NINA – Popular Politics in Early America

November 7, 2013

Irish Discrimination a Myth?

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In No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization, Richard Jensen argues that 19th century job discrimination against Irish-Americans, symbolized by the idea of signs reading “No Irish Need Apply” (NINA) hanging in business windows, was largely a myth. Nearly everyone in America remembers learning about the discrimination Irish immigrants faced during their early years in America, and the NINA signs are an essential part of that narrative. However, in his thorough research that included combing through both newspaper ads and records of firsthand accounts, Jensen convincingly shows that there is no evidence these signs were at all common. Instead, Jensen convincingly presents us with a narrative in which NINA signs were somewhat common in private British homes seeking maids, and that the collective memory of those signs and their significance as a slogan of general distaste for the Irish carried on into the 19th century United States. (409) He then discusses how John Poole’s song spread the line even further, causing the people to believe the phrase really was printed up in many businesses and also giving the phrase a special status as a rallying cry of oppression for the Irish to bond over. (409) Jensen uses economic arguments and later statistics to assert that the Irish were not discriminated against and in fact were sought after as cheap labor, a common experience of any immigrant group entering a workforce en masse without many skills. (413)

The part of Jensen’s argument that most interested me was something I alluded to in the last paragraph: the idea that the Irish used the idea of NINA and a general sense of discrimination as a way to strengthen their sense of community in the face of what they saw as economic discrimination. Jensen claims numerous times that this tight-knit Irish community encouraged individual Irish from taking jobs dominated by the “Other.” (Presumably, this means other immigrants and Yankees). Jensen believes this was a useful tool for the community as the Irish were able to dominate certain professions such as the canal building and longshoremen industries. (412) Their numbers thus allowed them more power as workers and allowed them to negotiate with employers and organize strikes in a unified fashion. On the face of it, it seems counterintuitive to say that the Irish community could play up discrimination against themselves and use it as an economic tool, but Jensen makes it into a logical, economic argument. Immigrant groups, and really any minority or otherwise disadvantaged groups, are at their most powerful when they act collectively and act to better conditions for the entire group. If Irish workers were constantly going into the same professions, then their numbers would give them a greater collective power as workers within those professions.

If I had one issue with the article, it would be the same that Eli brought up in his post. I think that Jensen could have done a better job of including narratives that illustrated how Irish people of the time actually felt. Perhaps diaries, letter correspondences, or Irish newspapers or pamphlets could have given insight into ways they felt American society mistreated them. I appreciated Jensen’s statistical, more logic-based argument, but when evaluating an immigrant group in this way it is important to consider their own experiences as they themselves perceived them.

November 7, 2013

Debunking Discrimination of Irish-Americans

Jensen’s “No Irish Need Apply” and Kenny’s “Race, Violence, and Anti-Irish Sentiment in the Nineteenth Century” provide revealing insights into race relations in America, particularly with reference to the plight of Irish immigrants to the United States. While both authors discuss the issues of anti-Irish sentiment in the nineteenth century, however, each takes a markedly different approach to their understandings of discrimination and racism against the Irish in America.

Jensen writes a bold, new interpretation of Irish–American history, and argues that the “No Irish Need Apply,” or NINA ideology said to have pervaded businesses in the United States was largely a fabrication of the Irish people. He effectively asserts that there is a surprising scarcity of evidence to support the widely-held view that the Irish were victims of workplace discrimination in the nineteenth century. In fact, Jensen writes that unskilled Irish workers were very likely welcomed into American business (409). While I agree with Jensen that there appears to be a definite lack of sufficient support to argue that the Irish were discriminated against under the NINA ideology, I believe his claim that the Irish used the NINA slogan as a protective tool falls short of his own criticism. While I found his argument about the possibility of Irish-Americans using NINA as an agent to ensure solidarity interesting, Jensen’s use of a single man’s assessment of the collective spirit of the Irish people to represent a century’s worth of political, economic, and racial struggles for Irish-Americans is audacious (417). With that being said I applaud Jensen’s effort because of this risk. As Kevin Kenny states in response to Jensen’s work, the conclusions presented are not supported by any other historians in the field (Kenny 372). In this way Jensen presents a novel method of evaluating the Irish-American solidarity of the nineteenth century, but ultimately falls short in providing a convincing argument for why it persisted.

On the other hand, Kenny’s work is much more conservative than Jensen’s, and ultimately this works in his favor. In his essay, Kenny successfully classifies the differences between anti-Irish sentiment among British and American societies. Unlike Jensen, Kenny also focuses on the progression of racism against the Irish, beginning with the caricature of “Paddy” in the news media; Paddy “was a uniquely racialized figure” (369). Kenny is also able to use several cases of Irish labor groups – the Molly Maguires, the Whiteboys, and the Ribbonmen – to illustrate the collective violent practices used by these groups, leading to the growth of anti-Irish sentiment because of perceived potential threats towards American society (373). Kenny’s statement that labor and class were largely inseparable from race in nineteenth century America was also well supported through his discussion of racism against Asian and black people in comparison to the Irish (375). Augmenting the evidence he provides for depicting an American culture with racist attitudes towards Irish-Americans is Jensen’s organization of his essay. Through his clearly articulated arguments and thorough treatment of historiography his claims are more cogent than those presented by Jensen.

