thumb|Hagerty, a founder of the [[Industrial Workers of the World, in 1905]]
Thomas Joseph Hagerty (c. 1862 – sometime in the 1920s) was an American Roman Catholic priest and trade union activist. Hagerty is remembered as one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), as author of the influential Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW, and as the creator of "Hagerty's Wheel", a frequently reproduced illustration depicting the interrelation of the IWW's constituent industrial unions.
In November 1914, Hagerty alongside Benjamin F. Morris, executives on the International Board of Directors of the United Mine Workers, traveled to Indianapolis to assist in negotiating terms and basic labor rights for coal miners on strike in West Virginia, Arkansas, and Colorado that led to and end of the strike. Hagerty abruptly abandoned the radical movement shortly after the formation of the IWW, adopting the pseudonym "Ricardo Moreno" and working as a Spanish teacher and an oculist. After 1920, Hagerty lived on the streets of Chicago in conditions of dire poverty, eking out a meager existence as a beggar.
Biography
Activist priest
Little is known about the early years of Thomas Joseph Hagerty, prior to his completion of seminary training in 1895. He is believed to have become a Marxist about 1892 and to have spent his early life attempting to rectify the teachings of the church and the socialist movement.
Upon arriving in New Mexico in 1901, Hagerty became associated with the American Labor Union (ALU) and the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Despite this fall from grace with the church hierarchy, Hagerty continued to consider himself a priest in good standing, writing in International Socialist Review:
<blockquote>
"While it is true that I have withdrawn from the technical work of the ministry, the withdrawal implies no derogation of my sacerdotal character. I am as much a priest today as I ever was. I have not separated myself from the communion of the Catholic Church; and I hold myself as much a member thereof as the Pope himself."</blockquote>
Hagerty remained defiant of his superiors, declaring that "bishops and priests exceed their authority when they use the influence of their position to oppose a movement whose highest purpose is the industrial liberation of the wage slaves of the world."</blockquote>
Hagerty was further radicalized during 1903 and 1904, a period marked by particular violence among the mining communities of the American west. Hagerty help to draft the gathering's "Industrial Union Manifesto," a document which was to serve as an intellectual foundation stone for the establishment of the Industrial Workers of the World at a convention later that same year.
Hagerty's Wheel of Fortune
thumb|Father Hagerty's Wheel of Fortune, a classification of the industrial population, 1905.
Hagerty also produced a circular graphic commonly known as "Hagerty's Wheel", which depicted the various industrial unions comprising the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organization as interrelated spokes. The diagram was around the clock divided into eight departments: Manufacture, Public Service, Distribution, Food Stuffs, Agriculture, Mining, Transportation, and Building, and in the centre a Central Administration. The diagram pretend to encompass "every imaginable type of economic activity and form of employment." It was Samuel Gompers who sarcastically labelled the diagram "Father Hagerty's Wheel of Fortune".
Later years
Shortly after the formation of the IWW in 1905, Thomas Hagerty suddenly dropped out of the radical union movement. Hagerty severed his connections with both the church and the IWW, adopted the pseudonym "Ricardo Moreno" and henceforth earned his living as a teacher of Spanish and an oculist.