Foner, Philip Sheldon

FONER, PHILIP SHELDON (1910–1994). A prominent Marxist intellectual and one of the most prolific of American historians, Philip S. Foner spent his career—as writer, teacher, editor, and publisher—connecting scholarship with the activity of movements for social change. Born in New York City, Foner was educated at the City College of New York (CCNY) and Columbia University, where he received the PhD in 1941. He began his teaching career at CCNY in 1933 but in 1941 became one of the victims of the legislative Rapp-Coudert purge of Communists and other radicals teaching at New York’s public colleges. Employed for a period in labor education, he was later a partner in the Citadel Press publishing firm. From 1967 to 1979 he was professor of history at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. As emeritus professor he continued to lecture and teach at numerous universities, both in the United States and abroad.

From his first book, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (1941), Foner broke new ground. In 1947 the first volume of his History of the Labor Movement in the United States appeared, and this ten-volume work stands as a formidable challenge to the reformist John R. Commons’s interpretation of labor history. Foner viewed labor’s struggles for better living and working conditions as manifestations of class conflict that ultimately would lead workers to political independence and rejection of capitalism. Although his main emphasis was upon the institutional growth of trade unions and the militancy workers expressed in innumerable strikes, he also enriched our knowledge of working class culture.

In The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (1949–1952) he provided the basis for major scholarly attention to the life and career of this great leader of nineteenth-century African Americans and champion of the antislavery struggle. Other important works written by Foner include Women and the American Labor Movement (1979, 1980), Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (1974), History of Black Americans (1975, 1983), and A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the United States (1962, 1963). He edited and co-edited numerous documentary collections as well.

Leberstein, Stephen. "Purging the Profs: The Rapp Coudert Committee in New York, 1940–1942," in Michael E. Brown et al. (eds.). New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993.

Philip Foners Papers. Guide. Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_153/admininfo.html