Jack Conroy, the Irish American Left, and the Radical Irish Legacy

Abstract

Irish immigrants were famously employed in nineteenth-century railroad and canal work and mining; by the 1850s, along with the Chinese, they were synonymous with the arduous, dangerous labor involved in American railroad development. The Irish American song “Working on the Railway” is laced with nascent Irish American proletarian dissatisfaction:

In eighteen hundred and forty four,

it left me where I was before;

Bad cess to luck that brought me oe’r

To work upon the railway.

I saw like phantoms my fellow workers,

and instead of spades and shovels

they had roses on their shoulders.

—Michael Hartnett, The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin