Jay Fox

Jay Fox (August 20, 1870 – March 8, 1961) was an American journalist, trade unionist, and political activist. The political trajectory of his life ran through anarchism, syndicalism, and communism, and he played a significant role in each of these political movements.

Fox is best remembered as a leading figure in an radical collective located in Home, Washington, near Tacoma, where he was editor of one of the leading English-language anarchist newspapers of the day, The Agitator. He became embroiled in legal difficulties related to the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing and after 1913 made his home in Chicago, Illinois, where he was a close political associate of future Communist Party leader William Z. Foster.

Jay Fox was born in New Jersey of Irish Catholic parents who had just immigrated to America. The family soon moved to Chicago, where he grew up in poor, immigrant neighborhoods near the stock yards. Quitting school at an early age he went to work growing cabbage for the stockyards, and later at Malleable Iron Works. He joined the Knights of Labor in 1886 and was present at the famous strikes for the eight-hour day on May 1 and 3 of that year, as well as at the Haymarket Square incident.

Later, in 1893, while working for Illinois Central Railroad, he was a charter member of the first local of the American Railway Union and delegate at its first convention in June 1894. After the virtual collapse of that movement following the Pullman Strike, he seems to have campaigned in several eastern US cities for William Jennings Bryan and visited England after his loss in the presidential election of 1896.

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