans considered the Irish as racially inferior, non-white or ape-like. 46
Third, as noted, historians point to statistical evidence that the Irish had lower rates of upward social mobility than average, in the 1850—1880 period. The Irish must have been held back by something: but was it internal or external, or just random historical luck? Given the 20th century success story of the Irish—they are among the wealthiest groups today—the disability or discrimination ended somewhere along the line. [End Page 412]
Many different models can explain the Irish condition: First there was lack of financial and human capital. The Irish who arrived in the 1840s and 1850s came with few useful industrial or agricultural skills, while the British and Germans who came at the same time brought cash and much more human capital. Thus the distribution of human capital can be said to have allocated Irish to unskilled jobs, and other immigrants to more skilled opportunities. After 1890 the Irish had acquired some schooling and skills, while the current newcomers were primarily unskilled peasants from southern and eastern Europe. The latter groups moved into the unskilled jobs while the Irish moved up. In the coal fields, with very few job opportunities above the level of unskilled miner, the arrival of new competitors led to significant tensions and violence. In some cases the new competitors were more skilled than the Irish; thus the Swedes who came to Worcester in the late 19th century displaced the less skilled Irish in the metals factories.
The Irish did invest heavily in human capital, through their system of parochial schools and colleges. The impact of such investment was necessarily long-term, and seems to have become visible by 1900. To a considerable extent the goal was preservation and protection of traditional religious values, and the creation of a social system that would discourage intermarriage. However the schools did follow a standardized curriculum that inculcated literacy and learning skills. Negative investment in human capital involved internal self-defeating factors, such as heavy alcoholism, weak motivation, poor work habits, and disorganized family life. This was widely commented on regarding 19th century Irish, but not much reported in 20th century. 47 Rather few Irish became entrepreneurs; the community did not generate pools of financial capital. Perhaps more important was a low communal value on the individualistic businessman. Construction contracting seems to have been the only business in which they had any significant ownership role, and that depended on control of labor and access to government contracts rather than financial capital. The Irish did operate many saloons, but they were financed by the German brewers and generated little new capital for the community. 48
Comparing rates of social mobility assumes that the Irish were seeking that goal to the same extent as the Yankees. Perhaps their ambitions looked more toward non-individualistic goals (such as building impressive churches), or non-career family advancement strategies focused on political leadership or home ownership, or (in the case of nuns and priests) honorific careers that involved a vow of poverty. A strikingly high proportion of talented Irish youth went into very low paying, very high prestige religious careers. The community more often honored priests and bishops than business entrepreneurs.
Social mobility depends upon strong family structures. Weak ties in a group would indicate fathers and uncles did not assist their kin. The Irish had a reputation for the opposite traits (clannishness and nepotism), but also had reportedly high rates of internal family discord. 49 On the other hand kinship ties could be too strong and impede upward mobility. Parents might demand more child labor, valuing family collective goals over the child's individualistic career potential. Did the Irish tend to remove their children from schools to put them to work early? This would produce ready funds for home ownership, but less long-run human capital. Census data indicate high rates of school attendance, at least to [End Page 413] age 14. 50 Special family needs, especially sending funds to Ireland for subsistence and bringing over more relatives, might have drained the capital needed for upward mobility through small business. This indeed was a major factor among the Irish down to the 1880s.
Perhaps the Irish ethic placed more stress on equality and communal sharing of wealth. Different customs can have this effect—for example extensive charity (tithing), or heavy gambling that redistributes earned income in random fashion. Irish levels of charity were moderately high (especially donations to the church); observers did not comment on heavy gambling. In some cultures, when a man gets money he must share it widely with relatives, thus diffusing it and slowing accumulation in entrepreneurial hands. Observers did not report this trait as especially characteristic of the Irish community. In the context of social mobility, "clannishness" can refer to a collective ethic whereby the goal is for the group as a whole moves ahead, with individual initiative discouraged. 51 Bad historical luck could lock a group into the wrong skills or geography, causing retarded growth and structural unemployment. A group could cling too long to old-fashioned skills that were dead-end or slow growth, or be attached to businesses or geographical areas that grew very slowly. This may have happened to the Germans, and certainly did happen in the 20th century to coal miners. The Irish however, were noted for their willingness to change jobs, move to new neighborhoods or cities, and abandon trades. However, the quest for political patronage probably locked Irish men into overpaid but dead-end blue-collar jobs, and channeled talent into public administration rather than private entrepreneurship. 52
Perhaps businessmen figured Irish were unacceptable and decided not to hire any? There is little evidence for, and vast evidence against, this hypothesis. Beginning with Samuel Slater, New England entrepreneurs built hundreds of textile mills in the ante-bellum period. Although the Yankee owners were at first eager to use Yankee workers like themselves (the famous "Lowell Girls") they soon switched to Irish and French Canadian Catholics. Pleased with this new labor supply, they built more mills, often in small towns that had previously been entirely Yankee. They counted on a steady inflow of Catholic workers, borrowing millions of dollars to create these jobs. Once the Irish did have mill jobs they were four times more likely to put their children to work in the same mill than Yankees—rather odd behavior if they were mistreated so badly. 53 Perhaps foremen and superintendents hired Irish for low level jobs but deliberately held them back or promote them very slowly? Major research projects by Tamara Hareven (dealing with Amoskeag, the largest textile mill in the world), and Walter Licht, dealing with internal promotion system in railroads, finds no evidence of this. Business historians and biographers have turned up no instances of systematic anti-Irish discrimination by any employer in the US, at any time. 54
NINA originated with women domestic servants, and we need to rethink their position. No one has suggested the Irish women used violence, boycotts or threats to achieve dominance in this industry. "Bridget" had a reputation for mediocre quality work, but this liability was offset by communal assets that made them attractive employees. They spoke English. Along with African Americans and Swedes, they had a strong commitment to service jobs and were available in large numbers. Because of late marriages and spinsterhood, they spent years in service, accumulating experience and maturity that made them more attractive [End Page 414] than inexperienced teenagers. Off the job the Irish had a well-developed support network that provided friendship, entertainment, advice, and connections to find new employers. These support networks established informal job standards regarding working hours, housing, food, perquisites and pay scales. The standards were enforced by the maid immediately quitting if the employer violated the standards, with knowledge her friends would be supportive and would help her find a new position. Despite scare stories in the anti-Catholic pamphlets, the Irish servants did not proselytize or interfere with household religious activity. Given the dominance of Irish women among maids in the large cities, and the constant turnover of servants, we can estimate that the large majority (perhaps 80 or 90 percent) of middle class families, regardless of their own ethnic or religious affiliations, routinely hired Irish women. 55
