In this thread, I compared a recent hate crime with historical anti-Irish prejudice in the US. This is typified with the infamous NINA (No Irish Need Apply) policy that many employers in the northeastern cities of the US supposedly had in the late 1800’s.
My question is, how was “Irish” generally defined (in terms of its formal definition) and adjudicated (e.g. evaluating individual people and sorting them into “Irish” and “Not Irish” baskets) in those days?
A person was Irish and needed not apply if there were predominantly of Irish descent. So someone with one Irish great-grandma who otherwise was a mix of French Canadian and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry would be non-Irish, and could apply.
A person was Irish if they were physically born in Ireland.
A person was Irish if they had some identifiable Irish ancestry and were a devout Roman Catholic. Converting to Protestantism made you Non-Irish.
A person was Irish if they had some identifiable Irish ancestry and were not a US citizen. So naturalization washed the Irish away, and children born in the US of two Irish parents would be sufficiently non-Irish to apply.
There was, however, prejudice against the Irish. Cartoons of the 19th century portrayed the Irish as looking much like chimpanzees and always holding a pipe held upside down. The “No Irish Need Apply” line seems to be something of a legend.
How was it defined? By “I know one when I see one.” Anyone who had any “Irish” tendencies – anything smacking of the stereotyped “Irish” culture – would be considered Irish. No one did a particularly precise analysis or definition. It usually meant that the person was Catholic (and there was plenty of anti-Catholicism, too) and was either first or second generation Irish, but it was far easier for someone of Irish descent to pass than someone with Negro blood.
That’s two ads in the New York Times, not signs or ads in general. Signposted notices could have been common.
Being the descendant of Irish immigrants to New York, I would say there certainly wasn’t anything so systematic or organized as segregation against blacks. Discrimination would have been against people who were culturally Irish Catholic, not those of Irish ancestry in general. If you didn’t have a recognizably Irish name, or an Irish accent, you could probably avoid discrimination.
From what I’ve read, it wasn’t really applied systematically or based on any rules. It was a mixture of anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant ideas that barred some Irish immigrants from the most entry-level forms of non-manual labor employment. Irish girls were considered clumsy so they didn’t make good housemaids. You didn’t want a Catholic raising your children. As far as I know, an Irish man with a strong back could always find a blue-collar job in a coal mine or building railroads. Block voting and Tammany Hall style political patronage created some animosity but it was never long term or systematic. The Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan were fairly short term waves of anti-Catholic purity but with few long term effects.
As a Maroon Irish Passport Carrying Irish Citizen, I can try to answer this:
The Irish were (and of course mostly are) Catholic
Sterotyped as heavy drinkers (maybe somewhat accurate :b)
They’re good at Golf and Gaelic Football (I had to add that)
And in the words of Roddy Doyle, in The Commitments: (and oh heck, I’m gonna quote the book, not the movie)
"The Irish are the N*‘s of Europe, lads… An’ Dubliners are the Ns of Ireland… An’ the Northside dubliners are the N’s of Dublin – so say it loud “I’m black and I’m proud”
(I decided against using that N* word. In the movie, Jimmy Rabbite says “black” all four times. If Alan Parker went that way, so will I. Roddy Doyle, in the book, uses the N* word the first three times)
I reckon nowadays, the Irish are accepted. They make best stout (Guinness). The best whiskey (Jameson) and the best parade.
You don’t have to have a hard rule about what kind of Irish you are not going to hire, if you are only going to hire a Methodist. If you make the hiring criteria tight, you can make the non-hiring criteria loose.
Post war, my dad was working for one of the big aircraft companies. He told me that on his side of the wall (Engineering), everyone was a member of the Masonic Lodge. On the other side (factory floor), it was all Knights of Columbus.
Perhaps ironically, this sort of historic explicit anti-Irish sentiment would be much easier to find in Canada than in the U.S. The Canadian establishment was heavily influenced by British Protestants from Northern Ireland since the earliest days of Confederation, and membership in the Orange Order was often an essential way to get ahead. Innumerable Canadian leaders at all levels of government were Orangemen, including virtually all the mayors of Toronto until the 1960s. It is still very easy to find Orangemen in Canada.
(Make no mistake - Canada has been much more conservative than the U.S. if you look back further than the 1970s)
Well, do you think Europeans look less like monkeys than other ethnicities do?
As for the OP, this was an anti-immigrant trend, and immigrants have accents. And names. Back in the 1900s, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out if someone was Irish or not. At least most of the time. Did some “pass”? Probably. So did lots of “coloreds”.
I’m reading a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman, which touches on the prejudice he, a Jew, dealt with in getting admitted into a university. Feynman was from New York City, and his accent alone was enough to get him classed as Jewish without anyone bothering to check any further.
I subscribe to Newspapers.com and did a informal little research on this once. There were a few “No Irish Need Apply” notices in want ads, such as help wanted or rooms for rent: such as a notice in the January 5, 1873 Chicago Daily Tribune (“No Irish Need Apply” in an ad for a housekeeper). An add in the Wellsboro Gazette in Pennsylvania July 12, 1889 for a governess has “no Irish need apply” and calls for a “Protestant.” A few other such notices are sprinkled in late nineteenth-century newspapers. Interestingly, there are far more references - even then - to the supposed pervasiveness of such notices in earlier decades. However, the phrase “no Irish” does not get a huge number of hit in comparison to other such phrases that target other groups. “No Italians” or “no Jews” receive more hits, including notices into the 1920s. (Interestingly the phrase “No Negroes Need Apply” appears mostly in editorials that attack Mormon policies.)
Anyway, the flaw with Newspapers.com is that its coverage is haphazard, so I don’t think I can do a real study of how pervasive this prejudice was - but it did exist and can’t be written off as a myth. But references to alleged “no Irish need apply” practices did outnumber the actual notices against the Irish in my little sample.
Also, a more common notice is “none but German or Swede need apply.” Maybe, this is a backhanded way of excluding the Irish, it also reinforces how some Americans saw specific ethnic groups as better for one type of labor or another. In western newspapers, I’ve often seen hotels and eateries boldly advertise that they only have “colored cooks.” That seems odd at first, given the anti-black prejudice of the time. But the implication is that there are no Chinese cooks, which was the more immediate prejudice - and that an African American’s “place” was in the kitchen.
)