William Zebulon Foster

• William Zebulon Foster
• Born: February 25, 1881
• Died: September 1, 1961

Labor and Communist leader, was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, the son of James Foster, an Irish immigrant whose nationalist Fenian activities in Queen Victoria’s army caused him to seek political refuge in the New World in 1868. He was a carriage washer and stable hand until his death in 1900. He married Elizabeth McLaughlin, a textile worker, born in England of Scotch-Irish ancestry. She bore twenty-three children, only five of whom lived to adulthood. She died, at fifty-three, in 1900.

In 1888 the Fosters moved to the vicinity of Seventeenth Street and Kater in Philadelphia, a neighborhood known to its residents as Skitereen. Kater Street, Foster reported in his autobiography, was “a noisome, narrow side street, made up of several stables, a woodyard, a carpet-cleaning works, a few whorehouses and many ramshackle dwellings.”

Following three years of school, William Z. Foster terminated his formal education at age ten when he was apprenticed to a craftsman of many skills. After three years he found work in a type foundry and, some three years later, in a white lead works. As a child laborer, he says, he “felt the iron of the class struggle sink into his heart.” His mother and the Rev. Joseph O’Connor of St. Theresa’s hoped that young Foster would study for the priesthood. But, as a teenager, he embarked on an omnivorous program of secular reading that banished religion from his mind and paved the way for his acceptance of a consistently materialist outlook.

During his teens, Foster did men’s work in a number of industries. While continuing his eclectic reading, he became fascinated by the social struggles of the waning nineteenth century: a railroad strike in Chicago, a miners’ strike in the Rocky Mountains, Coxey’s Army, and William Jennings Bryan. He felt fierce partisanship for working people, and when, in the summer of 1900, he heard a socialist soapbox orator urge the abolition of the profit system and propose workers’ ownership of industry, he experienced an epiphany. Foster discovered socialism that night and made a commitment to it that endured to the end of his life.

His next years were those of a footloose workingman—felling trees in Florida, herding sheep in Oregon—hopping freight trains from job to job. From 1901 to 1904 Foster shipped out in square-rigged British sailing vessels, with books as his off-hours companions. Then he quit the sea to devote himself to promoting the gospel of socialism. To this end he roamed the country, finding employment on railroads and in lumber camps. He spent three summers “proving up” a homestead claim in Oregon—then sold it and never owned land or a house again.

Foster belonged to the left wing of the socialist party, an amorphous group that scorned the white-collar professionals who dominated the party. The left wing held the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in low esteem, charging that body with “class collaboration” and with failing to organize minorities, women, the unskilled, and immigrants—and failing also to advance industrial unionism. In 1909 he went to Spokane to report on a “free-speech struggle” for a socialist newspaper. (It was there that Foster, who had been christened William Edward, adopted the distinctive initial “z” to assure proper delivery of his mail.) Hundreds of persons were jailed in the Spokane struggle, journalist Foster among them. He spent many weeks in prison, where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the organization that was leading the free-speech fight.

In joining the IWW, Foster opted for the movement called syndicalism, which he defined as “that tendency in the labor movement to confine the revolutionary class struggle of the workers to the economic field, to practically ignore the state, and to reduce the whole fight of the working class to simply a question of trade union action.” For the next ten years Foster was identified with this movement. He spent over a year in Europe (1910-11), studying the labor movements (and the languages) of France and Germany. He became convinced that the policy of forming left-wing unions, such as the IWW, was wrong—the left-wingers, he argued, should “bore from within” the established AFL unions. Failing to win the IWW leadership to this view, he left the organization. He became a railroad car inspector in Chicago and joined the AFL. With a group of his followers he formed the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA) in 1912.

In that year Foster married Esther Abramowitz, whose three children Foster adopted. Esther Foster, a Lithuanian-born needle-trades worker, had been active in the labor-anarchist movement. Their long-enduring marriage produced no children.

The SLNA lasted about two years and was succeeded by the International Trade Union Educational League, which, despite its name, never reached much beyond the limits of Chicago. The organization was short-lived but the active Foster group developed excellent relations with John Fitzpatrick, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, who backed Foster when the latter proposed a drive to organize the meatpacking industry. Within a few months, in 1917— 18, this effort brought 200,000 packinghouse workers into a federation of AFL unions and established Foster’s reputation as an organizer. Using the credit thus gained, he immediately moved to a project of even greater scale and difficulty: organization of the steel industry.

This drive started slowly in August 1918. AFL president Samuel Gompers and the union leaders gave grudging endorsement. The organizing campaign, despite obstacles placed by government, companies, and union leaders, swept 365,000 workers into a federated group of some twenty-five unions. On September 22, 1919, a national strike started. Harsh methods applied against it slowly wore down the strikers. In January 1920 the lost strike was formally ended. Its economic gains included a shorter workday, but the unions were barred from the industry. Foster promptly wrote his first book—a candid history and analysis of the strike, The Great Steel Strike (1920).