The economic theory of discrimination focuses on the tastes of the employers, coworkers and customers, and the costs to each (in terms of profits, wages and prices) of having a distaste for a category of workers. If there is underemployment of a target group in a competitive market, then some entrepreneur can make a bigger profit by seeking out and hiring that group. Coworkers who have a strong distaste for working alongside the target can react by boycotting that employer, forcing up his other costs. By looking at wage rates in workplaces with different mixes of groups, economists hope to estimate the "distaste" factor: that is, workers will have to be paid more to work alongside a target group (and will accept lower pay if there are no coworkers from that group.) Estimates of the distaste factor come from a historical study dealing with Michigan furniture workers in the 1890s. It found that in general all groups have a preference for their own kind as coworkers (and were willing to take a 5—10% wage cut for the privilege of working alongside their own kind.) People who were willing to work with outsiders were paid more. "Distaste" for Irish measured out about the same as for other groups. Overall discrimination was small—combined with language skills and the myriad of other unmeasured factors it was less than 5% of the average wage. Doubtless there was a tendency for owners of small shops to hire only their own ethnicity. While this would have the effect of excluding Irish from certain jobs, it cannot be called "anti-Irish" in motivation. Probably the Irish practiced closed hiring as much as or more than any group. 56
We know from the experience of African Americans and Chinese that the most powerful form of job discrimination came from workers who vowed to boycott or shut down any employer who hired the excluded class. Employers who were personally willing to hire Chinese or blacks were forced to submit to the threats. 57 There were no reports of mobs attacking Irish employment, even during sporadic episodes of attacks on Catholic church facilities in 1830s and 1840s. No one has reported claims that co-workers refused to work alongside Irish; this powerful form of discrimination probably did not affect the Irish in significant ways. On the other hand the Irish repeatedly attacked employers who hired African Americans or Chinese. If a group is systematically discriminated against in a major way by most employers, it will be segregated into a small niche. This segregation should be visible in the census statistics of occupation, when comparing it to other groups, especially to British Protestant immigrants who were not reputedly subject to discrimination. The most useful analysis of any large city for the 19th century is the "Philadelphia Social History Project" [End Page 415] which computerized hundreds of thousands of census entries. The Irish comprised 15—30% of the labor force there. How segregated were they, and how did the segregation decline over time? Table 1 (http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Erjensen/36.2jensen_tables.html#tab01) shows an index of how different the Irish and others were from native Americans. (Philadelphia was one of the few cities with a large native American working class.) The data show the Irish were about in the same position as German immigrants, and much less liable to being boxed into a job niche than blacks, Italians, Poles or Jews. The Irish had about the same score in 1930 as the British, which is consistent with very little discrimination by employers. The index is about the same for Irish of the first and second generation (1880) and later Irish (1930) indicating that the level of anti-Irish discrimination did not change much over time; it can be seen as equally low in both 1880 and 1930. [End Page 416]
Assuming the Irish relied somewhat less on individual skills or market forces, and more on collective action and political prowess for their job security and pay rates, we must ask how successful were they? By the early twentieth century their pay scales were probably at least average. Peter Baskerville has discovered the Irish Catholics in urban Canada in 1901 were about average in terms of both family incomes and standards of living.
Table 1: 1880 Index of Job Segregation , Philadelphia (100=max)58 (http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Erjensen/no-irish.htm#FOOTNOTE)
Old Stock 0
Black 53
Irish Immigrants 35
Sons of Irish immigrants 34
German Immigrants 37
Sons of German immigrants 31
1930 Index of Job Segregation, Philadelphia
White, US born parents 0
Black 62
Italian 60
Jewish 57
Polish 55
German 33
Irish 29
British 25
My analysis of Iowa data in 1915 in Table 2 shows the Irish Catholics had slightly above average incomes, but that additional years of schooling helped them less than other groups. This suggests that group solidarity was a powerful force for uplift, but it improved the status of the group as a unit rather than as an average of separate individuals. Autobiographies of overly ambitious youth relate how they were harassed by their classmates and warned against the sin of pride by the priest and nuns. 60
Table 2: Lifetime Earnings and return to additional schooling Iowa
Non-Farm Men, 1915
Group N $Lifetime Return ALL
909 100 10.6%
OLD STOCK 499 97 9.7%
No Religion 243 93 9.1%
Methodist 164 95 9.7%
ETHNICS 410 100 10.6%
German 147 109 12.2%
Lutheran 34 95 9.5%
Catholic 46 106 13.9%
Scandinavian 87 103 12.2%
British 58 114 14.7%
Irish Catholic 57 104 8.4% Pete Hamill explained how the collective spirit affected him, growing up in Brooklyn in 1940s: 61
This was part of the most sickening aspect of Irish-American life in those days: the assumption that if you rose above an acceptable level of mediocrity, you were guilty of the sin of pride. You were to accept your place and stay in it for the rest of your life; the true rewards would be given to you in heaven, after you were dead. There was ferocious pressure to conform, to avoid breaking out of the pack; self-denial was the supreme virtue...it was arrogant, a sin of pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms, and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude was expressed directlyMore often, it was implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce power. Who did I think I was? When the Irish grumbled about "No Irish Need Apply," they perhaps were really warning each other against taking jobs which were controlled by the Other and immune from the political pressures that group solidarity could exert. There was method to the myth, which is why it persisted so long. Individual upward mobility was a priority for individualistic strivers imbued with the "Protestant Ethic." There is no reason to assume it motivated the Irish. Their individual upward mobility rates were modest. 62
