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Scrutinizes the life and times of Joseph Banigan, one of New England’s, and America’s, most successful nineteenth-century industrialists

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.

“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.”—Professor Patrick Duffy, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

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).

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