"No Irish Need Apply"

Martin Kelly notes the mention of what he calls the "No Dogs, Blacks, or Irish Canard" in the Telegraph, and challenges the author for proof.

According to Wikipedia (and the more I hear about that source, the less I trust it):

After 1860 Irish sang songs (see illustration) about signs reading "HELP WANTED - NO IRISH NEED APPLY". The songs had a deep impact on the Irish sense of discrimination.

(While there is much evidence of such signs in England, [memory.loc.gov/rbc/amss/cw1/cw104040/001q.gif] no historian, archivist or museum curator has located a sign or photograph or exact description of one in the United States. Computerized searches of millions of want-ads in newspapers has turned up numerous NINA ads for female household workers, but only one ad for a male worker (see illustration for this 1854 want ad.)

However, the URL for the sign gives one a reproduction of a piece of sheet music which uses as a sort of epigram an alleged want ad. This is not an original.

So Wikipedia says "there is much eveidence of such signs in England" but it fails to give any example whatsoever.

A recent book, How the Irish Became White, claims that the Irish were regarded as non-white when they first came to America. The author, Noel Ignatiev, sure has one hell of an axe to grind, however, being the editor of Race Traitor, whose motto is "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". I think we can safely dismiss this "source".

(A digression: in a book I recently read, The Rebel Raiders, one discovers that the Confederate Secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory, as well as the South's most famous naval captain, Raphael Semmes, were Roman Catholics. Judah P. Benjamin, who held three different cabinet posts with the Confederacy, including the posts for War and State, was a Jew. What those facts tell me is that religious prejudice in 19th-century America has been greatly exaggerated.)


In short, unless further evidence is forthcoming, the "no Irish need apply" myth appears to be nothing but that, a myth.

Finally, like Martin, your blogger "is knackered, twitchy and feeling that blogging is taking more out of him than he's taking out of blogging."