Writing Labor’s Emancipation: The Anarchist Life and Times of Jay Fox. By Greg Hall

Abstract

Jay Fox (1870–1961) was an important figure whose life, writing, and organizing spanned crucial conjunctures in the American Left from the Knights of Labor, the eight-hour day movement, the Haymarket Bombing in Chicago, the anarchist movement, the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the growth of the communist movement after the Russian Revolution. Fox is a figure that surfaces in many historical works on this range of often-discrete subjects, and the present volume focusing sustained attention on his life and radicalism is a welcome contribution. The strength of Greg Hall’s book comes from his exhaustive research and “biographical approach” to Fox’s life (p. 8). Rather being constrained by a traditional biography, Hall draws from social history methods and sources to fill in where the biographical source material is thin, which allows him to paint in vivid first-hand details about touchstone events, while tracking shifts in movements, organizing, and Fox’s life.