William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism

Abstract

William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism is an informative account of a bold labor organizer whose movement activity, most notably as leader of the explosive 1919 steel strike, terminated in pitiful Stalinist dotage and death in a Moscow sanitarium in 1961. This is James R. Barrett's second contribution to the University of Illinois Press series The Working Class in American History, following upon his 1987 social history of Chicago's packinghouse workers. That labor history background may explain why he is at his best when describing Foster's workingclass origins and early union organizing. He ably depicts Foster's turnofthecentury Irish Catholic upbringing in Philadelphia, his generally male world of industrial work, his many coasttocoast rail trips, his maritime work on squarerigged ships from Africa to South America, and his involvement in the Socialist party and Industrial Workers of the World, including the Spokane free speech fight of 1909. Foster's youthful radicalism, Barrett maintains, was informed not by labor republicanism, but by the syndicalism that captivated a good part of the unskilled American proletariat. After visiting France in 1910–1911, Foster developed the perspective that competing left wing unions such as the Wobblies merely isolated revolutionaries from other workers; radicals instead should build a “militant minority” within the conventional trade unions, pressing for industrial organization and militant tactics. This strategy, “boring from within,” informed Foster's leading roles in interracial wartime meatpacker organizing and the 1919 steel strike, but it so narrowed his vision to trade unionism that he supported World War I in order to preserve his effectiveness within the American Federation of Labor.