If the Irish turned both politics and the job market into a group struggle, then we might expect different outcomes when comparing the three situations where the Irish were too weak to make much difference, where they had the "right amount" of leverage, and where they were too numerous. Statistical studies of social mobility in the 1850—1920 era suggest that the Irish did best in the Midwest (where they had just the right amount of strength), and not nearly as well in the Northeast, where they were too numerous to be advantaged by zero-sum power maneuvering. 63 Why the difference? Both Midwest and Northeast regions were doing very well, industrializing rapidly at that time. Let's examine the model of collective solidarity of the Irish in the labor market. It was a technique to facilitate the group as a whole moving rather than individuals. It had zero-sum properties (what one group gained, other groups lost). Their technique would work much better when the Irish were 10—30% of the population, and not nearly as well when they were in a majority. (If their numbers went above 50%, then it was dysfunctional, for most gains would come at the expense of other Irish.) The Irish did have a numerical dominance in Boston and other northeastern [End Page 417] cities, such as Troy. There were fewer rivals to elbow out of the way, and their technique was therefore much less successful there. The Irish approach discouraged entrepreneurship (which is positive-sum). It encouraged government work, and jobs (such as canal or railroad construction, longshoremen, transit) where government contacts or franchises were involved (thus allowing them to use their political muscle). In order to expand their preferred job base the Irish supported expansion of government spending and government regulation—what John Buenker has called "urban liberalism." Successors to the Al Smith tradition of urban liberalism, such as Speakers John McCormack and Tip O'Neill and Senator Ted Kennedy could well boast of their achievements in expanding government (or preventing its contraction) during and after the New Deal era. 64
After 1860 fears that the Irish were a threat to republicanism rapidly disappeared. The most decisive event came in spring 1861; when the War broke out the Irish rallied to the American flag, and joined the army. Although they strenuously opposed the draft and emancipation, they never supported the Confederacy (unlike some old-line Democratic leaders who took Confederate money.) Irish veterans were welcomed into the GAR, whose camaraderie validated their republicanism. The worst forms of poverty and destitution eventually disappeared, and a solid class of property owners and civil servants emerged to anchor the Irish in their communities. The Catholic Church, controlled by the Irish, vigorously supported law and order, and effectively suppressed the premodern urge to use violence for political goals. The Pope never dictated politics, and the bishops and priests never became active in domestic politics. They focused on building schools, colleges, hospitals, asylums and the stunningly beautiful churches. Many critics—throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—were alarmed that parochial schools threatened the public school system, which they insisted was the only guarantee of republican values. The Catholics vehemently rejected this allegation, and over the years gained surprising allies, as other denominations started their own parochial schools, including the German Lutherans, Dutch Calvinists, Orthodox Jews, and evangelicals. Lingering anti-Catholicism reappeared in debates over prohibition, and especially over the nomination of Catholics to the presidency, but it is notable that politicians were never attacked for their Irish heritage. 65
Irish collective solidarity seems to have broken down after World War Two, as New Deal work relief ended, the big city machines collapsed, unions entered an era of slow, steady decline, and the Catholic school system generated high school and college graduates well-equipped to make their way in the white collar world entirely as individuals, with minimal need for group support. By the 1960s the Irish had moved from the bottom to near the top of the ladder, with an economic status that surpassed their old Yankee antagonists. With the election of John Kennedy in 1960, Irish political solidarity climaxed. The Last Hurrah came in 1964, when Irish Catholics voted 78 percent for Lyndon Johnson. They abandoned Humphrey in 1968; since then they have split evenly between the parties and no longer comprise a bloc vote. 66
Did the Irish come to America in the face of intense hostility, symbolized by the omnipresent sign, "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply"? The hard evidence suggests that on the whole Irish immigrants as employees were welcomed by employers; their entry was never restricted; and no one proposed they be excluded [End Page 418] like the Chinese, let alone sent back. Instead of firing Catholics to make way for Protestant workers, most employers did exactly the opposite. That is, the dominant culture actively moved to create new jobs specifically for the unskilled Irish workers. As soon as the Irish acquired education and skills they moved up the social status ladder, reaching near the top by the 1960s. For a while political questions were raised about the devotion of the Irish to America's republican ideals, but these doubts largely faded away during the 1860s. The Irish rarely if ever had to confront an avowedly "anti-Irish" politician of national or statewide reputation—itself powerful evidence for the absence of deep-rooted anti-Irish sentiment. By the late 19th century the Irish were fully accepted politically and economically. However, reality and perception diverged. After the song appeared in 1862 the Irish themselves "saw" the NINA signs everywhere, seeing in them ugly discrimination that was forcing them downward into the worst jobs. It was deliberate humiliation by arrogant Protestant Yankees. The myth was undeniable—anyone inside the group would be called a traitor for suggesting that internal weaknesses inside the Irish community caused its problems; anyone outside would be called a prejudiced bigot. 67 But what if there were no such signs? The NINA slogan was in the mind's eye, conjured by an enormously popular song from 1862. Job discrimination by the Other was too well known to the Irish to need evidence beyond NINA, or the "recent" burning of the Ursuline convent. Historians engaging in cultural studies must beware the trap that privileges evidence derived from the protests of self-proclaimed victims. Practically every ethnoreligious group in America cherishes its martyrs and warns its members that outsiders "discriminate" against them, or would if they had the opportunity. The NINA slogan had the effect of reinforcing political, social and religious solidarity. It had a major economic role as well, strengthening the politicized work-gang outlook of Irish workers who had to stick together at all times. It warned the Irish against looking for jobs outside their community, and it explained away their low individual rates of upward social mobility. The slogan identified an enemy to blame, and justified bully behavior on the city streets. NINA signs never faded away, even as the Irish prospered and discrimination vanished—they remained a myth about origins that could not be abandoned.
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Click here:
http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm (http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Erjensen/no-irish.htm)
for original article and footnotes.
Journal of Social History 36.2 (2002) 405-429
"No Irish Need Apply":
A Myth of Victimization
Richard Jensen
Retired Professor of History, University of Illinois, Chicago
write the author at [email protected]
slightly revised version 12-22-2004
Abstract Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.
Introduction
The Irish American community harbors a deeply held belief that it was the victim of systematic job discrimination in America, and that the discrimination was done publicly in highly humiliating fashion through signs that announced "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply." This "NINA" slogan could have been a metaphor for their troubles—akin to tales that America was a "golden mountain" or had "streets paved with gold."
But the Irish insist that the signs really existed and prove the existence of widespread discrimination and prejudice. 1 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, 2 archivist, or museum curator has ever located one 3 ; no photograph or drawing exists. 4 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 5 Historically, [End Page 405] 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? This paper will explain how the 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.
