| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism. By James R. Barrett. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xvi, 352 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02046-4.)

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. 1

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 working-class origins and early union organizing. He ably depicts Foster's turn-of-the-century Irish Catholic upbringing in Philadelphia, his generally male world of industrial work, his many coast-to-coast rail trips, his maritime work on square-rigged 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. . . .

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