John Fitzpatrick

• John Fitzpatrick
• Born: April 21, 1870
• Died: September 27, 1946

Reform labor leader, was born in Athlone, Ireland, the youngest of five sons of John Fitzpatrick and Adelaide (Clarke) Fitzpatrick. His mother died when he was a year old and his father, a small farmer and blacksmith, when he was ten. Schooled locally until that age, he then went to Chicago to live with an uncle, who died shortly thereafter. To earn a living the boy worked in the stockyards for three years, employed by Swift & Co.

In the mid-1880s Fitzpatrick served his apprenticeship as a farrier, becoming a full member of Local No. 4 of the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers and preparing himself for a quick rise to prominence in trade union life. After holding office as vice president, treasurer, and president of the local, he became business agent, developing a reputation for his Irish wit and candor and his full commitment to the needs of his constituents.

Fitzpatrick joined the growing body of labor reformers who were trying to wrest power in Chicago from William C. Pomeroy, who controlled organized labor through the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly and who acted like a political boss, often for venal purposes. Starting as a delegate from his own local to the new Chicago Federation of Labor, which was supported by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Illinois Federation, Fitzpatrick served as president of the reform organization from 1899 to 1901. After corrupt trade unionists gained control, driving Fitzpatrick out, he enlisted a citywide drive of all reformers, including Jane Addams of Hull House, and in 1905 he won election as president again, holding office this time until his death.

The stage was set for Fitzpatrick to take the steps that were to mark him as an innovative progressive labor leader, actively attempting to incorporate industrial unionism into a labor federation composed predominantly of craft unionists and to promote independent political action by labor. As president of the Chicago federation, Fitzpatrick stressed militance and solidarity. His efforts in behalf of the striking garment workers in Chicago in 1910 contributed to the Hart, Schaffner & Marx agreement one year later. His sympathy with oppressed blacks and other ethnic industrial workers, hardly commonplace in the trade unions of his day, and the CFL’s support for Tom Mooney, the West Coast radical unionist, set him apart from other labor leaders.

In 1917 Fitzpatrick attacked the problem of organizing the Chicago stockyards, where he had begun his own working career in his adopted country. The demand for labor during World War I, which forced the federal government to make certain concessions to unions, legitimized attempts to organize new workers. Fitzpatrick created the Stockyards Labor Council (SYLC) with himself as chairman and William Z. Foster of the Railway Carmen (and previously the Industrial Workers of the World) as secretary. The AFL structure militated against industrial unions; the SYLC was a federated organization, bringing together all local Chicago unions representing jurisdictions among the packinghouse workers. Workers flocked to the SYLC.

But the organization was faced with the delicate problem of dealing with black workers, who could not easily be organized (because of their own reticence and because of the resistance of white workers) and whose employment was viewed by whites as the hiring of strikebreakers. Trying to restrain whites from racial violence, the council, under Fitzpatrick’s leadership, argued also for the right to protest the continued work of nonunionized blacks. With help from President Wilson’s Mediation Commission, the SYLC won an arbitration agreement but without receiving recognition of the union. Eventually, in the more conservative postwar decade, the stockyards union died during the national strike of 1921-22. Tensions between the national unions and the umbrella SYLC hurt industrial organization among the packinghouse workers; this problem was not solved until the industrial-union drive a decade later, during the New Deal period. Fitzpatrick’s effort represented the major attempt to unionize the stockyards prior to the 1930s.

At roughly the same time that the SYLC was at its height, Fitzpatrick, with Foster’s help, began to set up, along the same principles as the SYLC, the National Committee for Organizing the Iron and Steel Workers. Fitzpatrick was chairman of this effort, which had perhaps even more significance than the packinghouse drive. Recruiting rapidly in nonunion territory, the steel committee faced several obstacles: the resistance to a strike by AFL president Samuel Gompers, with whom Fitzpatrick argued repeatedly; the refusal of the steel companies to confer with the unions; and persistent charges of un-Americanism against its leaders, including Fitzpatrick. The steel workers were finally beaten down in the great strike of 1919, despite their many attempts to settle it, including Fitzpatrick’s offers to submit the issues to arbitration. These workers and their leaders, however, Fitzpatrick foremost among them, had set the stage for the mass unionization of the steel industry under the New Deal.

The great industrial struggles of World War I and the immediate postwar period heightened Fitzpatrick’s sensitivity to the relevance of politics to the needs of workers. A pioneer in the critical process of industrial unionism, he became a pioneer in the beginnings of independent labor politics. Fitzpatrick had always believed in workers’ participation in politics; during the steel strike he complained that the steel trust dominated government and that the labor movement received little consideration from those who ruled. Cognizant of the advances of the British Labour party, and disenchanted with President Wilson, Fitzpatrick sought to organize a labor party in Illinois in 1918 and was defeated in 1919 for the Chicago mayoralty on a labor ticket. He then ran as a senatorial candidate in Illinois on the national Farmer-Labor party ticket, which he had stimulated, and contributed to the Committee of Forty-eight in 1919-20 and the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922. Fitzpatrick finally became discouraged, in 1923, walking out of an independent political action conference after Foster and the Communists seized control. His discouragement was compounded by the recent loss of a packinghouse strike as well: both of his major innovative efforts seemed to have been balked. But in 1924, only one year later, the national Progressive ticket headed by Senator Robert M. La Follette rolled up an impressive vote, to which Fitzpatrick’s previous efforts certainly contributed.

Fitzpatrick’s later career was more that of the normal city labor leader, less given to innovation and not overtly involved in the political and industrial turbulence of the 1930s. It is significant, however, as labor historian David Brody has observed, that for twenty years, Fitzpatrick exercised his individual influence from within the confines of a conservative AFL to give a powerful voice to the needs not only of simple reform and sympathy, but also to the causes of independent politics and industrial organization. These causes were to be revived in the period after his retreat, partly as a result of the precedents he had set. The re-emergence of one of his causes, industrial unionism, was to have a critical impact upon the American social and political atmosphere. Measured by the probity of his conduct and his conscience, as well as his determination in pushing to the fore issues that had lain beneath the surface, Fitzpatrick was a prophet in the American labor movement.

Fitzpatrick was not a completely lonely prophet; one firm, long-term supporter was his wife, Katherine McCreash Fitzpatrick, a schoolteacher whom he married in 1892. They had one son, John. Fitzpatrick, who died of a heart attack at seventy-six, was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Evanston, Illinois.

The Chicago Historical Society has Fitzpatrick’s personal papers. See also the New Majority (later Federation News) of the Chicago Federation of Labor. The article in The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974) has a bibliography. Other biographical sources include J. Keiser, “John Fitzpatrick and Progressive Unionism, 1915-1925,” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University (1965); D. Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Non-Union Era (1970) and The Butcher Workmen: A Study of Unionization (1964); J. Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925 (1984); W. Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike (1919), and in contrast, Foster’s later, scattered, and unfriendly comments on Fitzpatrick in From Bryan to Stalin, made at a time when the Communist leader had converted from an independent trade unionist into a spokesman for the Communist party. Obituaries appeared in the Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun, September 28, 1946; and The New York Times, September 29, 1946.