I am sorry if I'm offending anyone with this post,but I am just really really tired of the racism here. I don't know if its just coincidental that all the times I experienced racism, it was with black people.

Take the subway for instance.. I've been harassed on the train before, with racial slurs such as "Chink, slanted eyes etc". Mind you that I'm very urban and that I was born and raised here. Yes my english is perfect and I live in Brooklyn.

The same has happened to my friends. My asian female friend went on the train and a group of black girls just started picking on her and insulting her for no reason at all. Another asian male friend of mine was also picked on by a black woman, just for no reason at all.

Now he would have said something back, but the train was full of blacks, if he said something they would all probably be against him and lawd knows what could have happened.

One time I went out to eat and this black guy cut in line and said "Yo move white boy" to the guy in front, and when he was in front he was shouting at the indian man behind the counter saying "Hurry up and give me my burger Osama". Can you believe this???

And back in high school where there were chinese people working in the cafeteria at a black high school. The students would always say things such as "Hurry ching chong chinaman" and literally scream at the man and insult him.

I dont know how many of you know of LaFayette high school in Brooklyn, but I'm sure u must have read it in the news somewhere. Here asians are being verbally and physically abused by black people and you can read stories right here:
[www.aamovement.net]

Lawd I could go on and on about stories like this, that I've experienced myself, heard from friends, or read on the news/internet.

Now I'm not racist so let's not even go there. I have plenty of black, hispanic, asian and white friends. Even my boyfriend is black and hispanic but I'm just pointing at the obvious here.

Majority of black people dislike and look down on asians, and that is the truth. You put any asian in a black neighbourhood, there will be hate, and verbal abuse. Even physical abuse after a long stay (Such as going to high school, getting on the school bus etc). I could pull up a few stories here too... from articles as well...

Me or my friends however, have never ever experienced this with white or hispanic people. It really makes you wonder, if you're being close minded and ignorant, or if the evidence is so clear that you can no longer turn the other cheek??

Sure everyone can be racist, but would you rather experience racism quietly where they don't actually show it? Or have people scream and shout racial slurs at you in public, while robbing you and beating you up? In this case I think most would say no to the last one.

And if anyone wants to say things such as "Black people are angry and bitter because of what they have experienced in the past", I just want to say "bullshit".
Read this and you will understand: [www.asian-nation.org]

Again, I'm not discriminating against black people, I just can't understand why they're treating asians like this because it's quite sad, this is 2006 and hitler died a long time ago. So should racism (not talking about quiet hate, but physical and verbal racism)




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/2006 06:42AM by (n/a).

Well, I for one am continually saddened when I read these types of reports. I have worked the better part of my adult life in both personal and professional ways to combat hate and racism. But I personally believe it is as alive and well today as it was in the 50's and 60's, it just has taken on different dimensions and faces.

I am married to a West Indian woman - and I could tell you stories all day about what we have experienced as an interacial couple here in this great liberal city (and it just gets worst the more you travel west) - that's why we spend all of our travel time outside of the US.

No one is blameless when it comes to discrimnination against others. I have been in countless Korean markets here where my wife is followed from the moment she walks in the door just because of the color of her skin. And fear of blacks is a predominate theme in immigrant Asian communities in this city.

So, where to start in bridging all the great misunderstandings, stereotyping, etc.

A good place would be to make sure we don't fall into the bad habit of painting an entire people with a broad brush based on the behavior of a few.

Its very sad that this type of thing happens,but it does. Let me give you an example, In white and English, my wife and daughter are Irish,I asked my daughter when she was 12 are you English or Irish, she thoughtfor a while and said Irish.

We lived for a time in West Yorkshire and my daughter was often referred to as an Irish Cu.., at school. Eventually I had a nervous breakdown, lost my job,so we moved back to Northern Ireland. Sadly racism is rearing its head here, as thousands of poles and other east europeans move into the UK for better welfare handouts or jobs. Many of these are attacked in the streets or bars.

Lets hope NYC with its myriad of nationalities stays free. Lets hope nobody insults my wife whilst on holiday, its takes ages for my knucles to heal.

I agree - the darkies don't like orientals.

Darkies and Orientals? Sorry but why not say blacks and asians? It sounds less ignorant and judgemental.

