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No Philanthropy at the Point of Production: A Knight of St Gregory against the Knights of Labor in the New England Rubber Industry, 1885 1

A modern academic study of Rhode Island’s Gilded Age business elite identified 180 noteworthy individuals. The solitary Irish-Catholic, and one of only a handful of immigrants, was Joseph Banigan. His family fled the Potato Famine and came to Rhode Island in 1847 when Banigan was only eight years old. He became a skilled worker in several of the state’s legendary industries. Employing the pluck and luck of the period—more often a trait of Yankee inventors than Irish immigrants—Banigan opened a rubber footwear factory on borrowed capital in 1867 in Woonsocket in northern Rhode Island. In 1882 he built a cutting-edge facility for the exclusive production of rubber boots in nearby Millville, Massachusetts—a rural outpost in the burgeoning industrial orbit of Woonsocket. Banigan adroitly out-managed his competitors while shrewd investments challenged the entrenched industrial power of local Protestant entrepreneurs. He also donated freely to the Catholic Church, affiliated charities, and local secular causes, gaining a national reputation for philanthropy. And in an era of extreme prejudice against the Irish—especially in Rhode Island—he hired his countrymen almost exclusively and practiced a brand of industrial paternalism laced with unusual ethnic sensitivity. A remarkable strike at his factories in 1885 by bootmakers and cutters affiliated with the Knights of Labor, however, uncovered hidden tensions within the Irish-Catholic community in a larger framework of Yankee domination of the state. Banigan’s progressive labor–management relations actually helped trigger the walkout. He failed to alert his workers, as was his usual practice, about major corporate