We must first ask if the 19th century American environment contained enough fear or hatred of the Irish community to support the existence of the NINA sentiment? Did the Irish-American community constitute an "Other" that was reviled and discriminated against? Did more modern Americans recoil in disgust at the premodern Irish immigrants? The evidence suggests that all the criticism of the Irish was connected to one of three factors, their "premodern" behavior, their Catholicism, and their political relationship to the ideals of republicanism. If the Irish had enemies they never tried to restrict the flow of Irish immigration. 6 Much louder was the complaint that the Irish were responsible for public disorder and poverty, and above all the fears that the Irish were undermining republicanism. These fears indeed stimulated efforts to insert long delays into the citizenship process, as attempted by the Federalists in 1798 and the Know Nothings in the 1850s. Those efforts failed. As proof of their citizenship the Irish largely supported the Civil War in its critical first year. 7 Furthermore they took the lead in the 1860s in bringing into citizenship thousands of new immigrants even before the technicalities of residence requirements had been met. 8 The Irish claimed to be better republicans than the Yankees because they had fled into exile from aristocratic oppression and because they hated the British so much. 9
The use of systematic violence to achieve Irish communal goals might be considered a "premodern" trait; it angered many people and three bloody episodes proved it would not work in conflict with American republicanism. In 1863 the Irish rioted against the draft in New York City; Lincoln moved in combat troops who used cannon to regain control of the streets and resume the draft. In 1871 the Irish Catholics demanded the Protestant Irish not be allowed an Orange parade in New York City, but the Democratic governor sent five armed regiments of state militia to support the 700 city police protecting the one hundred marchers. The Catholics attacked anyway, and were shot down by the hundreds. In the 1860s and 1870s the Molly Maguires used midnight assassination squads to terrorize the anthracite mining camps in Pennsylvania. The railroad brought in Pinkertons to infiltrate the Mollys, twenty of whom were hung. In every instance Irish Catholics law enforcement officials played a major role in upholding the modern forms of republicanism that emphasized constitutional political processes rather than clandestine courts or mob action. In each instance the Irish leaders of the Catholic Church supported modern republicanism. 10 After the [End Page 406] 1870s the Irish achieved a modern voice through legitimate means, especially through politics and law enforcement. Further enhancing their status as full citizens making a valuable contribution to the community, the Catholics built monumental churches (which were immediately and widely praised), as well as a massive network of schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages and other charitable institutions. 11
Regardless of their growing status, something intensely real was stimulating the Irish Catholics and only them. The NINA myth fostered among the Irish a misperception or gross exaggeration that other Americans were prejudiced against them, and were deliberately holding back their economic progress. Hence the "chip on the shoulder" mentality that many observers and historians have noted. 12 As for the question of anti-Irish prejudice: it existed but it was basically anti-Catholic or anti-anti-republican. There have been no documented instances of job discrimination against Irish men. 13 Was there any systematic job discrimination against the Catholic Irish in the US: possibly, but direct evidence is very hard to come by. On the other hand Protestant businessmen vigorously raised money for mills, factories and construction projects they knew would mostly employ Irishmen, 14 while the great majority of middle class Protestant households in the major cities employed Irish maids. The earliest unquestioned usage found comes from the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, using the phrase in Pendennis, a novel of growing up in London in the 1820s. The context suggests that the NINA slogan was a slightly ridiculous and old-fashioned bit of prejudice 15 Other ethnic groups also had a strong recollection of discrimination but never reported such signs. The Protestant (Orange) Irish do not recall "NINA signs. 16 Were the signs used only against Irish targets?
An electronic search of all the text of the several hundred thousand pages of magazines and books online at Library of Congress, Cornell University Library and the University of Michigan Library, and complete runs of The New York Times and The Nation, turned up about a dozen uses of NINA. 17 The complete text of New York Times is searchable from 1851 through 1923. Although the optical character recognition is not perfect (some microfilmed pages are blurry), it captures most of the text. A search of seventy years of the daily paper revealed only two classified ads with NINA—one posted by a Brooklyn harness shop that wanted a boy who could write, and a request for a couple to take charge of a cottage upstate. 18 Unlike the employment market for men, the market for female servants included a small submarket in which religion or ethnicity was specified. Thus newspaper ads for nannies, cooks, maids, nurses and companions sometimes specified "Protestant Only." "I can't imagine, Carrie, why you object so strongly to a Roman Catholic," protests the husband in an 1854 short story. "Why, Edward, they are so ignorant, filthy, and superstitious. It would never do to trust the children alone with one, for there is no telling what they might learn." 19 Intimate household relationships were delicate matters for some families, but the great majority of maids in large cities were Irish women, so the submarket that refused to hire them could not have been more than ten percent. 20
The first American usage was a printed song-sheet, dated Philadelphia, 1862. 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. 21 [End Page 407]
NO IRISH NEED APPLY.
Written and sung by Miss KATHLEEN O'NEIL.
WANTED.—A smart active girl to do the general housework of a large family, one who can cook, clean plates, and get up fine linen, preferred. N. B.—No Irish need apply
—London Times Newspaper, Feb. 1862.
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."
Alas! for my poor country, which I never will deny, How they insult us when they write, "No Irish need apply." Now I wonder what's the reason that the fortune-favored few, Should throw on us that dirty slur, and treat us as they do, Sure they all know Paddy's heart is warm, and willing is his hand, They rule us, yet we may not earn a living in their land,
. . . .
Ah! but now I'm in the land of the "Glorious and Free," And proud I am to own it, a country dear to me, I can see by your kind faces, that you will not deny, A place in your hearts for Kathleen, where "All Irish may apply." Then long may the Union flourish, and ever may it be, A pattern to the world, and the "Home of Liberty!"
In 1862 or 1863 at the latest John Poole wrote the basic NINA song that became immensely popular within a matter of months. 22 http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Erjensen/poole.gif
NO IRISH NEED APPLY.
Written by JOHN F. POOLE, and sung, with immense success, by the great Comic-Vocalist of the age, TONY PASTOR.
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.
Whoo! says I; but that's an insult—though to get the place I'll try.
So, I wint to see the blaggar with: No Irish need apply.
I started off to find the house, I got it mighty soon;
There I found the ould chap saited: he was reading the TRIBUNE.
I tould him what I came for, whin he in a rage did fly:
No! says he, you are a Paddy, and no Irish need apply!
Thin I felt my dandher rising, and I'd like to black his eye—
To tell an Irish Gintleman: No Irish need apply!
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! and to get away did try,
And swore he'd never write again: No Irish need apply.