There is going to be racism everywhere, and I think the reason why blacks disliek asians is because we can relate in so many ways. If you look around, you will see white people having the upper hand in America, and basically everywhere else. Hispanics vary in personality, shape, and color so you can never really put them in one catagory. But when it comes to asians and blacks, we all suffer from prejudice a lot and both races have strong cultures and a lot of pride, and because we sometimes live in the same community with the korean shops in the projects, we sometimes butt heads. Mostlly because there is economic competition.

Then you got the asians who really dont stand up for themselves, which makes it easier for others to pick on us. Black people have a lot of pride and their people are strong which I admire a lot, thats also another reason why people dontwant ot mess with them. Its not because of the bad thigns you see on the news about blacks, because obviously not all black people are bad. And Not all blakc people live in the projects. but simply because they stand up for themselves and dont take crap from anyone.

When is Racism ever going to stop?? Never, because no matter how much we hate it, it is teaching us a valuable lesson. Just like crime, it will always exist no matter how many cops you have in this world, and thats how it works.

now the only thing that could be improved is the type of racism. Before people used to hang black people from trees and chase chinese men down the street with bats and weapons. Nowadays its more verbal abuse and sometimes physical. Hopefully sometime in the future it will all be in the mind.

And if God allows... racism might jsut go away one day when we all learn ot live together in harmony... and instead of fighting each other and goign to war.. we will start helping the poor families that try to survive day by day, and the children who sleep alone in the streets at night covered in newspapers to keep their bodies warm... there are more important things to do out there, then to hate each other.

The more west you go? Really? As a born Californian who has lived in Colorado for over 25 yrs, and married to a guy from Detroit, I have experienced the opposite.

We HAD friends from Minneapolis for a couple years because it took that long before they showed their prejudice. I am Mexican/Puerto Rican, my husband is Polish. One night while playing Scrabble she said "for being Mexican you have the most amazing vocabulary". I kinda went into shock. That honestly was my first taste of prejudice. They brought that with them to the west.

When I am in Detroit I feel it. I notice people look at me different, especially when I am with my husband.

tpm45, I recently read Children of The Troubles - Our lives in the crossfire of Northern Ireland. The first time I truly understood what everything there was all about.

My son attends the most diverse high school in the city. Kids from 40 countries, speaking 60 languages. It is what he loves most about his school. I can't say I have ever heard of a racial problem there, because he is not in the minority with that feeling. I am thankful for that.

The blacks will answer that they have been victimized for so many years it gives them the right to act however they please. Putting down others make them feel superior. You know who else is also victimized? The white male! He cannot get into a good college, get promoted, or even hired for that matter, if there is a minority, including white women, as a competitor. It doesn't matter how hard they work, how well they perform, they will always be the last chosen because of this thing called "diversity" ..."minority quota", or whatever. Life isn't fair for anyone.

I disagree. As a white male I've always found life to be pretty easy from a non-victimized perspective. I've never had trouble being hired, promoted or for that matter getting into a good college. In fact, at my good college, and in my jobs, there have often been a noticeable lack of black people, which in my field (and I'm not going to say what that is) is a big business disadvantage.

There are no "minorities" in New York any more anyway. Everyone's a minority. There is no ethnic group with more than 50% of the population. White, African-American, Caribbean, African, various kinds of Latin American people, various kinds of Asians ... there's a lot of groups but nobody's a "minority" or a "majority." That's GOOD! New Yorkers live in a small world where their city looks like the whole world!

Salsa, one of the things that most surprised me about the movie "A Day Without a Mexican" was the running joke that non-Spanish-speakers in California think all Spanish-speakers are Mexican. So they call Argentinians "Mexicans," Puerto Ricans "Mexicans," etc. Is that really true? Obviously it's not true here because we've pretty much always had at least two distinct groups of Spanish speaking immigrants and if you call a Puerto Rican a Dominican or vice versa, you better turn and run - you'll learn that lesson fast.

Albert's comment was a joke, and a pretty funny one too, Dave Chappelle/Carlos Mencia style ...

Dear Monica
i can not believe this....
This is very bad !
all the peoples in the world are the same.
Peoples are peoples for me .
this is very very bad !!!!

Lots of greatings to you from The Netherlands.

