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High School Student Proves “No Irish Need Apply” Signs Existed (longislandwins.com)
97 points by apsec112 on Aug 1, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 82 comments



Jensen attracted a lot of attention because he did not just write that the NINA signs did not exist, he said the Irish were and are delusional, that in order to sustain a sense of victimhood they had manufactured a group-wide lie of discriminatory anti-Irish ads and signs. He said that believing that No Irish Need Apply Signs existed was the Irish equivalent of believing in leprechauns. Here is what Jensen wrote more than a decade ago:

If this is a remotely accurate characterization, it baffles me that Jensen's work would have found a home in a journal or that he would have felt comfortable expressing those views in public. How profoundly emotional and unscientific (not to mention vile and insulting)

Such a claim is extremely complicated (defying occam's razor) and implies some sort of conspiracy that is at the very least questionable without sound proof. The idea that such claims would have not been aggressively debunked in the past is pretty questionable, as well. The seemingly trivial task of finding evidence to support the existence of these ads makes me wonder if Jensen did any research at all. Was he just grinding his racist axe, and did the scientific community give him a pass on it because they didn't care?


It's especially baffling because he accepts that newspaper ads saying "no irish need apply" were common, but that the signs on the buildings did not exist. Even if that's true it's weird to then say that Irish people were delusionally perpetuating their victimhood.


It isn't so weird if he delusionally accepted his hypothesis from the get go.


If the signs did not exist, it is delusional to say they were common.


It's really interesting that, at least at that time and in that place, there appeared to be more employment discrimination against Irish than African-Americans. I noticed that several of the job ads would accept "colored" applicants, but not Irish.

Edit: "that" -> "than".


At the time, black people were stereotyped as servile and easily pressed to work, while the Irish were stereotyped as pugilistic, unreliable layabouts (and, to some, sinister Papists).


I had noticed that several of the ads also specified Protestants.


There was a joke about this in Blazing Saddles

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0BcQTIr4c


At one time it was true for Hungarians, too.

Oh, no. Don't tell me this is going to be trending now.


I cannot recall such an elegant and well researched response to such a load of whale shit.


It's not exactly hard to prove that this used to appear in newspapers all the time. A 10 second search on the LOC website shows a ton of examples of this phrase appearing in papers across America: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?stat...

Professor Jensen should be ashamed of himself for failing to conduct even the most trivial searches for this information.


He accepted that ads were discriminatory. His original paper mentions job ads. His claim was about signs in windows or on buildings.

The fact that he accepts the ads were real makes his claim that Irish were delusionally propagating a myth of oppression even harder to understand.


You didn't read the search results. Those are not ads, but articles mentioning the phrase, at least on the first page (20 articles).


News articles mentioning the phrase were exactly what Jensen claimed would have appeared if the signs existed, and whose absence he claimed proved the non-existence of these signs.

Fried just took the additional initiative of going directly to the newspaper ads, which are primary sources indicating discrimination, rather than the secondary sources of newspaper articles talking about the discrimination.


His research is as sloppy as his proofreading. I can see him sputtering and fuming as he angrily types out that last condescending reply to her.


Ashamed? Lol I think he'll be just fine.


Well one had to say the whole premise of 'couldn't find evidence thus fact didn't exist' was fishy even before the article started digging out the evidence that reseaecher somehow missed.


> "the whole premise of 'couldn't find evidence thus fact didn't exist' was fishy"

Not really. The one thing he's correct about is that, if NINA was a real and widespread phenomenon, it would show up in certain pieces of documentation of the era -- newspaper want ads, for example (we actually have fairly large archives from the relevant era; it's not like something from thousands of years ago where it's plausible that no documentation would have survived.) His problem was that he didn't look deeply enough, and once he drew the initial wrong conclusion, he invented a totally wrong theory to explain it.


> it would show up in certain pieces of documentation of the era

True. I think what he assumed was that it would show in other types of documents (like discrimination lawsuits, news showing revolt of the Irish against this policy, etc)

But I suspect this was very common and accepted, unfortunately.


Except that, as Fried, showed, it did. Not quite anti-discrimination lawsuits, since those laws didn't exist at the time, but there's an example of some Irish filing a libel lawsuit against a newspaper for printing a NINA advertisement, and of an Irish protest against the posting of a NINA sign at a mill.


