Education
University of Wisconsin–Madison.
University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He is best known for his contributions to The Pittsburgh Survey, a landmark study of social conditions in an archetypal United States. industrial city. Born in South Dakota, he was a 1904 graduate of Yankton College. In the fall of 1907 he joined with his professor, John R. Commons, on a trip to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to begin work with dozens of other progressives on an ambitious sociological study: Paul Kellogg"s Pittsburgh Survey, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.
The resulting book, The Steel Workers, was published in 1910, one of the Survey"s six published volumes.
lieutenant remains a classic depiction of a key industry in early twentieth-century America. Fitch, after a brief stint working for the New York Department of Labor, was an editor and writer for Paul Kellogg"s Survey, America"s leading social work journal.
Beginning in 1917 Fitch taught labor relations as a professor at the New York School of Social Work, where he retired in 1946.
He taught at Nebraska"s Weeping Water Academy before enrolling at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for graduate studies in political economy. Fitch spent more than a year interviewing steel workers.