A historian challenges the `No Irish' myth
NOTHING SYMBOLIZES the hatred faced by Irish immigrants during their first century in America as strongly as the signs that used to hang outside factories and in shop windows: ''Help Wanted-No Irish Need Apply.''Posted by Ith at March 16, 2003 12:14 PMThe late Tip O'Neill recalled seeing them as a boy in Boston, as has Senator Edward Kennedy. In a 1996 speech on the Senate floor, Kennedy said, ''I remember `Help Wanted' signs in stores when I was growing up saying `No Irish Need Apply.' Thankfully, we have made a great deal of progress in ending that kind of... bigotry.''
The signs, which some have likened to the ''Whites Only'' signs of the South before the civil-rights era, have been used to illustrate not just native-born Americans' bitter opposition to the Irish, but how the Irish managed to surmount that opposition in order to achieve the American Dream.
There's only one problem with this story: The signs may have hardly existed.