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My paternal great grandfather emigrated from Ireland and I remember, as a child, hearing about the “NINA” signs in stores. As children, I think that we judge the truthfulness of a claim, not by the facts, but rather by the statement’s plausibility, and the credentials of the people making the claim. NINA signs certainly seem plausible; in my imagination, they paralleled the “Whites Only” signs of Jim Crow. As far as credibility, parents are about as credible as it gets–at least that’s the way it seems when you’re little. Only now, reading these articles, has my collective, cultural memory been challenged.
Richard Jensen marshals a compelling argument that the NINA signs were, in fact, a mostly imagined phenomenon. While they may have appeared in windows of private homes, especially in Britain, they were non-existent within the commercial world. He discusses the discrimination that the Irish perceived, contradicting it with examples of Irish economic success in America.
Kevin Kenny, though sounding a tone more sympathetic to the Irish than that of Jensen, seems to be in relative agreement. He acknowledges that “demand for unskilled male heavy labor and unskilled female domestic labor in the nineteenth century was simply too great for the Irish to have suffered much by way of anti-hiring discrimination, racial or otherwise.” In seeming agreement about labor, these two historians also write in concordance regarding political discrimination against the Irish, including nativist fears.
Essentially, I think, this discussion comes down to disagreements about what it felt like to be Irish or Irish-American during the nineteenth century. Did it feel discriminatory, or welcoming? The truth can likely be determined from evidence and thoughtful intuition: the Irish, despite being a poor and unskilled immigrant group, often succeeded in the labor market in America. Yet, cultural fears about their race, or their Catholicism persisted. They displayed economic mobility, but were discriminated against politically. The Irish likely felt unwelcome in America, even as they found employment, dominated some industries and gained political franchise. That feeling, not reality, seems to have created the NINA signs that exist in my imagination and the imaginations of millions of other Irish-Americans: sitting in shop windows, they remind us that our ancestors once felt unwelcome, even if that feeling didn’t come from a sign in the window, or a mass inability to find work.
I think that I echo Michael’s final line, where he writes “I think an effort to better connect how the discrimination in other aspects of the Irish experience contributed to the myth of economic discrimination would have added to Jenson’s work.” A focus on the experience of the Irish, and their own understanding of their cultural history, would be extremely useful in conjunction with this factual analysis of the ways the Irish were and were not discriminated against in the 19th century.