Book Review

Canada and the United States

William Z. Foster was a giant of American working-class history and a major leader of the American Communist movement during its three decades as a force in American politics and society. After years of seasoning—and extreme privation—as an itinerant worker, Foster proved to be a "brilliant organizer and strike leader" (p. 2). In the era of World War I, he led vitally important organizing campaigns in meatpacking and steel, before casting his lot with the Communist Party in 1921. From that moment, the trajectory of his life and worldview would be shaped less by his indigenous working-class experience than by the influence—at times the dictates—of the international Communist movement. Thus, it is perhaps fitting that Foster died "in the shadow of the Kremlin" (p. 2). To historian and biographer James R. Barrett, the place of Foster's death and the direction of his life from the 1920s onward reflect Foster's growing isolation from "the lives and concerns of most American workers" (p. 272) and, more fundamentally, "the tragedy of American radicalism."

1

Foster was born in 1881 and raised in Skittereen, an Irish neighborhood in Philadelphia. His mother was a devout Catholic who bore twenty-three children, most of whom died in infancy. His father was an unskilled worker who "devoted most of his energies to Irish republicanism, amateur athletics, and street fighting" (p. 10). The family's unrelenting poverty compelled the precocious William to quit school and go to work at age ten. Although he remained a voracious reader, he soon abandoned his mother's Catholic faith and developed a sense of alienation from, and contempt for, Skittereen and its "half-starved, diseased, [and] hopeless" inhabitants (p. 15). By 1901, Foster's parents were dead; his family had largely disintegrated, and Foster had become a "rootless young man" (p. 17).

. . .