Actually the mill was a different situation; the mill owner adverstised the jobs and large numbers came to apply, Irish and non Irish. The non Irish came armed (guns and knives) and forced the mill owner to put up a sign saying "No Irish Need Apply". The Irish being unarmed decided to leave the scene.


> he didn't look deeply enough, and once he drew the initial wrong conclusion, he invented a totally wrong theory to explain it.

My reading is the opposite. He started with a theory and then did a shallow search to bolster his pre-conceived theory, ignoring or discounting any findings that didn't fit.


Following the links from the OP, I see the first researcher states there are fewer than 2 NINA ads per decade in the Brooklyn Eagle, while following the example of the search I counted more than 8 ads in Brooklyn Eagle from the 1870ies before giving up the point as discredited.

I wonder if the big reason for these completely different results in the underlying counting experiment is that the later research was done after ocr had improved so much that the searches had very different samples of the papers.


> I’m the PhD who wrote the original article. I’m delighted a high school student worked so hard and wrote so well.

He's certainly not doing himself any favors with this condescending appeal to authority. In general, the exchange between Jensen and Fried is a perfect example of how to handle a nasty person with grace.


Why am I not surprised?

I wouldn't put it past the fact that the high schooler probably knows how to google better than the "phd"

"Jensen attracted a lot of attention because he did not just write that the NINA signs did not exist, he said the Irish were and are delusional, that in order to sustain a sense of victimhood they had manufactured a group-wide lie of discriminatory anti-Irish ads and signs"

Oh wow, lovely lad

Another edit: "Wanted - A Middle Aged protestant woman... no Irish need apply" I think it would be hard to find an Irish Protestant at that time, no?


> I think it would be hard to find an Irish Protestant at that time, no?

Belfast (and the whole of Ulster) was full of them.


And indeed you'll find that Irish protestants in general tended to immigrate to the southern US states and the Catholics were more likely to immigrate to the northern US states (such as they existed at the time). Even till today you'll find a higher ratio of Protestant Irish to Catholic Irish in Georgia than Massachusetts for example.


I was told a while back by a native that 10% of the south was Protestant, though he was talking of the modern day. I don't know how that number would translate historically.


I know that, I'm more wondering what was the amount that immigrated to the US (in relation to Catholic Irish)


Many (including at least two Presidents). They just tended not to identify themselves as plain "Irish".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_American


I don't have exact numbers to hand but I am sure the numbers of Protestant Irish emigrants was very high.

Poverty throughout the counties was common and they wanted to find a new and better life just as much as their Roman Catholic neighbours did.


Did they really consider themselves "Irish", though?


Yes, of course they did.

They were Irish, but the unionists agreed (along with Great Britain) that Ireland should be ruled by the King and be under British rule, and subsequently they all adopt the "British" sect of Christianity (Anglicanism).


No, and the situation was and still is a lot more complicated than that.

The relationship between Unionism and Protestantism and Nationalism and Catholicism was and still is much more grey than many realise. The current situation with Northern Ireland makes this appear much more dry-cut than it actually is because NI was set up on sectarian grounds. However, historically many, in fact the majority, of the prime movers in Irish nationalism have been from Anglican backgrounds that would naively be associated with Unionism.

Also, Irish Nationalism was contrary to Unionism, but a good number of prominent Nationalists had Monarchist tendencies too, such as the founder and leader of the original Sinn Fein, Arthur Griffith[1]. Republicanism was something that came out of the more militant strains of Nationalism, as represented by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who infiltrated Sinn Fein to use it as a vehicle for their own aims.

Moreover, the vast majority of Irish Protestants have been Presbyterian, not Anglican. Anglicanism was the church of the Establishment, not the common people. Presbyterians, being Nonconformist, were subject to many of the discriminatory practices of the various penal laws, just as Catholics were, because they weren't Anglicans, albeit not to quite the same extent. Anglicanism was historically the church of the upper classes and parts of the middle class.

[1] Griffith wasn't technically what you'd call a Monarchist, but he wasn't a Republican either. He supported the idea of an independent Ireland under a dual monarchy with the United Kingdom.


