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William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Working Class in American History)

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Barrett helps the reader refocus on the essential character of working-class virtuosity in dialectical contradistinction to the vapid nonsense of post-modernist theory and the lost generation of young historians coming to age since the demise of the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China. To paraphrase Country Joe McDonald, bring back the Marxists, Jim. Barrett helps us keep up the good fight with a well-crafted piece of historical writing that is sure to bring the enmity of those who foolishly believe in the end of ideology.

This book is around 279 pages of small print main text, packed full of details and analysis. It is the story of William Z Foster, one of the prominent leaders of the American Communist Party. The author is not a Communist sympathizer but makes clear that he is interested in social movements of the poor and oppressed and what makes for their success.

Barrett describes Foster's early life, when he grew up in extreme poverty in the slums of Philadelphia and became attracted to socialist doctrines in the first decade of the twentieth century. For most of the period 1900-1915, Foster engaged in the extremely hazardous and harsh life of an itinerant laborer and hobo while he developed a revolutionary strategy based on syndicalism and associated for several years with the IWW.

Foster reached the pinnacle of his achievements when he toned down his revolutionary ardor and become an organizer for the A.F of L. He oversaw the great A.F of L organizing drives in meatpacking, steel and mining in 1918-19 during and shortly after World War I. He firmly believed that workers needed to organize in industrial unions; in contrast the A.F of L had historically often been hostile to organizing anyone who was not a skilled white male worker of western European descent. Foster helped bring about a federal government mediation forum for the Chicago meatpacking strike and was able to use the forum so that workers could tell about the poor working conditions they endured. The Federal mediator imposed a union friendly agreement that lasted for around a year until the meatpackers moved to dismantle it and crush the union. In the midst of the post World War I Red Scare, Foster testified in front of a Senate committee investigating the steel strike. The Senators latched onto strident anti-capitalist statements Foster made in a pamphlet published several years earlier. Foster tried to downplay those statements. A.F of L president Samuel Gompers, for the first and last time, defended Foster. In 1919 strikes in the Pennsylvania coal-fields, 14 strikers and sympathizers were killed. One of Foster's organizers, 49 year old Fannie Sellins was clubbed, shot and clubbed again by police, before she ended up dying. Barrett seems impressed by the tireless energy and organization skills Foster demonstrated in the strikes of 1918-1919.
Foster joined the Communist Party in 1921, bringing his immense prestige as a labor organizer to an organization lacking in proletarian credibility. Barrett describes how Foster's efforts in the 1920's to build coalitions with non-communist leftists and liberals in the 1920's were sabotaged by the imposition of the party line from Moscow. Foster would be arrested several times before 1933 because of his anti-capitalist public speeches. In 1930-31 he spent many months in jail facilities in New York City lacking elementary sanitation and was fed with rotted food.

In the early years of the Great Depression, Foster led the Communist Party's Trade Union Education League's efforts to organize the coal and textile industries, with his typical energy and resourcefulness. The strikes were usually not successful in the face of local and state government repression and other obstacles. He won 100,000 votes as the Party's presidential candidate in 1932 (Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party got 900,000) but also suffered a heart attack, stroke and nervous breakdown. He would be bed-ridden for the next several years, suffering the symptoms of clinical depression. After he recovered to some extent in the mid-30's, he would devote himself extensively to writing projects but his health would never again allow him to directly participate in union organizing. His writings about union organizing however were highly respected within the CIO, particularly by the many Communists who took leading roles in CIO unions.With Foster effectively incapacitated, his one-time protégé and soon to be fierce rival, Earl Browder took over the Party. Foster was the Party's chairman but Browder held the real power as the Party's General Secretary. Browder, in line with Comintern policy, adopted the policy of the "Popular Front," making the Party supportive of Roosevelt's New Deal while constructing a personality cult for himself. Foster worried, with some ground according to Barrett, that Browder's policies were diluting the revolutionary ardor of many Party members, orienting members' enthusiasm towards reformist social democracy. By the early 40's officials in Moscow suggested that Foster be given an overseas job in the Comintern to get him out of Browder's way or even be removed from all his Party posts though Browder didn't accept the suggestions. To Foster's horror, Browder argued that revolution in the United States was a very remote possibility and during World War II very briefly succeeded in transforming the Party into a sort of political lobbying organization oriented toward lobbying politicians for progressive liberal (bourgeois) reforms.

What may be the most interesting part of Foster's story is his last years. Foster was the dominant force in the Party after the Soviets ordered the purge of Browder and his supporters in 1945. However he re-ascended in the Party just as the Party was about to be the target of massive government repression and its membership base plummeted. Barrett describes how Foster and his supporters met their increasing isolation in American life by retreating further behind a wall of narrow sectarianism and purged from the Party those members who did not completely adhere to their conception of Marxist-Leninist discipline and purity. In the wake of Kruschev's speech about Stalin's crimes in 1956, a faction of the American CP led by Daily Worker editor John Gates launched a sort of glasnost within the Party. The pages of the Daily Worker were opened to criticisms of the anti-democratic nature and other policies of the CP and reflections on the crimes of Stalin. A faction of the American CP opposed the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. All of this horrified Foster and his faction, who set about the successful task of maneuvering the reformers out of the Party.

James R. Barrett is a competent historian. He is even, despite his tendency to confuse profundity with complexity of expression, a reasonably good writer. Unfortunately, these qualities are overshadowed in his book on William Z. Foster by his own romantic attachment to the mythology of the "Working Class". The work is well researched, but its interpretation is flawed by Barrett's insistence on viewing the past through rose-colored glasses (pun intended). Simply stated, Barrett's own rather extreme ideological predilections taint the book to the point that it says almost nothing about the real place of Communism and its leader in American history. Frankly, with Edward P. Johanningmeier's biography of Foster already published, there is no real justification for Barrett's book. It has its uses in providing some new detail, but essentially it is irrelevant as history, and stands merely as an interesting document of fading left-wing historicism.

Having been forced to read this book in a graduate class, I must say that I found it to be nearly impossible to read. The clearly Communistic slant makes this more of a political tract than a history.