While I agree with Max’s comments in stating that Kenny could have extended his essay to elaborate upon other factors affecting Irish-American racism in the nineteenth century, in doing so I believe Kenny may have lost his central argument that Irish collective violence was the basis for anti-Irish sentiment in the United States. By adding interpretations to this work Kenny might be falling back into the historiography he is trying to distance himself from, making his argument less an original piece than an amalgamation of what other scholars have stated about Irish-American racism. While narrowing one’s focus definitely runs the risk of weakening the quality of a historical work (just see my criticism of Jensen), I ultimately think both Kenny’s and Jensen’s article make important contributions to understanding the development of the Irish-American community in the 19th century.

November 6, 2013

Cultural Consciousness

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.

November 6, 2013

What Do You Mean, "You People"?

In ““No Irish Need Apply”: A Myth of Victimization,” Richard Jensen examines the myth of Irish-Catholic exclusion from mainstream American jobs and activities and its origins as a protective tool for the Irish community. He argues that Irish claims of its (NINA) existence were a political statement that enhanced and perpetuated non-individualistic work culture.

In order to fully understand the myth of discrimination in the Irish pathos, Jensen needed to show the full extent of evidence there was that supported it. He seemed to have boiled it down to a single piece of sheet music with the refrain “No Irish Need Apply!” in 1862(409). It is important to note that this was based off a song from London about discrimination against Irish maids, because of the fact that the American version is about Irish working men. I think this is significant because of the association of labor and masculine activities mentioned in Wilentz such as day drinking and putting out fires. In Kenny’s chapter on racial perceptions of Irish in American culture, he writes that racially-based stereotypes were mainly directed at men rather than women. In a paper I wrote for a different class about the rise of white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina, masculinity and race were also closely related because African Americans and women in the antebellum South were dependents. White supremacy in this case was a reaction to the eclipsed dominance of the white man.

Both Jensen and Kenny return to the 19^th century Irish phenomenon of collective violence. Jensen views mob violence as one of the instances where Irish acted out in a way that demonstrated solidarity against what was perceived as hostility and “othering”. Kenny points out that these massive bursts of social and political violence provided the strongest evidence for nativists making racial claims about Irish. By comparing these two statements, it is easy to see how the solidarity could have been viewed instead as self-segregation based on racial standards.

November 6, 2013

Self-inflicted prejudice

“No Irish Need Apply”: A Myth of Victimization by Richard Jensen may be the first work I have read this semester that I completely agree with. Jensen’s explains his thesis claiming, “This paper will explain how the myth originated and will explore its long-lasting value to the Irish community as a protective device” (406). Jensen’s work does a nice job explaining the background behind the slogan as well as giving multiple possible explanations for the significance of the myth without factual historical evidence. His work delves into the Irish myth of victimization using the popular slogan “No Irish Need Apply.” He explains that 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” (405). Without historical evidence many historians viewed this slogan as a metaphor for Irish troubles; however, the Irish insist that the signs did exist and seem to prove their discrimination.

The “NINA” slogan seemingly originated out of England after the 1798 Irish rebellion and came over to America with the migration. The myth in America seemed to focus on the public “NINA” signs hanging up in shops and restaurants that deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. However, with that being said, “No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists” (405). Along with no historical evidence of the signs, no other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs as well as there was no known employment discrimination ever documented. I found this is to be very strange especially after Jensen noted some very famous Americans that said they had heard about the signs growing up. Something had to be going on and Jensen offers some rather valid options. The one I was most interested in was the one he mentions last.

With no physical evidence or documentation of the myth Jensen offers the explanation that myth fostered among the Irish a misconception that other Americans were prejudiced against them, and were deliberately holding back their economic progress. This perceived prejudice gave the Irish a “chip on the shoulder” mentality and directly added to their encouragement of the myth. No other European Catholic group shared this chip on their shoulder; likely the strong group ethos that encouraged Irish to always work together, and resist individualistic attempts to break away attributed to the popular myth. The Irish must have been held back by something because they had a statistically lower rate of upward social mobility than average in the 1850-1880 period; but was it internal or external (412)? Jensen argues that there is something else going on that is fostering this self-proclaimed discrimination by the Irish stating, “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 occupational experience of the Irish” (411). Records show that many Irish worked together in large groups such as labor gangs and construction crews adding to the theory of group solidarity driving the myth. Touching on CT’s previous post, it is important to note the atmosphere of the region at the time and realize that many different cultures and backgrounds could have easily lead to the congregation of Irish immigrants in the some workplaces and communities and held them back from political and social mobility.

In my opinion, self-denial was the king and self-infliction was what led the Irish to popularize this myth. Pete Hamill provides Jensen with a tremendous example of this collective Irish spirit, “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” (417). Their own slogan only pushed them down into lesser jobs. The slogan was in the mind’s eye, and gained steam and significance from the popular song from 1862. With no evidence, the Irish, in my view, become self-proclaimed victims. Discrimination by others may have been relatively irrelevant compared to the effect the Irish slogan had on reinforcing political, social and religious solidarity amongst its own people. It was more of a warning to stick to the neighborhood than it was a prejudice act by Others. I agree with Jensen’s final analysis and believe the slogan identified an enemy to blame for the Irish inability to move socially upward besides their own faults and community ideals.