The feat of organizing hundreds of thousands of steelworkers gave Foster enormous prestige. He received an offer to join the AFL official family with the relative prosperity that status provided. He chose instead, in November 1920, to organize the Trade Union Education League, (TUEL), yet another center for work inside the established unions.

After the Russian Revolution of November 1917 the writings of Lenin began to reach this country. Foster was delighted to learn that he and Lenin were in agreement on the need for work within the craft unions and on the condemnation of dual unionism—a policy of setting up a second, more militant, union to dislodge an established union. In 1921 Foster went to Moscow as correspondent for a labor press bureau. He became convinced that syndicalism was not the road to socialism. He accepted the need for political action and, on his return from nearly four months abroad, he joined the Communist party.

For the next forty years, until his death in 1961, Foster’s activities within the American labor movement were parallel to his activities in the Communist party. During most of this time he held the post of party chairman. He continued as head of the TUEL and, from 1929, of its successor, the Trade Union Unity League, which was dissolved in 1935. In 1922 he attended a communist convention at Bridgman, Michigan; for that act he was charged with criminal syndicalism, but was freed after a jury failed to agree on a verdict.

When Senator Robert M. La Follette ran for president in 1924 on the Progressive ticket, the Communists found themselves isolated from the coalition that supported him. Thereupon, they nominated Foster for president and Benjamin Gitlow for vice president. (The two ran as candidates of the Workers party, as the Communist party was then called.) They were on the ballot in thirteen states and received an official total of 33,316 votes. In 1928 the same ticket ran in thirty-two states and polled 48,228 votes. In 1932 Foster, with the black Communist James W. Ford as his running mate, ran again. On this, his last campaign, he was on the ballot in forty states and received 102,991 votes.

In 1930, with the onset of the Great Depression, Foster devoted himself to the welfare of the unemployed. Following a huge demonstration in New York City, he was arrested and spent six months in prison. In 1932, while on an election speaking tour, he suffered a severe heart attack and was disabled for almost three years. Starting in 1935, he applied his skills and experience to the turbulent labor movement of the time, which saw the organization of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. At the same time he was active in the movement against what he perceived as the twin dangers of fascism and war.

In 1944 Foster was the lone dissenter within the Communist leadership against the dissolution of the party that was carried through by Earl Browder, its general secretary. Fourteen months later Foster led the movement that reconstituted the party. After World War II, as the Cold War between the United States and the USSR entered its early stages, the Communists were systematically isolated within the labor movement, in which many of them had held important posts. In 1948 Foster and eleven other top party leaders were indicted on a charge of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. When the case came to trial, Foster was severed from the rest because of his acute cardiovascular illness. The others were convicted and served prison terms of from five to eight years.

Between his seventieth birthday and his seventy-fifth, Foster published five large volumes on subjects ranging from the history of the Western Hemisphere to the history of black people in the United States; he also wrote scores of articles. Despite failing health, he was plunged into a factional struggle, in the years 1956-1959, against a right-wing grouping in the Communist party. During this period he was felled by a stroke.

In February 1961, leaving for the last time the one-bedroom apartment that he and Esther Foster had occupied since the early 1930s he sought treatment in the Soviet Union. He died, at eighty, in a sanitarium near Moscow and was given an elaborate funeral in Red Square. His ashes were returned to the United States for burial at Waldheim Cemetery, Chicago.

As an indigenous reformer, Foster based his hopes for radical societal change on labor. He demonstrated that it was possible to mobilize prodigious numbers of workers around common economic causes and across craft lines. Like Eugene Debs, he was a premature industrial unionist who possessed authentic talents as an organizer. After abandoning the simplistic syndicalism of the IWW, he moved to the Communist party, for which he became an active symbol. His ability to speak clearly about complex political issues stood him in good stead. He is typical of the energized radical who rejects moderate reform as an ultimate goal, preferring to strive for the replacement of capitalism by a socialist commonwealth.

The principal sources of Foster biography are his two autobiographical volumes, From Bryan to Stalin (1937) and the anecdotal Pages from a Worker’s Life (1939). Much of his The Twilight of World Capitalism (1949) and The Great Steel Strike (1920) is also autobiographical. Foster wrote fifteen books. The last five, averaging 600 pages each, were published between 1951 and 1956. His Outline Political History of the Americas (1951), History of the Communist Party of the United States (1952), and The Negro People in American History (1954) are in the latter group. He also wrote some ninety pamphlets. Biographical sources include the section on Foster in P. F. Douglas, Six Upon the World (1954), which combines interviews with Foster with a study of his writings, and A. Zipser, Workingclass Giant: The Life of William Z. Foster (1981). For a critical view, see H. Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depresion Decade (1984) and, to a lesser extent, T. Draper, The Roots of American Communism (1957). See also Current Biography (July 1945) and the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 7 (1981). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, September 2, 1961.