Vera Hendriks

I would not get too hung up on any of the opions above, as they are just that... opinions. It is a shame racism exists anywhere. That being said, I grew up in the south. Racism was everywhere. I was the textbook WASP, but it still bothered me to see so much prejudice.

NYC is so much more open-minded and tolerant compared to the south. I see racism here. But there will always be stupid people. I hope you can appreciate that NYC is actually ahead of everywhere I have been south of the mason dixon.

[www.TrumanLibrary.org]

Edwin Wright: Zionist Jews worked 'to capture the U.S. Government'


Edwin M. Wright (pictured) was an intelligence agent and State Department employee in the 1940s and 1950s. Though an internationalist and an advocate of a plan for bringing refugee Jews to America, he saw clearly the danger posed by Zionism to the United States and to the world. His account of Jewish crimes and manipulations makes riveting reading. His personal experiences of Jewish bullying (and even impersonation!) of Presidents and officials, vote-buying, and much more are absolutely amazing and convincing. He's also an excellent writer. Excerpts follow:
"The material I gave Professor McKinzie was of a very controversial nature -- one almost taboo in U.S. circles, inasmuch as I accused the Zionists of using political pressures and even deceit in order to get the U.S. involved in a policy of supporting a Zionist theocratic, ethnically exclusive and ambitious Jewish State. I, and my associates in the State Department, felt this was contrary to U.S. interests and we were overruled by President Truman..."

"Zionists and Christian Fundamentalists have frequently used the Hebrew Bible as an authority for justifying a Jewish State. As late as summer 1976, Candidate Jimmie Carter stated, 'I am pro-Israeli, not because of political expediency, but because I believe Israel is the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy.'

"So the Bible-- and belief that it is God's Holy Word and infallible, became a useful tool in Zionist propaganda. I take the point of view that the Bible is a mixture of Hebrew legends and myths and cannot be used as an element in U.S. foreign policy."

"The Zionists were very successful in using religion for political purposes. This is prohibited by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which states the Government should recognize no 'religous establishment.' In the case of Zionism and Israel, the U.S. has recognized and supported a religious establishment--viz: the State of Israel which in turn discriminates against all non-Jewish religions."

"Zionists, since Truman's decision in 1947-48, have lived in a Fool's Paradise. They assumed their control of the US government, press and public was permanent and based an 'moral' values -- therefore, the US at all times would give Israel total support. Zionists seem to live in a dream world of their own creation and think the rest of the world should accept their dream. They seem quite incapable of facing reality."

"Esther got her Gentile King drunk, then wheedled his signet ring and sent out an order to the Jews--so they slew 75,000 innocent Persians (Esther 9:16). The Book of Esther is not history. It is parody. The Ahasuerus of Esther is probably the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes (165 B.C.) and Mordechai is probably a symbol for Judas Maccabeus. Esther represents the beautiful dream of a Messianic Jewish State. There is a lesson nevertheless in this immoral and violent story. A political marriage of any political power with Messianic Zionism is certain to produce disaster."

"Time is vindicating the point of view of those State Department specialists whom Truman said he could not trust because they were 'anti-Semitic.'"

"The third step in Zionism was that they must have large enough a state in order to keep the whole Jewish population there. At that time there were about fourteen million Jews, and now that meant owning a very large territory. It is not brought out in Zionist propaganda in America, but what they claim is all the territory from the Suez Canal clear north to the mountains of Cappadocia, in southern Turkey. [Statement by Herzl. Also see Numbers 34; Genesis 15:18, Joshua 13, II Samuel 8:5-6.} It includes all of Lebanon, much of Syria, Jordan, and Sinai. This is the territory they call 'Eretz Israel,' the land of Israel, which is mentioned in the Bible."

"I might mention here that I have found Zionism very deceitful. There is a double meaning in all the words Zionists use, and [Chaim] Weizmann himself said one time, 'Let the British or anyone else talk about Zionism and they can use our terminology, but we know what the meaning of it is. It has one meaning to us, one meaning to the Gentiles.' They've always had this double-entendre in everything that they have done. Whenever they use words you have to try to find out what is the context in which they are using these words."

"Domestic issues are not based on intelligence, but on self interest of a smaller group, and I think in this connection I think I should mention specifically two. One was what we called the China Lobby, a very odd and indiscriminate group of people who never were really organized, but had a tremendous influence upon government. They eventually were captured by Senator [Joseph R.] McCarthy. The other were the Zionists, who were more organized. They had been working for a long time to capture the U.S. Government; to use it for purposes of developing a Jewish state. In other words, we had two lobby groups in America who knew little about the area at all, who had certain ideological concepts of society and America. When the people from the fields reported what was unpopular to these groups, they were fired."

"...when the election was coming up in 1946 in New York, the group of New York Jews called upon Mr. Truman. [Alan Taylor, op. cit. p.93] Emmanuel Cellar was the head of this committee. Rabbi Steven Wise and several others were in it. They called upon Mr. Truman and said, 'We have just been talking with Mr. [Tom] Thomas Dewey. He is willing to come out and declare for a Jewish state, and we are going to turn our money and urge the Jews to vote for him unless you beat him to it.' Then Emmanuel Cellar pounded upon Mr. Truman's desk and said, 'And if you don't come out for a Jewish state we'll run you out of town.'"

"Henry Byroade made a talk in Philadelphia in April 1954. ...In it he made this statement: 'I have some advice for both Arabs and for Jews. Israel should think of itself as a state living in the Middle East and that it must live with its Arab neighbors. The Arabs must cease to think of themselves as wanting to destroy Israel and should come to terms with Israel itself.' ...The next morning Henry Byroade got a call from Nathan Goldman, who was in California. [Nathan Goldman was president of the World Jewish Congress and many years president of the World Zionist Organization...] He used his first name and said, 'Hank, did you make that speech in Philadelphia that was reported in the papers today?'

"Byroade said, 'Yes, I made that speech.'

"He said, 'We will see to it that you'll never hold another good position.'"

"The Zionists are organized in 17 (now 31) different committees and groups in America. They are all inter-related by what's called the Association of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. These are the presidents of the 31 Zionist organizations. All they have to do is to send in a letter to any one of them and these 31 will reproduce it in mimeograph and send it out to all their organizations. As a result of one letter you'll get hundreds of replies coming in attacking me. This is the type of constant fear that a Government official lives under because of the mimeograph machine and the xerox machine."

"Mr. Truman himself has the most remarkable of all statements in there, a memo that's quoted, in which he says, 'Something's going on and I don't know what it is. Somebody called up the President of Haiti and he said that it was I. [F.R.U.S., 1947 , Vol. V, p. 1309.] He said, "We want you to vote for the Zionist program." As a result the President of Haiti changed his vote to satisfy what he thought was me. I don't know who this fellow was that called him up.'

"In other words, somebody impersonated President Truman and threatened the President of Haiti. There were people who used President Truman's voice and name and he didn't know who they were. The State Department never found out who they were, but this is the way decisions are made in Washington. I think I know who that fellow was. It was Robert Nathan, because I met Robert Nathan frequently at the U.N. I had met him out in the Middle East, and he was the one who was running to the telephone booth and calling up the President of Liberia, calling up Costa Rica, telling them, "Unless you will vote for our program, we will see to it that the American interhighway system is not built through your country." These people assumed that Nathan and Co. were acting for America and nobody had consulted them at all. This kind of thing went on at the U.N. and in Washington and if you want the documentary proof of it, it's in Mr. Truman's statement.

"Before I read this statement of Mr. Truman's I'll have to explain what the situation was. There was tremendous pressure upon the governments of other countries to vote for the partition program, which the Zionists had accepted. I was at the U.N. and was Mr. Henderson's assistant and was there when he read some of these memos. I was reporting back to the State Department what was happening at the U.N.

"There were a number of Jewish Zionists at the U.N., like Robert Nathan, Bernard Baruch, and various other people, who were calling up the chiefs of other states and saying, "Unless you vote for this partition program, the United States will not build a road in your country; will not help you in aid or will not do something else." They were pretending they had the authority of the President of the United States to determine policy, when they were just one individual operating on their own. They had no authority, no official position, but they were using the importance of the United States as a threat against these countries."

"That's an official document. Somebody represented himself as the President of the United States to some foreign countries. This was the kind of threat that the Zionists used to change votes at that last session when finally it was voted by a small majority of two or three."