> No, and the situation was and still is a lot more complicated than that.

The question was "Did they [Irish Protestants] really consider themselves "Irish", though?" and the answer is "yes".

> Moreover, the vast majority of Irish Protestants have been Presbyterian, not Anglican.

The Church of Ireland is (and has been in recent history) the second largest Christian "sect" (as I put it earlier) in Ireland after Roman Catholicism. The Church of Ireland follows Anglicanism.

Of course are many many complications to the entire subject but that wasn't the original question, I was referring to the national identification of the Protestant islanders during the time frame of Jensen's claims.


> The Church of Ireland is (and has been in recent history) the second largest Christian "sect" (as I put it earlier) in Ireland after Roman Catholicism. The Church of Ireland follows Anglicanism.

Yes, you're correct in that the CofI is slightly bigger than the Presbyterian churches. However, that's not my main point. What I was disagreeing with was your conflation of Unionism and Anglicanism, which is entirely incorrect.


In the United States, they tended to identify as "Scots-Irish", and had a much more established place in American society (for example, at least three Presidents that I know of were Scots-Irish in the 19th century).


Scots-Irish isn't quite the same thing. Those referred to as 'Scots-Irish' in the US are descendants of Scottish (largely) Presbyterian planters. People who adhere to Anglicanism generally wouldn't consider themselves or be considered 'Scots-Irish'.


About half of Irish (whole-Island) Protestants today are Presbyterians concentrated in the Ulster Plantation (Northern Ireland); those are absolutely the same ethnic group as the Scots-Irish, despite that label not being used in the UK.


Yes, I know that. The issue is that zumtar had mistakenly lumped all Irish Protestants together as Anglicans.


> Yes, of course they did.

Protestants in what is now Northern Ireland could consider themselves eg, 'Ulster Scots'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Scots_people


Ulster Scots is a different thing than was they're referring to. Ulster Scots refers to (largely) Presbyterian descendants of Scottish planters who emigrated to the US. Adherents to the Anglican communion wouldn't necessarily consider themselves 'Ulster Scots'.


There are many Ulster Scots who are Scots in Ulster and haven't migrated to the U.S. See the references in the wikipedia link.


I'm Irish, so I'm entirely aware of that. I was specifically referring to those who had.


Your previous comment said:

"Ulster Scots refers to (largely) Presbyterian descendants of Scottish planters who emigrated to the US."

Which implied otherwise.


Brainfart.


For some details and background, Emigration Across the Atlantic: Irish, Italians and Swedes compared, 1800–1950 http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/economic-mig...


Her replies display an impressive amount of maturity, and her style is perfect.

She'll go places.


Yeah, yikes. Jensen is really piling it higher and deeper.


he apparently is the real life incarnate of "tl;dr"


Jensen: "No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs."

How on Earth did anyone take this man seriously? Is he a visitor from an alternate universe where segregation never happened?


It is weird that this exact phrase kept getting used against the Irish and not other discriminated-against groups. Nothing for Poles, Slavs, Italians, Russians... Or at least that's what I'm finding on the LoC search. A few "No Jews Need Apply", but only a few, and those aren't job listings.

Probably not a particularly important mystery, but weird.


There are likely some historical reasons. Here's a quote from The Times from 1860:

If this [exodus] goes on, as it is likely to go on…the United States will become very Irish….So an Ireland there will still be, but on a colossal scale, and in a new world. We must gird our loins to encounter the Nemesis of seven centuries’ misgovernment. To the end of time a hundred million spread over the largest havitable area in the world, and, confronting us everywhere by sea and land, will remember that their forefathers paid tithe to the Protestant clergy, rent to absentee landlords, and a forced obedience to the laws which these had made. (The Times, quoted in The Nation, May 1860)


It's called researchers bias where someone so fervently believes something is true that it influences their research. NINA is a good example of an uncomfortable truth.


Same could be said for human caused global warming..


Yes. Even though the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is real and probably has human causes you do still find people in the pay of large fossil fuel companies who will deny the reality, and then a number of otherwise smart people who believe the shills.

It's a fascinating (also frustrating) phenomenom.


Well documented in the film "Merchants of Doubt." Many cut their teeth in the tobacco industry and went on to ply their trade in environmental denialism.


