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

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.