"It's very rare that a country of which no boundaries are known is recognized. There are also other questions: When you recognize a state do you recognize its claims to people outside the state? The Zionists have always claimed that the Jewish nation is wherever a Jew is, anywhere in the world. Every Jew, therefore, is part of this Jewish nation. Golda Meir repeated this when they asked her what the boundaries of Israel are. She said, 'Wherever there's a Jew, there is Israel. It's not a line on a map.'"

"'Constantly they kept asking me, "Why does the United States behave this way?" I couldn't explain it to them.'

"Nobody can explain it, because you've got to know how they buy congressional and senatorial votes through speeches; how they control the five electoral states, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, etc. You have to understand the weighting of the Jewish vote in America and the contribution to the party systems. By the time we explained that to Arabs they'd say, 'But aren't you corrupt?'

The answer is, 'Yes, we're corrupt.'"

[tigger.uic.edu]
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Journal of Social History 36.2 (2002) 405-429
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"No Irish Need Apply":
A Myth of Victimization

Richard Jensen

Retired Professor of History, University of Illinois, Chicago

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write the author at RJensen@uic.edu
slightly revised version 12-22-2004
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Abstract

Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.

Introduction

The Irish American community harbors a deeply held belief that it was the victim of systematic job discrimination in America, and that the discrimination was done publicly in highly humiliating fashion through signs that announced "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply." This "NINA" slogan could have been a metaphor for their troubles—akin to tales that America was a "golden mountain" or had "streets paved with gold." But the Irish insist that the signs really existed and prove the existence of widespread discrimination and prejudice. 1

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, 2 archivist, or museum curator has ever located one 3 ; no photograph or drawing exists. 4 No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries it was used by English to indicate their distrust of the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant. For example the Anglican bishop of London used the phrase to say he did not want any Irish Anglican ministers in his diocese. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. It is possible that handwritten NINA signs regarding maids did appear in a few American windows, though no one ever reported one. We DO have actual newspaper want ads for women workers that specifies Irish are not wanted; they will be discussed below. In the entire file of the New York Times from 1851 to 1923, there are two NINA ads for men, one of which is for a teenager. Computer searches of classified help wanted ads in the daily editions of other online newspapers before 1923 such as the Booklyn Eagle, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune show that NINA ads for men were extremely rare--fewer than two per decade. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America, at any time. NINA signs and newspaper ads for apartments to let did exist in England and Northern Ireland, but historians have not discovered reports of any in the United States, Canada or Australia. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The overwhelming evidence is that such signs never existed.

Irish Americans all have heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had "legs": people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O'Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up 5 Historically, [End Page 405] physical NINA signs could have flourished only in intensely anti-Catholic or anti-Irish eras, especially the 1830—1870 period. Thus reports of sightings in the 1920s or 1930s suggest the myth had become so deeply rooted in Irish-American folk mythology that it was impervious to evidence. Perhaps the Irish had constructed an Evil Other out of stereotypes of outsiders—a demon that could frighten children like the young Ted Kennedy and adults as well. The challenge for the historian is to explain the origins and especially the durability of the myth. Did the demon exist outside the Irish imagination—and if not how did it get there? This paper will explain how the myth originated and will explore its long-lasting value to the Irish community as a protective device. It was an enhancement of political solidarity against a hostile Other; and a way to insulate a preindustrial non-individualistic group-oriented work culture from the individualism rampant in American culture.

We must first ask if the 19th century American environment contained enough fear or hatred of the Irish community to support the existence of the NINA sentiment? Did the Irish-American community constitute an "Other" that was reviled and discriminated against? Did more modern Americans recoil in disgust at the premodern Irish immigrants? The evidence suggests that all the criticism of the Irish was connected to one of three factors, their "premodern" behavior, their Catholicism, and their political relationship to the ideals of republicanism. If the Irish had enemies they never tried to restrict the flow of Irish immigration. 6 Much louder was the complaint that the Irish were responsible for public disorder and poverty, and above all the fears that the Irish were undermining republicanism. These fears indeed stimulated efforts to insert long delays into the citizenship process, as attempted by the Federalists in 1798 and the Know Nothings in the 1850s. Those efforts failed. As proof of their citizenship the Irish largely supported the Civil War in its critical first year. 7 Furthermore they took the lead in the 1860s in bringing into citizenship thousands of new immigrants even before the technicalities of residence requirements had been met. 8 The Irish claimed to be better republicans than the Yankees because they had fled into exile from aristocratic oppression and because they hated the British so much. 9

