Fox, Jay, 1870-1961

Jay Fox was born in 1870 and died in 1961. Fox edited the "Agitator" and "Discontent, Mother of Progress," published at Home, a utopian colony in Kitsap County, Washington. Cora, his second wife, was Danish and an artist who painted china plates. Cora died in 1966. Edward Padgham was executor of Cora's estate and a long-time friend.

Anarchist labor organizer, trade unionist, syndicalist, and communist, in Home, Washington.

Jay Fox, trade unionist, syndicalist, communist and anarchist, lived more than fifty years in the small farming community of Home, Washington on Puget Sound. Fox, born in 1870, took part in the Haymarket riot while still in his teens. After an active career as a union organizer, which brought him to the Pacific Northwest, he joined the anarchist Mutual Home Colony Association, usually know as the Home Colony. For an interesting view of the life and activities at the colony see Stewart Holbrook's Anarchists at Home (American Scholar, 15 (Autumn 1946) 425-438). For a more thorough account of colony's experiences, and a brief biography of Jay Fox, see Charles P. LeWarne's chapter on the Home Colony in his Communitarian Experiments in Western Washington, 1885-1915 (Unpublished dissertation, University of Washington, 1969).

At Home, Fox served as editor of The Agitator, the colony newspaper, a successor to those previously suppressed by the U.S. Post Office. During this period his editorial defense of colonists who were arrested for nude bathing brought him into the public eye when he was prosecuted for "encouraging or advocating disrespect for the law." Although an isolated rural area, Home had considerable contact with scores of radical political and social thinkers, including Emma Goldman, James F. Morton, Elbert Hubbard and Fox's old friend from union organizing days, William Z. Foster. His death, in 1961, was within months of Fosters.