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The Debunker: Was "No Irish Need Apply" a Myth?

by Ken Jennings

Since 2014, June has been Immigrant Heritage Month in the United States, a time for Americans to remember our status as a nation of newcomers. So celebrate Immigrant Heritage Month along with us, until President Trump cancels it! After all, if you're here and you're not fully Native American, we guarantee that either you or an ancestor qualifies! As an extra bonus, we have Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame (and English/Welsh/Scotch-Irish stock) to school us about all the things we thought we knew about our ocean-crossing forebears.

The Debunker: Was "No Irish Need Apply" a Myth?

"I'm a decent boy just landed from the town of Ballyfad,
I want a situation, yes, and I want it very bad.
I have seen employment advertised. 'It's just the thing,' says I,
'But the dirty spalpeen ended with NO IRISH NEED APPLY.'"

what's drunk and stays out all night? paddy o'furniture

So begins "No Irish Need Apply," an Irish folk song from the 1860s about the difficulty of finding jobs in London when one was fresh off the boat from the auld sod. "No Irish Need Apply" signs still feature prominently in family folklore, and their replicas decorate Irish pubs all over the United States, but academics are skeptical. In a 2002 article subtitled "A Myth of Victimization," historian Richard Jensen claims that "No Irish Need Apply" signs never existed, for the most part, and that the American job market suffered from "no significant discrimination against the Irish." This is "an urban legend," said Jensen, a "psychological phenomenon."

That was the conventional wisdom until 2015, when the same journal that published Jensen's article printed a rebuttal by Rebecca Fried, an eighth-grader from Washington, D.C. By searching online databases, Fried found dozens of classified ads in American newspapers, as recently as 1909, validating Irish claims that such discrimination did, in fact, exist.

Jensen has reacted rather uncharitably to being second-guessed by a middle schooler, sniffing that the existence of want ads doesn't prove that merchants hung signs with the same restrictions, and moving the goalposts by disqualifying many of Fried's examples as non-representative—they were for political offices, they were for women's jobs, they were placed by recent arrivals from England, and so forth. It's true that the case for "No Irish Need Apply" has been overstated in the past. For example, Jensen's arch-nemesis, a scholar named Kerby Miller, once called them "ubiquitous," which may be a stretch, and politician Tip O'Neill claimed to have seen such signs in Boston as a child, almost certainly an anachronism. But Fried's point seems indisputable: hundreds of "No Irish Need Apply" ads have now turned up in archives, and if that's the case they probably figured on window signs as well. It's just that the signs haven't survived. If future historians looking at our era were to find hundreds of newspapers ads for missing cats, but no physical signs from telephone poles, would they really conclude that nobody who lost their cat ever hung a sign on a telephone pole?

Quick Quiz: John F. Kennedy wasn't the first Irish-American U.S. president; he was at least the fifteenth. In 1829, who became the first U.S. president of Irish descent?

Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.