Irish In America
...e led to emigration. Religious intolerance at times was also a factor.” (Cumberpatch) The Irish like many newcomers face prejudices. There were times when signs were hung outside NINA standing for No Irish Need Apply. It also didn’t help that some Irish were against each other as stated. “And that Irish Catholics and Protestants found it increasingly difficult to accommodate one another. Threatened with growing resentment among the general population, many Irish Catholics, especially in the lower-class, sought “to reject the multiethnic and nonsectarian approach of the middle class emigre”(Bayor and Meagher pg 12). Even in Maryland one of the first points of colonization they faced problems. “Irish arriving in Maryland, as elsewhere in America, faced discrimination, prejudice, and often poverty. As early as 1704 a tax of 20 shillings was levied on Irish immigrants arriving in Maryland as servants. Also in that year, public Catholic masses in Maryland were outlawed. The Know-Nothing Party in the 1840s and 1850s advocated anti-immigration policies and expressed the anti-papist feelings of many Americans. The Know-Nothings were suspicious of change and the influence of immigrants, particularly Jewish and Catholic ones. In 1856 fights broke out on the streets of Baltimore between members of the Know-Nothing Party and Irish democrats. The Irish also had to contend with employment signs that stated "No Irish Need Apply." (Cumberpatch) The Irish workers were astounding, they came in large numbers. “The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. 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. Apart from want ads for personal household workers, the NINA slogan has not turned up in the newspapers. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably no such signs ever existed at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America.”(Jensen) In Maryland they made due with what they had in the area. “Most of the Irish were unskilled laborers. They sought work in the coal mines of western Maryland, laying track for the B & O Railroad, and digging the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. They worked at livery stables, in the shipbuilding and ironworks industries in Baltimore.” (Cumberpatch). There were also stories of Nevada and California Gold Rush workers and their mass numbers.“Popular imagination links the Irish with the building of America’s transcontinental railroad. Irish track layers dominated the westward push in answer to their largely Chinese counterparts heading east from California. Nevertheless, most Irish in early Nevada were miners with no railroad experience. The Irish contributed to Nevada’s earliest mining period. On June 8, 1859, Irish-born Patrick McLaughlin and Peter O’Riley discovered the north end of the Comstock Lode, a huge gold and silver ore body. The strike resulted in the founding of Virginia City. The 1860 census documents an even scattering of Irish immigrants in the western Great Basin, representing about 10 percent of the population. Some served as soldiers at Fort Churchill. Others found diverse occupations throughout the region. In Virginia City and Gold Hill, the majority of about 300 Irish were miners, again representing roughly 10 percent of the community. Like other groups, Irish women were rare. Over the next decade, thousands of Irish immigrants moved to Nevada. Forty-two percent settled on...