Foster, William Z

FOSTER, WILLIAM Z. (1881–1961). The rise and decline of a radical labor movement in the twentieth-century United States was encapsulated in the life of William Z. Foster, who stood at the center of each of the key radical movements of this era: socialism, syndicalism, and communism. His early career, through the 1920s, demonstrates the strong roots that such ideas had within some working-class communities and among certain groups of workers, while his later life, especially during the late 1940s and early 1950s, exemplifies the increasing isolation of Marxist radicals through the ascendancy of Stalinism as well as government repression.

Raised in an Irish Catholic home in the slums of Philadelphia, Foster left school after the third grade and drifted around the country, working at jobs ranging from deep-water sailor to locomotive fireman. His intimate knowledge of a wide variety of jobs and his sensitivity to the ways that workers thought about their work and their problems made him a talented organizer.

Foster joined the Socialist Party just after the turn of the century and became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1909, playing a key role in the Spokane free-speech fight of that year. He taught himself to read in German and French, read the classic works of Marxism, and then traveled throughout Europe, studying the ideas and strategies of labor movements there.

In 1911 Foster split from the Industrial Workers of the World over the issue of dual unionism, which he vigorously opposed. Deeply influenced by French syndicalists, he developed the concept of “boring from within” the mainstream labor organizations to win them over to a revolutionary program. He established a series of organizations designed to accomplish this goal. Both the Syndicalist League of North America (1912–1914) and the International Trade Union Educational League (1915–1917) remained small “militant minorities” based largely in midwestern industrial cities, but their strategies and personnel played important roles in later movements and organizations, including the Communist Party. By World War I, Foster had emerged as a leading theorist of American syndicalism and during the war he earned a national reputation, directing drives to organize unskilled immigrant and black workers in the meat-packing and steel industries. He visited Russia during 1921 in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, was won over to the revolutionary cause, and joined the Communist Party later that year. Foster was still highly regarded by many labor activists as a creative and talented organizer with firm roots in the mainstream labor movement long after he had joined the Party.

During the 1920s Foster was instrumental in building the Trade Union Educational League, the most important Left opposition group within the American Federation of Labor. Throughout the early twenties Foster worked with John Fitzpatrick and other figures in the Chicago Federation of Labor to create a national Farmer-Labor Party, but when a shift in Communist strategy in 1923 undercut his relationship with Fitzpatrick and other mainstream labor progressives, Foster found himself more and more isolated. The Trade Union Educational League provided leadership in several of the most important strikes of the decade, however, and kept alive the goal of industrial over craft organization.

Beginning in the late 1920s, as a result of Comintern policy formulations and factional conflicts within the American Party, Foster became the spokesman for a narrow, sectarian line. After bitterly opposing its formation in 1928, he eventually became the leading figure in the Trade Union Unity League, a separate federation of dual, revolutionary unions. Foster campaigned as the Party’s presidential candidate in 1924, 1928, and 1932 and directed its trade union work throughout the 1920s and the early years of the Great Depression. A severe heart attack during his 1932 presidential campaign slowed him down considerably, though he turned much of his attention to writing and remained a leading figure in the Communist movement. Although he was a prolific author of books and pamphlets throughout his long career, Foster produced his most ambitious works on the history of communism, labor, and Afro-Americans during the 1940s and 1950s.

Foster was the Party’s chairperson between 1932 and 1957, from its dramatic growth and increasing influence in the Great Depression and war years through its isolation and decline during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. He played a central role in the expulsion of Earl Browder, architect of the Party’s Popular Front policies, and led the organization’s reversion to a more sectarian line in the postwar era. When Khrushchev revealed the extent of Stalin’s crimes in a 1956 speech before the Soviet Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress, a reform group sought to reconstruct the American Party along more democratic lines and to make it more independent of Soviet influence. Foster successfully resisted these efforts, however, and the failure of the reform movement fueled a precipitous decline in membership. His own physical collapse in the late 1950s paralleled that of the movement he had done so much to build. William Z. Foster died in Moscow on 1 September 1960, and his ashes were placed near the monument to the Haymarket martyrs in Waldheim Cemetery outside Chicago.

Barrett, James R. “Revolution and Personal Crisis: William Z. Foster and the American Communist Personal Narrative,” Labor History, 43:4 (Fall 2002): 465-482.

Barrett, James R. William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Johanningsmeier, Edward P. Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

William Z. Foster, 1881-1961. Works. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/