He made a big apology; I bid him thin good-bye,
Saying: Whin next you want a bating, add: No Irish need apply! [End Page 408]
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. 23
Though fools may flout and bigots rave, and fanatics may cry,
Yet when they want good fighting-men, the Irish may apply,
And when for freedom and the right they raise the battle-cry,
Then the Rebel ranks begin to think: No Irish need apply
After a few rounds of singing and drinking, you could easily read the sign. Note that in the New York City 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. The lad starts his job search by scanning the want ads in the city's leading Republican newspaper, the New York Tribune, which seems an unlikely resource for a new arrival from a remote village. In the draft riots of 1863 the Tribune was a special target of Irish mobs. 24
Did the Irish feel discriminated against before the NINA slogan became current? First note the last stanza of the 1862 London song shown above. If the NINA 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 second evidence comes from the Confederacy in 1863. The Rebels hailed and incited Irish unrest in the North. A major editorial in the Richmond Enquirer May 29, 1863 enumerated multiple reasons for the Irish to hate the Yankees, such as convent attacks and church burnings. The catalog of grievances focused on anti-Catholicism and did not mention job discrimination or NINA—probably because the Poole song had not yet reached Richmond. 25
We can now summarize our explanation of where the NINA myth comes from. There probably were occasional handwritten signs in London homes in the 1820s seeking non-Irish maids. The slogan became a cliché in Britain for hostility to the Irish. Tens of thousands of middle-class English migrated to America, and it is possible a few used the same sort of handwritten sign in the 1830—1850 period; the old British cliché was probably known in America. There is no evidence for any printed NINA signs in America or for their display at places of employment other than private homes. Poole's song of 1862 popularized the phrase. The key change that made the second version such a hit was gender reversal—the London song lamented the maid's troubles, the New York City version called for Irishmen to assert their manhood in defiance of a cowardly [End Page 409] enemy. By 1863 every Irishman knew and resented the slogan—and it perhaps helped foment the draft riots that year. The stimulus was not visual but rather aural—a song about NINA sung only by the Irish. There was indeed such a song, and it became quite popular during the 1863 crisis of the draft riots of the Civil War; it still circulates. The song was a war cry that encouraged Irish gangs to beat up suspicious strangers and it warned Irish jobseekers against breaking with the group and going to work for The Enemy.
Recollection is a group phenomenon—especially in a community so well known for its conviviality and story telling. Congressman Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts grew up hearing horror stories of how the terrible Protestants burned down a nearby convent school run by the Catholic Ursuline nuns. When O'Neill went to college he was astonished to read in a history book that it happened a century earlier in 1834—he had assumed it was a recent event. 26 It is most unlikely that businesses in Boston routinely displayed NINA signs in the 20th century and yet left no trace whatever in the records. People who "remember" the signs in the 20th century only remember the urban legend. 27
Political mobilization against the Irish was never successful. The most important effort was the Know Nothing movement, which swept the Northeast and South in 1854—56. It was a poorly led grass roots movement that generated no significant or permanent anti-Catholic or anti-Irish legislation. There was no known employment discrimination. Know-Nothing employers, for example, were never accused of firing their Irish employees. The Know-Nothings were primarily a purification movement. They believed that all politicians were corrupt, that the Democrats were the worst, and that Irish support for Democrats, plus their growing numbers, made them highly suspect. The party lasted longer in the South where it was the anti-Democratic party but only slightly anti-Catholic. Ray Billington concludes "The almost complete failure of the Know-Nothings to carry into effect the doctrines of anti-Catholic and anti-foreign propagandists contributed to the rapid decline of this nativistic party." 28 Likewise there were few visible effects of the APA movement of the 1890s, or the KKK in the 1920s. The conclusion is that, despite occasional temptations, Americans considered their "equal rights" republicanism to be incompatible with systematic economic or political discrimination against the Irish. Given the overlap of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudice how can historians tell the difference? In both cases, the anti's would attack on political grounds—elections, candidates, appointments, bosses, machines, election frauds, registration laws, civil service reform. 29 Anti-Catholics would focus on certain issues, especially saints and Mariolatry, parochial schools, sacramentalism, convents, missions to the Indians, and Bible-reading in schools. 30 They also were intensely alert to activities of the Papacy, and the political power of priests and bishops. The Vatican certainly controlled ecclesiastical affairs, but it carefully avoided American political issues. 31 By 1865 politicians realized that bishops and priests largely avoided even informal electoral endorsements of any kind—they were far less active than pietistic Protestants, as the annals of temperance and anti-slavery demonstrate. 32
Were Irish men the victims of job discrimination in reality? That was possible without any signs of course. The evidence is exceedingly thin—the Irish started poor and worked their way up slowly, all along believing that the Protestant world [End Page 410] hated them and blocked their every move. Contemporary observers commented that the Protestant Irish were doing well in America, but that preindustrial work habits were blocking progress for the Catholics. As Thernstrom has shown, Irish had one of the lowest rates of upward mobility. 33
A likely explanation is the strong group ethos that encouraged Irish to always work together, and resist individualistic attempts to break away. (The slogan tells them that trying to make it in the Yankee world is impossible anyway.) No other European Catholic group seems to have shared that chip on the shoulder (not the Germans or Italians—not even anti-Irish groups such as the French Canadians). Historians agree the political hostility against the Irish Democrats in the Civil War Era was real enough. Critics complained that the Irish had poor morals and a weak work ethic (and hence low status). Much more serious was the allegation that they were politically corrupt and priest-controlled, and therefore violated true republican values. The Irish could shoot back that The Enemy did not practice equal rights. The Irish community used the allegation of job discrimination on the part of the Other to reinforce political solidarity among (male) voters, which in any case was very high indeed—probably he highest for any political group in American history before the 1960s.
It is easy to identify job discrimination in the 19th century against blacks and Chinese (the latter indeed led by the Irish in California). Discrimination against the Irish was invisible to the non-Irish. 34 That is perhaps why this urban legend did not die out naturally. Benign Protestant factory owners could not soften the tensions by removing signs that never existed. When Protestants denied NINA that perhaps just reinforced the Irish sense of conspiracy against them (even today people who deny NINA are suspected of prejudice.) The slogan served both to explain their poverty 35 and to identify a villain against whom it was all right retaliate on sight—a donnybrook for the foes of St. Patrick. 36 The myth justified bullying strangers and helped sour relations between Irish and everyone else. 37 The sense of victimhood perhaps blinded some Irish to the discrimination suffered by other groups. 38
Perhaps the slogan has reemerged in recent years as the Irish feel the political need to be bona-fide victims. The Potato Famine of course had all the ingredients to make them victims, 39 but it will not do to have the villains overseas: there must be American villains. 40 If we conclude the Irish were systematically deluding themselves over a period of a century or more about their primary symbol of job discrimination, the next question to ask is, was it all imaginary or was there a real basis for the grievances about the economic hostility of Protestants to Irish aspirations? Historians need to be critical. Because a group truly believes it was a victim, does not make it so. On the other hand, the Irish chip-on-the-shoulder attitude may have generated a high level of group solidarity in both politics and the job market, which could have had a significant impact on the on the occupational experience of the Irish.
How successful were the Irish in the job market? Observers noticed that the Irish tended to work in equalitarian collective situations, such as labor gangs, longshoremen crews, construction crews, or with strong labor unions, usually in units dominated numerically and politically by Irishmen. Wage rates were often heavily influenced by collective activity, such as boycotts, strikes and [End Page 411] union contracts, or by the political pressures that could be exerted on behalf of employees in government jobs, or working for contractors holding city contracts, or for regulated utilities such as street railways and subways.