The use of systematic violence to achieve Irish communal goals might be considered a "premodern" trait; it angered many people and three bloody episodes proved it would not work in conflict with American republicanism. In 1863 the Irish rioted against the draft in New York City; Lincoln moved in combat troops who used cannon to regain control of the streets and resume the draft. In 1871 the Irish Catholics demanded the Protestant Irish not be allowed an Orange parade in New York City, but the Democratic governor sent five armed regiments of state militia to support the 700 city police protecting the one hundred marchers. The Catholics attacked anyway, and were shot down by the hundreds. In the 1860s and 1870s the Molly Maguires used midnight assassination squads to terrorize the anthracite mining camps in Pennsylvania. The railroad brought in Pinkertons to infiltrate the Mollys, twenty of whom were hung. In every instance Irish Catholics law enforcement officials played a major role in upholding the modern forms of republicanism that emphasized constitutional political processes rather than clandestine courts or mob action. In each instance the Irish leaders of the Catholic Church supported modern republicanism. 10 After the [End Page 406] 1870s the Irish achieved a modern voice through legitimate means, especially through politics and law enforcement. Further enhancing their status as full citizens making a valuable contribution to the community, the Catholics built monumental churches (which were immediately and widely praised), as well as a massive network of schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages and other charitable institutions. 11

Regardless of their growing status, something intensely real was stimulating the Irish Catholics and only them. The NINA myth fostered among the Irish a misperception or gross exaggeration that other Americans were prejudiced against them, and were deliberately holding back their economic progress. Hence the "chip on the shoulder" mentality that many observers and historians have noted. 12 As for the question of anti-Irish prejudice: it existed but it was basically anti-Catholic or anti-anti-republican. There have been no documented instances of job discrimination against Irish men. 13 Was there any systematic job discrimination against the Catholic Irish in the US: possibly, but direct evidence is very hard to come by. On the other hand Protestant businessmen vigorously raised money for mills, factories and construction projects they knew would mostly employ Irishmen, 14 while the great majority of middle class Protestant households in the major cities employed Irish maids. The earliest unquestioned usage found comes from the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, using the phrase in Pendennis, a novel of growing up in London in the 1820s. The context suggests that the NINA slogan was a slightly ridiculous and old-fashioned bit of prejudice 15 Other ethnic groups also had a strong recollection of discrimination but never reported such signs. The Protestant (Orange) Irish do not recall "NINA signs. 16 Were the signs used only against Irish targets?

An electronic search of all the text of the several hundred thousand pages of magazines and books online at Library of Congress, Cornell University Library and the University of Michigan Library, and complete runs of The New York Times and The Nation, turned up about a dozen uses of NINA. 17 The complete text of New York Times is searchable from 1851 through 1923. Although the optical character recognition is not perfect (some microfilmed pages are blurry), it captures most of the text. A search of seventy years of the daily paper revealed only two classified ads with NINA—one posted by a Brooklyn harness shop that wanted a boy who could write, and a request for a couple to take charge of a cottage upstate. 18 Unlike the employment market for men, the market for female servants included a small submarket in which religion or ethnicity was specified. Thus newspaper ads for nannies, cooks, maids, nurses and companions sometimes specified "Protestant Only." "I can't imagine, Carrie, why you object so strongly to a Roman Catholic," protests the husband in an 1854 short story. "Why, Edward, they are so ignorant, filthy, and superstitious. It would never do to trust the children alone with one, for there is no telling what they might learn." 19 Intimate household relationships were delicate matters for some families, but the great majority of maids in large cities were Irish women, so the submarket that refused to hire them could not have been more than ten percent. 20

The first American usage was a printed song-sheet, dated Philadelphia, 1862. It is a reprint of a British song sheet. The narrator is a maid looking for a job in London who reads an ad in London Times and sings about Irish pride. The last verse was clearly added in America. 21 [End Page 407]