Комментарии
11 years назад
+mooninquirerPlease don't pretend to speak with any authority on the subject of discrimination of Irish immigrants in early America. You've apparently bought that entire story that college professor from Minnesota was selling several years back. There's no way in hell that he, or you, or anyone else could know for a fact that NO SIGNS saying Irish Need Not Apply (etc) ever existed. The fact that he says he couldn't find a picture of one means just that; that he couldn't find a picture of one It does not mean that they couldn't possibly have been real. He repeatedly talked about looking for a photograph of one of these signs in a store window so that he could prove they were used, but think about it, why would anyone take such a photograph in the first place? Big businesses would not have had huge, loud signs advertising their dislike of any nationality, even the lowly Irish, as doing so would almost certainly cause them to lose some customers. Small businesses, however, who generally hired people for short-term, low-level employment, by sticking a homemade sign in a window would not have the same concerns. There are enough reference to such signs in contemporary newspaper articles and literature that their existence, however big or small, would seem very, very likely. In Catholic newspapers of their day, editorials were written criticizing the business owners who did advertise their discrimination of Irish immigrants with signs and asking these businesses to reconsider their stand on this issue. If no such signs existed, why would editorials which described their use and railed against them even be published?The professor also claimed he spent much time exhaustively searching for evidence of similarly discriminatory words within 19th century job advertisements but found only a tiny number, yet after reading his original article, I searched google for maybe and hour and a half, and I found eight or nine such advertisements myself. Unlike him, I did not restrict myself to the archives of the New York Times, whose search engine BTW is not all that reliable. I found evidence in all sorts of places, including books and old magazine articles. A Massachusetts man whose mill was burned down went on record as saying that his business might have been targeted because of the NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs which were plastered to the mill's walls. Even in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, an old 19th Century ad from the Brooklyn Eagle which advertised for baseball players, specifically excluding Irishmen, is on display. I also know from my great, great grandfather's diary (a man who was not Irish, by the way) that these signs were appearing in some store windows in New York City. Why would a man write in his personal diary about seeing such signs if they were not even real? Was it an evil plan of his to make America look racist more than a century after his own death? The problem with people like that man who claims Irish discrimination was a myth, and with those people who assume his ideas should, for some unknown reason, be accepted as gospel truth, is that they use bad information to draw conclusions, and in the end that only casts doubt on whatever actual truth might exist within their work. Had he said that his research "suggests that the subject has been greatly exaggerated" over the years, it'd be hard to dispute his claims. But any educated person knows, or at least ought to know, that claims for which no truly reliable evidence has been presented should never be accepted as fact. Saying, "I couldn't find enough evidence, therefore it can't be true," is very bad science, especially for an academic.