The first arrivals formed all-Irish work crews for construction companies in the building of railroads in the 1830s. 41 Sometimes the Irish managed to monopolize a specific labor market sector—they comprised 95% of the canal workers by 1840, and 95% of the New York City longshoremen by 1900. 42 The monopoly of course facilitated group action, and once a crossing point was reached it was possible to exclude virtually all Others. Solidarity (with or without formal union organization) made for excellent bargaining power, augmented as needed by the use of intimidation, strikes, arson, terrorism and destructive violence to settle any grievances they may have had with their employers, not to mention internal feuds linked to historic feuds back in Ireland. Direct evidence that employers did not want Irish workers is absent. By the early 20th century major corporations had personnel offices and written procedures. If the Irish had a reputation for being unsatisfactory, the personnel managers never commented upon it. Job discrimination against blacks and Asians continued, and was quite visible in the corporate records and the media. Discrimination against newer immigrant groups can be identified as late as 1941 (when it was banned for government contract holders). No trace of anti-Irish hostility has turned up in the corporate records of the literature of personnel management. Can we prove there was no job discrimination against the Irish? Zero is too hard to "prove"—though no historian has found any evidence of any actual discrimination by any business or factory. 43 The main "evidence" referenced in the historical literature is three fold:
First, the NINA myth was so convincing that the Irish saw no need to investigate further, or to document the discrimination, or to set up a protective organization. (They of course organized extensively, in both Ireland and America, to protest maltreatment back in Ireland.) 44
Second, historians point to contemporaries who commented unfavorably on the Irish, generalizing from a handful of cases to create a stereotype of the dominant views of all of American society. Now indeed the 19th century literature is filled with eyewitness and statistical descriptions of Irish drunkenness, crime, violence, poverty, extortion, insanity, ignorance, political corruption and lawless behavior. The reports come from many cities, from Catholics and non-Catholics, social scientists and journalists, Irish and non-Irish. 45 The question is not whether the Irish were admired. (They were not.) The argument that the dominant popular stereotypes of the Irish were especially nasty does not hold up under careful examination. There is no evidence that more than one in a thousand Americans considered the Irish as racially inferior, non-white or ape-like. 46
Third, as noted, historians point to statistical evidence that the Irish had lower rates of upward social mobility than average, in the 1850—1880 period. The Irish must have been held back by something: but was it internal or external, or just random historical luck? Given the 20th century success story of the Irish—they are among the wealthiest groups today—the disability or discrimination ended somewhere along the line. [End Page 412]
Many different models can explain the Irish condition: First there was lack of financial and human capital. The Irish who arrived in the 1840s and 1850s came with few useful industrial or agricultural skills, while the British and Germans who came at the same time brought cash and much more human capital. Thus the distribution of human capital can be said to have allocated Irish to unskilled jobs, and other immigrants to more skilled opportunities. After 1890 the Irish had acquired some schooling and skills, while the current newcomers were primarily unskilled peasants from southern and eastern Europe. The latter groups moved into the unskilled jobs while the Irish moved up. In the coal fields, with very few job opportunities above the level of unskilled miner, the arrival of new competitors led to significant tensions and violence. In some cases the new competitors were more skilled than the Irish; thus the Swedes who came to Worcester in the late 19th century displaced the less skilled Irish in the metals factories.
The Irish did invest heavily in human capital, through their system of parochial schools and colleges. The impact of such investment was necessarily long-term, and seems to have become visible by 1900. To a considerable extent the goal was preservation and protection of traditional religious values, and the creation of a social system that would discourage intermarriage. However the schools did follow a standardized curriculum that inculcated literacy and learning skills. Negative investment in human capital involved internal self-defeating factors, such as heavy alcoholism, weak motivation, poor work habits, and disorganized family life. This was widely commented on regarding 19th century Irish, but not much reported in 20th century. 47 Rather few Irish became entrepreneurs; the community did not generate pools of financial capital. Perhaps more important was a low communal value on the individualistic businessman. Construction contracting seems to have been the only business in which they had any significant ownership role, and that depended on control of labor and access to government contracts rather than financial capital. The Irish did operate many saloons, but they were financed by the German brewers and generated little new capital for the community. 48
Comparing rates of social mobility assumes that the Irish were seeking that goal to the same extent as the Yankees. Perhaps their ambitions looked more toward non-individualistic goals (such as building impressive churches), or non-career family advancement strategies focused on political leadership or home ownership, or (in the case of nuns and priests) honorific careers that involved a vow of poverty. A strikingly high proportion of talented Irish youth went into very low paying, very high prestige religious careers. The community more often honored priests and bishops than business entrepreneurs.
Social mobility depends upon strong family structures. Weak ties in a group would indicate fathers and uncles did not assist their kin. The Irish had a reputation for the opposite traits (clannishness and nepotism), but also had reportedly high rates of internal family discord. 49 On the other hand kinship ties could be too strong and impede upward mobility. Parents might demand more child labor, valuing family collective goals over the child's individualistic career potential. Did the Irish tend to remove their children from schools to put them to work early? This would produce ready funds for home ownership, but less long-run human capital. Census data indicate high rates of school attendance, at least to [End Page 413] age 14. 50 Special family needs, especially sending funds to Ireland for subsistence and bringing over more relatives, might have drained the capital needed for upward mobility through small business. This indeed was a major factor among the Irish down to the 1880s.
