“No Irish need apply.” An arrogant Illinois historian once forcefully argued that this phrase—and the experience it represented—was a historical hoax, calling it a “myth of victimization.” A high school teen in our nation’s capital demolished that speculative history, however, quickly turning up scores of advertisements from 19th-century America that bluntly used the phrase the historian had denied existed.
A researcher at the New York Times tracked down the phrase’s first appearance in that venerable paper’s classifieds from November 10, 1854:
“GIRL WANTED—In a small private family . . . either American or German, to take care of a young child. . . . No Irish need apply.”
The Times reporter had no trouble running down many other classified ads using the same language—or much worse.
In 1852, James Redfield, a doctor and amateur Darwinist, published a book comparing Irish people to animals and claiming they were naturally suited to dirt and servitude. He wrote they were “good servants if you deal harshly with them, as a master does with his dog.”
Conspiracy theories swirled around the arriving Irish. Chris Klein writes in an article for the History Channel: “Protestants feared the pope and his army would land in the United States, overthrow the government and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati,” imposing “the Catholic canon as the law of the land.”
It was a cultural infection disseminated across the country in newspaper columns and letters sections, the social media of the 19th century. All the hateful words soon produced the noxious anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, best known as the “Know-Nothings.”
These OG America-firsters said Catholics could not contribute to the New Jerusalem; they could only tear apart its fine Protestant sinews.
They took their hatred well beyond newsprint, attacking priests, burning churches, lynching immigrants.
Struck low by hunger and hardship during the Great Famine of 1847, two million penniless Irish arrived on these shores over the next 10 years. They were the ones who had survived the one-way journey, crossing weeks of ocean. Too many to count never made it, their bodies tossed overboard into the Atlantic. Back in Ireland, the colonial masters were happy to be rid of them; they were struggling to dispose of the corpses piling up.
The Irish came to do the worst work: to “dig ditches,” the modern canal network that would propel the United States into its industrialized future. They crowded into poor houses.
They were accompanied by Germans and followed by Italians, Chinese, and scores of others, seeking opportunity—some by choice, others under duress.
John F. Kennedy probably had it right when he said to his grandfather’s people in Wexford, Ireland, in June 1963: “My country welcomed so many sons and daughters of so many countries, Irish and Scandinavian, Germans, Italian, and all the rest, and gave them a fair chance and a fair opportunity.”
Nevertheless, this welcome was hard-won in many cases, and the spirit of hostility and suspicion towards immigrants still continues, even among many descended from those Irish immigrants who came here in desperation, seeking a better life.
Each despised wave of immigrants has stumbled in and stuck it out in the United States, adding, contributing, building a better, stronger nation. Have we lost our faith? Our hope? Our nerve?
This article also appears in the June 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 8, page 42). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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