Background
He was born in Athlone, Ireland, the youngest of five sons of John Fitzpatrick, a small farmer who also worked as a horseshoer, and Adelaide (Clarke) Fitzpatrick. The mother died when John was a year old, the father when he was ten.
He was born in Athlone, Ireland, the youngest of five sons of John Fitzpatrick, a small farmer who also worked as a horseshoer, and Adelaide (Clarke) Fitzpatrick. The mother died when John was a year old, the father when he was ten.
His formal education in the local grammar school ended at the time when his parents died.
In 1882 he came to America to live in Chicago with an uncle, who, however, died before the boy could resume his schooling.
In 1882 he came to America to live in Chicago with an uncle, who, however, died before the boy could resume his schooling. Forced to go to work, John spent three years in the packing plant of Swift and Company in the Chicago stockyards.
But Fitzpatrick was not destined for a life in a smithy shop. Marked early as a leader, he served as vice-president, treasurer, president, and, for five years, business agent of his local.
His leadership was characterized by rugged honesty, the absence of guile, and a total identification with the cause of the workingman.
During the 1890's the Chicago labor movement was a battleground for rival ideologies and factions. Early in the decade William C. Pomeroy captured the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly and converted that central body into a vehicle for his personal enrichment and for the peddling of political influence. Reform elements, unable to dislodge the wily Pomeroy from the Trades and Labor Assembly, formed a rival body that gained backing from the Illinois and American federations, thus launching in 1896 a new city central, the Chicago Federation of Labor.
As the delegate from Horseshoers' Local No. 4, Fitzpatrick participated in the reform movement, and he emerged as one of its leaders. From 1899 to 1901 he served as president of the new federation.
At this point the city central was again captured by graft-ridden elements, this time emanating from the building trades and headed by Martin B. ("Skinny") Madden, whose specialty was strong-arm tactics. Once more the struggle resumed to drive the rascals out.
With citywide reform support behind him, including such progressives as Jane Addams and Raymond Robins, Fitzpatrick defeated the Madden forces and won reelection in 1905 to the presidency of the Chicago Federation of Labor, a post he held thereafter until his death.
With its national-union structure and economic focus, American trade unionism normally affords city leadership a very restricted field of action. Fitzpatrick stood virtually alone as a city official who became a labor leader of national consequence.
The Chicago Federation of Labor under his leadership won a wide reputation for progressivism; it was, for example, one of the first labor organizations to take up the cause of the convicted West Coast labor radical Tom Mooney.
Two particular contributions set Fitzpatrick apart. First, he figured heavily in the pre-New Deal efforts to bring mass-production workers into the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor.
When the Chicago garment workers went on strike in 1910, Fitzpatrick mobilized financial support and helped bring about the historic Hart, Shaffner and Marx agreement of 1911.
World War I made conditions ripe for a major organizing move. Utilizing the concept of federated unionism (since the A. F. of L. ruled out an industrial union structure), Fitzpatrick and William Z. Foster, a former member of the Industrial Workers of the World, in July 1917 organized the Stock Yards Labor Council, with Fitzpatrick as acting chairman.
Representing all the local unions with jurisdiction in the Chicago stockyards, the S. Y. L. C. made rapid headway among the packinghouse workers and, with the aid of the President's Mediation Commission, forced the packers to operate under a system of arbitration (but without actual union recognition). The next year, on August 1, 1918, Fitzpatrick and Foster utilized the same federated approach--this time, however, on a national basis--to form the National Committee for Organizing the Iron and Steel Workers, of which Fitzpatrick subsequently became chairman.
The steel drive broke into open-shop territory even more spectacularly than had the packinghouse campaign. In the end, however, both ventures came to grief. The steel industry defeated the unions in the great steel strike of 1919. Packinghouse organization declined more slowly, suffering, among other ways, from conflicting authority between the S. Y. L. C. and the national unions. The collapse came with a national strike in 1921-1922.
Still, this marked the high point before the New Deal of any A. F. of L. effort to reach the mass-production workers. Fitzpatrick had meanwhile embarked on the second major undertaking of his career. He had early disagreed with the political views prevailing within the A. F. of L.
Although never a socialist, Fitzpatrick did, as Raymond Robins observed in 1911, believe "in labor legislation and the direct political action of the workers. " Encouraged by the example of the Labour party in England, and thoroughly disillusioned with the Wilson administration, Fitzpatrick started a movement in late 1918 to form a labor party in Illinois.
In 1919 he ran unsuccessfully as the labor candidate for mayor of Chicago. Fitzpatrick now attempted to broaden the state movement into a national labor party, and simultaneously to widen its base of support. This led in 1920 to the formation of the Farmer-Labor party, which nominated a presidential ticket and entered Fitzpatrick (again unsuccessfully) in the Illinois senatorial race. Efforts to induce progressive elements, first the Committee of Forty-Eight in 1919-1920 and then the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, to join in an independent party failed.
Trying once again in 1923, Fitzpatrick issued a call to all labor and left-wing elements. The only fresh group to respond in force was the Communists, who, led by Fitzpatrick's former ally William Z. Foster, proceeded to take over the Chicago convention of July 1923 and to form a new Federated Farmer-Labor party.
Defeat forced Fitzpatrick to cave in, and after 1923 he was reduced to the conventional role of city labor functionary. Neither in the organizing ferment nor in the new politics of the Great Depression did he play a major or distinctive part.
He died of a heart attack at his Chicago home in 1946 after suffering for some years from arteriosclerosis. A Catholic, he was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Evanston, Ill.
He was a Catholic.
The Chicago Federation of Labor under his leadership won a wide reputation for progressivism; it was, for example, one of the first labor organizations to take up the cause of the convicted West Coast labor radical Tom Mooney.
He had early disagreed with the political views prevailing within the A. F. of L. Although never a socialist, Fitzpatrick did, as Raymond Robins observed in 1911, believe "in labor legislation and the direct political action of the workers. "
Despite a craft and ethnic background that inhibited his contemporaries in the labor movement, Fitzpatrick was notably free from bias against Slavic and black workers, deeply sympathetic to their plight in Chicago's factories, and genuinely committed to organizing them.
Settling on the trade of farrier, he joined the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers in 1886, served out his apprenticeship, and became a full member of Local No. 4.
He was powerfully built, simple and direct in manner, and endowed with an Irish sense of humor and also an intense Irish nationalism.
On June 29, 1892, he married Katherine McCreash, a schoolteacher, an invaluable ally who helped make up for the education he had missed as a boy. They had one son, John.