Perhaps the Irish ethic placed more stress on equality and communal sharing of wealth. Different customs can have this effect—for example extensive charity (tithing), or heavy gambling that redistributes earned income in random fashion. Irish levels of charity were moderately high (especially donations to the church); observers did not comment on heavy gambling. In some cultures, when a man gets money he must share it widely with relatives, thus diffusing it and slowing accumulation in entrepreneurial hands. Observers did not report this trait as especially characteristic of the Irish community. In the context of social mobility, "clannishness" can refer to a collective ethic whereby the goal is for the group as a whole moves ahead, with individual initiative discouraged. 51 Bad historical luck could lock a group into the wrong skills or geography, causing retarded growth and structural unemployment. A group could cling too long to old-fashioned skills that were dead-end or slow growth, or be attached to businesses or geographical areas that grew very slowly. This may have happened to the Germans, and certainly did happen in the 20th century to coal miners. The Irish however, were noted for their willingness to change jobs, move to new neighborhoods or cities, and abandon trades. However, the quest for political patronage probably locked Irish men into overpaid but dead-end blue-collar jobs, and channeled talent into public administration rather than private entrepreneurship. 52
Perhaps businessmen figured Irish were unacceptable and decided not to hire any? There is little evidence for, and vast evidence against, this hypothesis. Beginning with Samuel Slater, New England entrepreneurs built hundreds of textile mills in the ante-bellum period. Although the Yankee owners were at first eager to use Yankee workers like themselves (the famous "Lowell Girls") they soon switched to Irish and French Canadian Catholics. Pleased with this new labor supply, they built more mills, often in small towns that had previously been entirely Yankee. They counted on a steady inflow of Catholic workers, borrowing millions of dollars to create these jobs. Once the Irish did have mill jobs they were four times more likely to put their children to work in the same mill than Yankees—rather odd behavior if they were mistreated so badly. 53 Perhaps foremen and superintendents hired Irish for low level jobs but deliberately held them back or promote them very slowly? Major research projects by Tamara Hareven (dealing with Amoskeag, the largest textile mill in the world), and Walter Licht, dealing with internal promotion system in railroads, finds no evidence of this. Business historians and biographers have turned up no instances of systematic anti-Irish discrimination by any employer in the US, at any time. 54
NINA originated with women domestic servants, and we need to rethink their position. No one has suggested the Irish women used violence, boycotts or threats to achieve dominance in this industry. "Bridget" had a reputation for mediocre quality work, but this liability was offset by communal assets that made them attractive employees. They spoke English. Along with African Americans and Swedes, they had a strong commitment to service jobs and were available in large numbers. Because of late marriages and spinsterhood, they spent years in service, accumulating experience and maturity that made them more attractive [End Page 414] than inexperienced teenagers. Off the job the Irish had a well-developed support network that provided friendship, entertainment, advice, and connections to find new employers. These support networks established informal job standards regarding working hours, housing, food, perquisites and pay scales. The standards were enforced by the maid immediately quitting if the employer violated the standards, with knowledge her friends would be supportive and would help her find a new position. Despite scare stories in the anti-Catholic pamphlets, the Irish servants did not proselytize or interfere with household religious activity. Given the dominance of Irish women among maids in the large cities, and the constant turnover of servants, we can estimate that the large majority (perhaps 80 or 90 percent) of middle class families, regardless of their own ethnic or religious affiliations, routinely hired Irish women. 55
The economic theory of discrimination focuses on the tastes of the employers, coworkers and customers, and the costs to each (in terms of profits, wages and prices) of having a distaste for a category of workers. If there is underemployment of a target group in a competitive market, then some entrepreneur can make a bigger profit by seeking out and hiring that group. Coworkers who have a strong distaste for working alongside the target can react by boycotting that employer, forcing up his other costs. By looking at wage rates in workplaces with different mixes of groups, economists hope to estimate the "distaste" factor: that is, workers will have to be paid more to work alongside a target group (and will accept lower pay if there are no coworkers from that group.) Estimates of the distaste factor come from a historical study dealing with Michigan furniture workers in the 1890s. It found that in general all groups have a preference for their own kind as coworkers (and were willing to take a 5—10% wage cut for the privilege of working alongside their own kind.) People who were willing to work with outsiders were paid more. "Distaste" for Irish measured out about the same as for other groups. Overall discrimination was small—combined with language skills and the myriad of other unmeasured factors it was less than 5% of the average wage. Doubtless there was a tendency for owners of small shops to hire only their own ethnicity. While this would have the effect of excluding Irish from certain jobs, it cannot be called "anti-Irish" in motivation. Probably the Irish practiced closed hiring as much as or more than any group. 56
We know from the experience of African Americans and Chinese that the most powerful form of job discrimination came from workers who vowed to boycott or shut down any employer who hired the excluded class. Employers who were personally willing to hire Chinese or blacks were forced to submit to the threats. 57 There were no reports of mobs attacking Irish employment, even during sporadic episodes of attacks on Catholic church facilities in 1830s and 1840s. No one has reported claims that co-workers refused to work alongside Irish; this powerful form of discrimination probably did not affect the Irish in significant ways. On the other hand the Irish repeatedly attacked employers who hired African Americans or Chinese. If a group is systematically discriminated against in a major way by most employers, it will be segregated into a small niche. This segregation should be visible in the census statistics of occupation, when comparing it to other groups, especially to British Protestant immigrants who were not reputedly subject to discrimination. The most useful analysis of any large city for the 19th century is the "Philadelphia Social History Project" [End Page 415] which computerized hundreds of thousands of census entries. The Irish comprised 15—30% of the labor force there. How segregated were they, and how did the segregation decline over time? Table 1 (http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Erjensen/36.2jensen_tables.html#tab01) shows an index of how different the Irish and others were from native Americans. (Philadelphia was one of the few cities with a large native American working class.) The data show the Irish were about in the same position as German immigrants, and much less liable to being boxed into a job niche than blacks, Italians, Poles or Jews. The Irish had about the same score in 1930 as the British, which is consistent with very little discrimination by employers. The index is about the same for Irish of the first and second generation (1880) and later Irish (1930) indicating that the level of anti-Irish discrimination did not change much over time; it can be seen as equally low in both 1880 and 1930. [End Page 416]
Assuming the Irish relied somewhat less on individual skills or market forces, and more on collective action and political prowess for their job security and pay rates, we must ask how successful were they? By the early twentieth century their pay scales were probably at least average. Peter Baskerville has discovered the Irish Catholics in urban Canada in 1901 were about average in terms of both family incomes and standards of living.
