In due time Professor MALLOY introduced us to Joseph BANIGAN, an Irish Catholic, a refugee from the Irish patato famine, who came to Providence in 1847 at the age of eight, with his parents and seven brothers and sisters. The family's arrival came at a time when the Irish were not welcomed to our shores. Here in Rhode Island the immigrant situation was aggravated by the murder of Amasa SPRAGUE in 1843, alledgedly by John GORDON, an Irish immigrant.
After the Civil War he scraped together enough money to start the Woonsocket Rubber Company. By 1882 he had brought out his partners and became sole owner. In 1890 he built the Alice Mill, a massive structure which is still standing in Woonsocket. At the time it housed 7 1/2 acres of floor space! He installed the newest technology: electricity, automatic sprinklers, telephones. The business quickly grew. He bought out companies that supplied him with the materials he needed in the manufacture of his footware: buckles for his boots, felt for the inside of the shoes and boots, eventually owning everything he needed from the beginning to end of the production line.
He was smart and he was crafty. He traveled to Brazil to negotiate the price of rubber. He became the largest importer of raw rubber in the world and controlled the market. By 1892 or so his competitors were feeling the impact of his success on their own bottom line. They combined to form the U.S. Rubber Company, one of the most important monopolies in business history. BANIGAN did not join because he knew that without him they could not monopolizedthe industry. They soon came to him. In 1893 he sold his empire in Woonsocket and Millville, Massachusetts, and every other company that he owned, to the U.S. Rubber Company for 9.5 million, which was double the paper value. After they paid him the cash, they hired him as president at a salary of $50,000 a year.
After becoming president he counseled the company to shut down the factories of some of his competitors because he felt that they had not kept up with the new technology and were therefore no longer profitable. There were some strong abjections from the executive board and BANIGAN walked away from the presidency.
This entangled him in a lawsuit which was not settled until after his death. After he left U.S. Rubber he opened his own factory on Valley Street in Providence and completed with them. In 1898, just as he was on the way to once again controlling the rubber industry, he was stricken with a gall bladder attack and after undergoing a second operation he died. He was 59 years of age.
There is so much more to the story - the strikes, the reaction of his Irish employees to his high-handed rules, his exeptional philanthropy to the Catholic Church and to the community, his personal life-the distribution of his estate.
Professor MALLOY was recently contacted by a publishing company to do a biography on BANIGAN but said that records of his life have all but disappeared. The information he does have was pieced together from newspapers, rubber journal articles, and a few diocesan records. Sometime in the 1960s the U.S. Rubber Company, where much of BANIGAN'S work history should be found, destroyed its records in order to avoid any environmental lawsuits that would uncover pollution.
More information on Joseph BANIGAN can be found in Professor MALLOY's booklet
A Knight of St. Gregory Against the Knights of Labor: No Philantrophy at the Point of Production.
The 1885 Strike at the Woonsocket Rubber Company.
Published by Rhode Island Labor History Society 22003 Schmidt Labor Research Center, Hart House, 36 Upper College Rd., URI Kingston, RI 02881 Tel:401-874-2569.
e-mail: Malloy@uri.edu
Rhode Island Historical Society website
Taken from The Pawtuxet Valley Historian, June 2004, Volume 17, issue 10.
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