Irish Titan, Irish Toilers: Joseph Banigan and Nineteenth-Century New England Labor / Edition 1

by Scott Molloy

Overview

In 1847 Joseph Banigan, an Irish Potato Famine refugee, established himself in Rhode Island as an entrepreneur. This was a time when “No Irish Need Apply” signs abounded and discrimination against the Irish and other immigrants—institutionalized in the constitution of his adopted state—hindered voting and other human rights. Bucking this trend and belying his humble origins, Banigan succeeded spectacularly in the emerging local rubber footwear industry, becoming the president of the United States Rubber Company—one of the nation’s major cartels, and New England’s first Irish-Catholic millionaire. Backed by primary and secondary research on two continents, Molloy’s inquiry into Bannigan’s notoriety and success singularly codifies and elucidates the Irish-American experience during this critical period in American labor history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781584656913
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	07/31/2008
Series:	Revisiting New England Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

SCOTT MOLLOY is an award-winning Professor at the Labor Research Center, University of Rhode Island. He previously drove a bus, was a union activist, and was Chief of Staff to a United States Congresswoman. A prolific writer, Molloy’s most recent book is Trolley Wars: Streetcar Workers on the Line (UNH, 2007).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Intoduction: Spouting
The Irish Background
Rhode Island's Yankee Ascendancy
The Rhode Island Irish
The Woonsocket Rubber Company
A Knight of St. Gregory Against the Knights of Labor
Tragedy, Philanthropy, and Lace Curtain
Rubber King and Rubber Workers
The United States Rubber Company
Conclusion: A Memorial Forever
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Professor Patrick Duffy

“Irish Titan, Irish Toilers is a superlative labour history of Rhode Island at a formative stage in the industrialization of America. Its mid-century experience was fueled by an endless stream of impoverished Irish immigrants who often violently resisted discrimination and who kept alive memories of childhood pain and grievance for a distant time and place.
“From the ‘Bannikan’ cabin in county Monaghan to the Banigan mansion in Wayland Square, Providence, Scott Molloy uses Joseph Banigan's story and the Woonsocket Rubber Company as sounding boards for the story of Irish immigration into this nineteenth-century cauldron of political struggle and labor resistance. His authority and scholarship as a labor historian is, if anything, enhanced by the book’s racy, action-packed narrative of riots, strikes, ethnic prejudice, political chicanery, enterprise, initiative, and above all, in the end, American success and achievement. It's a story well told and well worth the reading.”

Robert E. Weir

“Irish Titan, Irish Toilers is an inventive look at politics, culture, and identity in 19th century America. Scott Molloy’s book is, simultaneously, a biography, an ethnography, an industrial study, a labor history, and a foray into identity politics. His protagonist, Joseph Banigan (1839-98), embodies the fluidity of Gilded Age America, but also its limits. Molloy follows Banigan from his Famine Irish immigrant roots to his emergence as a Rhode Island-based rubber industry monopolist.
Molloy’s nuanced monograph challenges assumptions about social identity and invites us to consider how reputation, respectability, and manliness are constricted. He reconstructs a complex social milieu in which an Irish Catholic industrialist found himself in the midst of a dispute with the Knights of Labor, on organization comprised of large numbers of Irish Catholic workers in a state in which both were viewed with suspicion by entrenched Yankee elites. Molloy takes us inside a world in which paternalism has given way to hard-hearted industrial labor, the ethos of producerism is crumbling before market forces, the Catholic Church battles unions for workers’ souls, and shared ethnicity bifurcates along class lines.”

Editorial Reviews

"With the good sense, keen judgment, and undeniable wit for which he is so well known, University of Rhode Island labor historian Scott Molloy has written a fascinating book on a previously underappreciated figure in 19th-century New England."—The Providence Sunday Journal

"This remarkably rich history of 19th-century workers and one particularly successful entrepreneur, Joseph Banigan, is . . . solid. Molloy carries us through the struggles of Irish immigrants and their role in the burgeoning labor movement, along with Banigans's rise to riches and his subsequent fame as a philanthropist. Irish Titan, Irish Toilers is expertly researched and imminently readable." —The Providence Phoenix

"[Joseph] Banigan's story is set within the larger framework of the history of the Irish in nineteenth-century Rhode Island."
—Rhode Island History

"Molloy utilizes an impressive range of newspapers, court cases, business records, and other sources to provide not only an excellent biography but also an illuminating examination of Irish Americans in late-nineteenth-century Rhode Island."—The New England Quarterly

From the Publisher