I see what you did there.


I read about the "NINA" paper when it came out. This summary of the new historical research amply shows that the original thesis indeed needs "substantial modification".

While it says nothing of the historical accuracy, the exchange between the two historians, quoted in the text, makes me lean much more in favor of the researcher behind the new work.


> Let me make one last point and then I promise I will shut up and give you the last word if you want it. You began this conversation by stating that the article “did not claim to find a single window sign anywhere in the USA.” I think we now agree at least that this is not correct. Many are specifically listed.

Ouch. That's a serious burn.


It's funny how blind people are to the same thing happening today. Most employers openly refuse people based on their nationality and we are perfectly accepting of that, even enforcing it with the law!

I wonder if people in another 100 years will think it's wrong to discriminate against people because of who their parents were.


If this is a veiled reference to affirmative action, at least show the courage to say what you really mean.


I mean not allowing foreigners to work, even when they live in the country. Ironically, the public's distrust of the Irish and other foreigners has led to the law disallowing them at the border rather than individual employers at the job application. We don't allow Irish to freely enter the US and work today.


Right but that's not because they hate immigrants or think they are inferior or whatever. It's because they don't want them to compete for jobs with Americans. It's an attempt at protectionism of labor and preventing a race to the bottom. Your accusations that it's racist or discrimination is just not correct.


Not entirely racism, but still discrimination.


Yeah, but that's about non-Americans. It's already legal for US Border Patrol agents to shoot from American soil across the Mexican border and kill Mexicans, because there's no (US-)Constitutional right to life for non-Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/04/24/us/ap-us-border-p...


Ah yes. And even if there's a "points system" for highly qualified candidates, is there equality of opportunity?


Yea points sound nice in a way but I like to just replace the specified nationality with "black" and see if it still sounds OK. "There's a points system to allow the most successful blacks to work among regular citizens."


> Most employers openly refuse people based on their nationality and we are perfectly accepting of that, even enforcing it with the law!

I assume you're talking about the H-1B visas, etc?


Yes, can you imagine if there was a "black visa"? We still discriminate hard but it's so entrenched that it seems obviously right.


Most countries discriminate between citizens and non-citizens. As a non-citizen here (US) I'm actually not too upset by this.


Reminds me of a sign I saw in the Pueblo, Co train depot - http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/mix97-3.com/files/201...

For attribution purposes, the image is associated with an enlightening write-up, but that particular image isn't in the actual article - http://mix97-3.com/youre-never-too-old-for-a-spring-break-le...


Australian bricklayer employment ad says “No Irish” need apply (2012)

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/australian-bricklayer-emplo...

Totally irrelevant to the conversation other than perhaps the myths/realities/realities that become myths/myths that become realities perhaps traverse time.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=irish+need+not+ap...


Australia's pretty backward about this stuff. E.g. example: someone on HN yesterday was saying Jeremy Clarkson (from the UK) wasn't old enough to remember the racist version of 'eeny meeny miny mo'. I remember it and I was born in Australia in the 80s.


I didn't think the existence of such signs was a contested bit of history. I guess you can find apparently qualified people espousing all sorts of nonsense.


There are people denying the holocaust. An event for which plenty of historical evidence exists. People will believe what they want to believe.


Indeed. That is exactly the example that popped into my head as well. It would not surprise me at all if there were even a few holocaust deniers with PhDs in history.


Website has slowed to a crawl. Here's Google's text cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:23zU9KH...


historians have not discovered reports of any in the United States, Canada or Australia.

Oh really? Australia, 1862:

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/115763711?searchTerm...


Here's what the signs look like for those interested, most appear to be from London.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22no+irish%22+window+...

Here's a reddit thread on the issue

https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3erkxv/nina_no_i...


I've met a certain subculture of racists who like to point to articles like this and say things like "well since there were never NINA signs, discrimination against blacks couldn't have been as bad as it was". Reading Jensen you can see how he's a kindred spirit of such people. It's apparent he started out with "I think the Irish were lazy, violent and anti-American who need victim-hood to maintain their identity" and set to work to prove it.


The myth of bad treatment of returning Vietnam vets is something you see in the movies but apparently didn't really happen much: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/20...




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