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. 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?
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 schoolsThe 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
By 1847, there were 37,000 Irish immigrants in Boston alone, making up a full third of its entire population. In The Immigrants, Oscar Handlin describes them as "a massive lump in the community, undigested and indigestible." These newcomers had no skills, no tools, no education to become clerks, and the factories where they might have found work a decade earlier had moved out to Lowell, Lawrence, and Waltham. Many men had to be supported by their wives and daughters who worked as domestic servants in hotels and private homes, while they themselves worked sporadically sweeping streets, tending horses, cleaning stables, cutting fish, and performing any other menial work they could find.
1. For the next several decades, standards of living improved for the Boston Irish, as their sons became plumbers, carpenters, and police, and new Italian immigrants took over the more lowly jobs. But the first Irish immigrants to arrive here occupied terribly overcrowded slums in the North End and Fort Hill, often living in conditions which rivaled the misThe key to the success of ethnic political strategies was the concentration of European immigrants within ethnic ghettoes, in northern and midwestern cities (Boston, NY, Chicago, etc.) and the fact that European immigrants, unlike Asian immigrants, were eligible for naturalization. Irish political activists enjoyed a particular organizing advantage because their communities were English-speaking and the Irish largely saw themselves as permanent, rather than temporary, immigrants. Only 10% of Irish immigrants returned to their home country as opposed to between 40-60% of Italians immigrants.
ery they had fled.
construction workers who organized themselves into craft unions within the building trades industries. In return, Irish entrepree conditions for their members by limiting the size membership and convincing employers to hire members of their union within their given field. In this way, Unions became a mechanism for immigrant workers to resist exploitation and claim the privileges of American citizenship usually preserved for the white and native-born. Beginning in the late 19th century, many craft unions used ethnic and racial membership restrictions as one mechanism for limiting the size of their membership. It was not until the emergence of the Affirmative Action policies of the 1960's that the American Federation of Labor, which was made up primarily of craft unions, finally banned its member unions from maintaining racial bars to membership.
For example, in the years before the Civil War in the North, Irish immigrants and free blacks often competed for the same low-skill and low-wage jobs. In this competition, Irish workers and political leaders often asserted their whiteness, (i.e. their commonality with the white American majority), while blacks responded by asserting their native-born status against the claims of Irish-born workers. This competition led many Irish-American workers and organizations to opposed the abolition of slavery-- for fear of increased competition newly freed blacks from the South. In 1863, during the Civil War, Irish workers rioted in opposition to a military draft law that allowed the wealthy to pay $300 for a substitute to replace. also that jobs on the city’s docks be reserved just for whites, the rioters attacked blacks and black neighborhoods in New York for 4 days, killing 105. The rioting did not end until a U.S. Army regiment arrived from Gettysburg.
During the late 1840s and the 1850s, immigrants came in large numbers from Ireland, Germany, and England. The Irish were poorest and fared least favorably in the job market, but "the dominant tendency among new arrivals was downward occupational mobility."72 Within a decade or so, the Germans and English made greater vocational advances. Recruiting of immigrant workers by employers was centralized in New York where a state employment agency contacted employers seeking unskilled laborers. In time, branch offices of the agency were established in seven states. Immigrant remittances back home continued apace. During 1853-1854 alone, Irish immigrants sent $21.7 million, a goodly part of which paid for their families' later steamship tickets to America.73 The average wealth possessed by the immigrants was quite modest.
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