William Z. Foster

William Z. Foster

William Z. Foster (1881-1961) was a highly influential leader of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) as well as a prolific author.

Early Life

William Foster was born in Massachusetts in 1881 to poor European immigrants and began to work full time from the age of 10. As he entered his twenties he began to subscribe to socialist views, joining the Socialist Party in 1901 but was expelled in a faction war, and later the Industrial Workers of the World in 1909, leaving the latter organisation when his plan to infiltrate the American Federation of Labor was turned down. He went on to join the AFL in 1919 led the very large, but unsuccessful, Steel Strike.

Communist Years

Document 54 from Soviet Archives. Alexander and Earl [Browder] to [William] Foster, 11 July 1928, RTsKhIDNI 534–6–137. Original in English. At this time Browder was working for the Comintern and serving as the first general secretary of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat. "Alexander" was the alias of a Profintern official named Keetagnian.

Foster joined the newly formed American Communist Party (CPUSA) in the 1919, and ran for the U.S. Presidency on the CPUSA ticket in 1924, 1928 and 1932. After the third attempt he suffered a serious heart attack and was relieved of his post. Foster was always loyal to Josef Stalin, and Stalin brought him back in 1945 to replace Earl Browder.

Zebulon

William Foster's middle initial "Z." was added as a way to distinguish himself as a communist author, as well as to avoid snail-mail confusion with another William Foster who lived in Spokane at the time. It was never officially intended(nor legally changed) to signify a middle name.

Indictment

Foster was indicted under the Smith Act in 1948 for subversion, but did not go on trial because of his poor health. He later lost his post in the Communist Party for refusing to condemn the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. He died in 1961.

Works

• Insurgency: or, the economic power of the middle class, 1910
• Syndicalism, 1913
• General report on steel strike relief fund, 1920
• The great steel strike and its lessons, 1920
• The railroaders' next step--amalgamation, 1922
• The Russian Revolution, 1922
• The Revolutionary Crisis of 1918-1921: In Germany, England, Italy and France, 1922
• The bankruptcy of the American labor movement, 1922
• The Principles and Program of the Trade Union Educational League, 1922
• Russia in 1924, 1924
• Russian workers and workshops in 1926, 1926
• Organize the unorganized, 1926
• Strike Strategy, 1926
• Misleaders of labor, 1926
• The Watson-Parker law, the latest scheme to hamstring railroad unionism, 1927
• Wrecking the labor banks; the collapse of the labor banks and investment companies of the Brotherhood of locomotive engineers, 1927
• Victorious socialist construction in the Soviet Union, 1930
• Little brothers of the big labor fakers: report of a speech against the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, made in New Star Casino, New York City on May 10, 1931, 1931
• Toward Soviet America, 1932

Further reading

• Barrett, James R. William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism. (2000). 352 pp standard scholarly biography
• We told you so - revelations of espionage by the Communist Party USA - includes related article on the Verona intercepts project, by Stephen Goode and Tiffany Danitz, Insight on the News, Oct 6, 1997.

See also

• Communist Party of the United States of America
• Earl Browder
• Eugene Dennis

External Links

• Spartacus - William Z. Foster
• WSWS - The Life of William Z. Foster