Roy Gerald Fitzgerald (August 25, 1875-November 16, 1962) was an attorney, a soldier, a preservationist, and a member of the United States House of Representatives from Ohio.
Roy G. Fitzgerald was a son of Michael Gerald Fitzgerald and Cornelia Maria Avery, and was born in Watertown, New York. His father was a business executive who moved to Dayton in 1890 with the Davis Sewing Machine Company, which had been purchased by George P. Huffman and relocated from Watertown to Dayton. Mr. Fitzgerald took schools in Watertown and Dayton. He took special college courses in economics and read law in the office of John M. Sprigg of Dayton. He was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 1896 and engaged in general practice as a partner in the law firm of Sprigg and Fitzgerald, which later became Fitzgerald and Sprigg, and still later was dissolved. Mr. Fitzgerald continued to practice law independently until his death.
Roy G. Fitzgerald was a Republican and in 1920 was elected from Ohio's Third District to the Sixty-seventh U.S. Congress and to the four succeeding Congresses. During his decade in Congress, he fought for a number of causes that dismayed his more conservative colleagues, including child labor laws, reorganization of the U.S. Army Air Corps as an independent body, and federal care for the needy and aged. The latter anticipated Social Security. He was Chairman of the Committee on Expenditures within the Department of Commerce in the Sixty-eighth Congress. In the Seventieth and Seventy-first Congresses, he served on the Committee on Revision of the Laws, during which time he authored a cumulative codification system for statutory law the United States and the District of Columbia. In 1922 he introduced a constitutional amendment to give Congress jurisdiction over the labor and working hours of children under the age of eighteen. Although his amendment was passed in 1924, only twenty states had ratified it by 1938, the year in which Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which included the regulation of child labor. He was defeated for re-election to the Seventy-second Congress in 1930.
In Dayton, he secured the location of Wright Field, now Area B of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
For more than fifty years, from 1910 until his death, he was Director of the Merchants National Bank and Trust Company in Dayton.
Although he was not a Dayton native, Roy Fitzgerald enthusiastically led in helping to preserve many Dayton landmarks, notably Newcom Tavern and the Old Courthouse. He was President of the Montgomery County Historical Society for twenty-two years. During his presidency, a six million dollar bond was issued to build a new courthouse, with the condition that the Old Courthouse building be kept intact. During that time [1963] the Old Courthouse became the headquarters of the Montgomery County Historical Society.
Roy was married in 1900 to Caroline Wetecamp of Greenville, Ohio, with whom he had two daughters, Ruth and Dorothy, and a son, Roy Jr. Roy Jr. was a Major in World War II. He survived the Battle of the Bulge but died from his battle wounds in early 1946, five months after VJ Day. Caroline Fitzgerald died in 1935, and Mr. Fitzgerald married the same year to his second wife, Alverda J. Sinks, of Miami County, Ohio.
During World War I, Roy Sr. enlisted in the Army. He was eventually commissioned a captain of infantry and was the commanding officer of Headquarters Company, 329th Infantry Regiment, American Expeditionary Force in France. He was commissioned Lt. Col. of Infantry, United States Army Reserve Corps, in 1928.
A licensed pilot and early advocate of flying, Roy G. Fitzgerald was acquainted with Orville and Wilbur Wright. As Congressional Rep. Fitzgerald, he qualified as an "aerial daredevil" of Congress by flying approximately 500 miles from Dayton to Washington for the reconvening of the "lame duck" session of Congress in 1922. In Dayton, he secured the location of Wright Field (now Area B of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). His interest in flying led him, in 1927, to urge that the Air Force be reorganized as an independent department of national defense. "The recent oceanic flights," he said at the time, "coupled with the preliminary tests of heavy bombing planes, have startled the world with the tremendous power of aviation. Aircraft have generally appeared to be the cheapest instruments of defense. Now they prove themselves to be one of the most powerful."
From 1927 to 1930, he was a delegate to the Carnegie Foundation's Inter-Parliamentary Union in Paris, Berlin, Geneva, and London, to study methods of classifying international law.
An active man, Roy G. Fitzgerald climbed Mount Rainier in 1925 and four years later swam the Bosporus from Europe to Asia in a cold rain. The swim took him 30 minutes.
After his Congressional service, Roy Gerald Fitzgerald resumed the independent practice of law in Dayton, where he lived the rest of his life.
He died in Dayton on November 16, 1962, after a long illness and is interred with his parents, wives and son at Woodland Cemtery in Dayton, Ohio.
From the guide to the Roy G. Fitzgerald Papers, 1842-1962, 1917-1962, (Dayton Metro Library)
