Anarchist labor organizer and editor Jay Fox (1870–1961) is an all but forgotten figure of American history – until now. Greg Hall’s deeply researched and accessibly written book highlights the intersection of Fox’s activities with nearly every significant left-wing and working-class movement of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The result is not merely a biography but rather a narrative of the development of American labor and radicalism more generally. As Hall describes it, the book is “a microhistory of the radicals, utopians, revolutionaries, and union men and women with whom [Fox] associated, debated, and supported over the course of many decades” (8). Students and researchers of the American labor movement, anarchism, syndicalism, and Communism alike will find much of interest in its pages, almost all of it from a refreshingly new perspective.

Reading about Fox’s life is akin to encountering a radical version of Forrest Gump, always on the periphery of momentous historical events. At age sixteen, he joined the Knights of Labor in Chicago, met the anarchist agitator Albert Parsons, struck for the eight-hour workday, and was present at the Haymarket Affair, where he narrowly avoided being shot by panicked officers. He went on to become a charter member of Eugene V. Debs’s American Railway Union and the Social Democracy of America, as a member of its often-overlooked anarchist faction; to cofound the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); participate in the Seattle General Strike of 1919; and maintain a longtime friendship with Communist Party leader William Z. Foster (who in 1912 married Fox’s former romantic partner, Esther Abramowitz). Along the way, Fox also emerged as a prominent writer and editor for the anarchist press and for such mainstream union journals as The American Federationist, the Seattle Union Record, and Chicago Labor News.

Building on recent scholarship on American anarchism, Hall uses Fox’s life to show that the movement was not “a foreign import to the United States” (4). Fox, after all, was born in New Jersey, to Irish immigrant parents, and the movement that he encountered in Chicago in his youth “was firmly rooted in the American working class and in the labor movement” (14). Fox’s grounding within organized labor is also a dominant theme of the book. Unlike some of his more well-remembered comrades, such as Emma Goldman and Harry Kelly, both of whom withdrew from active participation in labor unions around the turn of the twentieth century, Fox remained a lifelong union man; “faith in organized labor and in the working class was central to Fox’s vision of the anarchist transformation of society” (75). It was therefore natural that he gravitated toward syndicalism, a newly developed ideology that viewed labor unions, using the direct action of the general strike, as the instruments of revolution, as well as the organizational basis for a future socialist society. Hall describes Fox as a member of the labor movement’s self-conscious “militant minority” – a phrase that he notes was preferred by contemporary syndicalists as well as by labor historian David Montgomery – who assumed the task of radicalizing their fellow workers.

Fox consistently championed the role of workers and unions in his anarchist writings, while also promulgating “radical and potentially revolutionary positions” within the pages of union publications (69), where his “anarcho-syndicalism was thinly veiled for readers familiar with that form of labor radicalism” (150). However, despite cofounding the IWW, he “never felt comfortable with dual unionism,” and after 1912, he instead agreed with the fellow syndicalist Foster’s goal of boring from within mainstream labor unions to reach the mass of the working class (74). As Hall relates, Fox was particularly outspoken about the need to pursue the creation of industrial unions through the amalgamation of existing craft unions.

The final two chapters of the book document Fox’s ideological journey after World War I. The Russian Revolution, government repression during the First Red Scare, and his close collaboration with Foster all convinced Fox of the need to secure state power. In 1918, he supported the leftwing Nonpartisan League, arguing, “labor has got to control political power in the proportion it attains economic power,” and in 1920 he backed the Farmer-Labor Party, before finally joining the Workers’ (Communist) Party in 1925 and publicly embracing Leninism (186). Hall, however, suggests that Fox, who was by this point retired from activism and labor organizing, was never entirely able to let go of anarchism. In particular, the aging radical dedicated much of his time to writing an unfinished and sympathetic history of the anarchist movement, and he “seemed to have been unable to write a repudiation of the movement and add a celebratory ending focused on the Communist Party, which Foster had advised him to do” (215).

Given Fox’s longtime opposition to the IWW’s separatism, it is surprising that Hall breezes past the Communist Party’s embrace of dual unionism during Communism’s Third Period (1928–1933), with no mention of his subject’s reaction to it. But aside from this curious silence, as well as a few copyediting oversights, there is little to fault in Hall’s account. Writing Labor’s Emancipation is an important reminder that anarchism played a significant role in the labor movement of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era – including within certain corners of the American Federation of Labor – and that the labor movement and working class were in turn central aspects of much of the anarchist movement’s thought and activities.