Table 1: 1880 Index of Job Segregation , Philadelphia (100=max)58 (http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Erjensen/no-irish.htm#FOOTNOTE)
Old Stock 0
Black 53
Irish Immigrants 35
Sons of Irish immigrants 34
German Immigrants 37
Sons of German immigrants 31
1930 Index of Job Segregation, Philadelphia
White, US born parents 0
Black 62
Italian 60
Jewish 57
Polish 55
German 33
Irish 29
British 25
My analysis of Iowa data in 1915 in Table 2 shows the Irish Catholics had slightly above average incomes, but that additional years of schooling helped them less than other groups. This suggests that group solidarity was a powerful force for uplift, but it improved the status of the group as a unit rather than as an average of separate individuals. Autobiographies of overly ambitious youth relate how they were harassed by their classmates and warned against the sin of pride by the priest and nuns. 60
Table 2: Lifetime Earnings and return to additional schooling Iowa
Non-Farm Men, 1915
Group N $Lifetime Return ALL
909 100 10.6%
OLD STOCK 499 97 9.7%
No Religion 243 93 9.1%
Methodist 164 95 9.7%
ETHNICS 410 100 10.6%
German 147 109 12.2%
Lutheran 34 95 9.5%
Catholic 46 106 13.9%
Scandinavian 87 103 12.2%
British 58 114 14.7%
Irish Catholic 57 104 8.4% Pete Hamill explained how the collective spirit affected him, growing up in Brooklyn in 1940s: 61
This was part of the most sickening aspect of Irish-American life in those days: the assumption that if you rose above an acceptable level of mediocrity, you were guilty of the sin of pride. You were to accept your place and stay in it for the rest of your life; the true rewards would be given to you in heaven, after you were dead. There was ferocious pressure to conform, to avoid breaking out of the pack; self-denial was the supreme virtue...it was arrogant, a sin of pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms, and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude was expressed directlyMore often, it was implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce power. Who did I think I was? When the Irish grumbled about "No Irish Need Apply," they perhaps were really warning each other against taking jobs which were controlled by the Other and immune from the political pressures that group solidarity could exert. There was method to the myth, which is why it persisted so long. Individual upward mobility was a priority for individualistic strivers imbued with the "Protestant Ethic." There is no reason to assume it motivated the Irish. Their individual upward mobility rates were modest. 62
If the Irish turned both politics and the job market into a group struggle, then we might expect different outcomes when comparing the three situations where the Irish were too weak to make much difference, where they had the "right amount" of leverage, and where they were too numerous. Statistical studies of social mobility in the 1850—1920 era suggest that the Irish did best in the Midwest (where they had just the right amount of strength), and not nearly as well in the Northeast, where they were too numerous to be advantaged by zero-sum power maneuvering. 63 Why the difference? Both Midwest and Northeast regions were doing very well, industrializing rapidly at that time. Let's examine the model of collective solidarity of the Irish in the labor market. It was a technique to facilitate the group as a whole moving rather than individuals. It had zero-sum properties (what one group gained, other groups lost). Their technique would work much better when the Irish were 10—30% of the population, and not nearly as well when they were in a majority. (If their numbers went above 50%, then it was dysfunctional, for most gains would come at the expense of other Irish.) The Irish did have a numerical dominance in Boston and other northeastern [End Page 417] cities, such as Troy. There were fewer rivals to elbow out of the way, and their technique was therefore much less successful there. The Irish approach discouraged entrepreneurship (which is positive-sum). It encouraged government work, and jobs (such as canal or railroad construction, longshoremen, transit) where government contacts or franchises were involved (thus allowing them to use their political muscle). In order to expand their preferred job base the Irish supported expansion of government spending and government regulation—what John Buenker has called "urban liberalism." Successors to the Al Smith tradition of urban liberalism, such as Speakers John McCormack and Tip O'Neill and Senator Ted Kennedy could well boast of their achievements in expanding government (or preventing its contraction) during and after the New Deal era. 64
After 1860 fears that the Irish were a threat to republicanism rapidly disappeared. The most decisive event came in spring 1861; when the War broke out the Irish rallied to the American flag, and joined the army. Although they strenuously opposed the draft and emancipation, they never supported the Confederacy (unlike some old-line Democratic leaders who took Confederate money.) Irish veterans were welcomed into the GAR, whose camaraderie validated their republicanism. The worst forms of poverty and destitution eventually disappeared, and a solid class of property owners and civil servants emerged to anchor the Irish in their communities. The Catholic Church, controlled by the Irish, vigorously supported law and order, and effectively suppressed the premodern urge to use violence for political goals. The Pope never dictated politics, and the bishops and priests never became active in domestic politics. They focused on building schools, colleges, hospitals, asylums and the stunningly beautiful churches. Many critics—throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—were alarmed that parochial schools threatened the public school system, which they insisted was the only guarantee of republican values. The Catholics vehemently rejected this allegation, and over the years gained surprising allies, as other denominations started their own parochial schools, including the German Lutherans, Dutch Calvinists, Orthodox Jews, and evangelicals. Lingering anti-Catholicism reappeared in debates over prohibition, and especially over the nomination of Catholics to the presidency, but it is notable that politicians were never attacked for their Irish heritage. 65
Irish collective solidarity seems to have broken down after World War Two, as New Deal work relief ended, the big city machines collapsed, unions entered an era of slow, steady decline, and the Catholic school system generated high school and college graduates well-equipped to make their way in the white collar world entirely as individuals, with minimal need for group support. By the 1960s the Irish had moved from the bottom to near the top of the ladder, with an economic status that surpassed their old Yankee antagonists. With the election of John Kennedy in 1960, Irish political solidarity climaxed. The Last Hurrah came in 1964, when Irish Catholics voted 78 percent for Lyndon Johnson. They abandoned Humphrey in 1968; since then they have split evenly between the parties and no longer comprise a bloc vote. 66
Did the Irish come to America in the face of intense hostility, symbolized by the omnipresent sign, "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply"? The hard evidence suggests that on the whole Irish immigrants as employees were welcomed by employers; their entry was never restricted; and no one proposed they be excluded [End Page 418] like the Chinese, let alone sent back. Instead of firing Catholics to make way for Protestant workers, most employers did exactly the opposite. That is, the dominant culture actively moved to create new jobs specifically for the unskilled Irish workers. As soon as the Irish acquired education and skills they moved up the social status ladder, reaching near the top by the 1960s. For a while political questions were raised about the devotion of the Irish to America's republican ideals, but these doubts largely faded away during the 1860s. The Irish rarely if ever had to confront an avowedly "anti-Irish" politician of national or statewide reputation—itself powerful evidence for the absence of deep-rooted anti-Irish sentiment. By the late 19th century the Irish were fully accepted politically and economically. However, reality and perception diverged. After the song appeared in 1862 the Irish themselves "saw" the NINA signs everywhere, seeing in them ugly discrimination that was forcing them downward into the worst jobs. It was deliberate humiliation by arrogant Protestant Yankees. The myth was undeniable—anyone inside the group would be called a traitor for suggesting that internal weaknesses inside the Irish community caused its problems; anyone outside would be called a prejudiced bigot. 67 But what if there were no such signs? The NINA slogan was in the mind's eye, conjured by an enormously popular song from 1862. Job discrimination by the Other was too well known to the Irish to need evidence beyond NINA, or the "recent" burning of the Ursuline convent. Historians engaging in cultural studies must beware the trap that privileges evidence derived from the protests of self-proclaimed victims. Practically every ethnoreligious group in America cherishes its martyrs and warns its members that outsiders "discriminate" against them, or would if they had the opportunity. The NINA slogan had the effect of reinforcing political, social and religious solidarity. It had a major economic role as well, strengthening the politicized work-gang outlook of Irish workers who had to stick together at all times. It warned the Irish against looking for jobs outside their community, and it explained away their low individual rates of upward social mobility. The slogan identified an enemy to blame, and justified bully behavior on the city streets. NINA signs never faded away, even as the Irish prospered and discrimination vanished—they remained a myth about origins that could not be abandoned.
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