William Z. Zebulon Foster

On September 22, 1919, 250,000 steelworkers walked off the job across ten major steel-producing centers in the largest industrial strike American labor had yet seen. The architect and field commander of the strike was a 38-year-old AFL organizer named William Z. Foster. He took the strategy that had won the eight-hour day in Chicago’s packinghouses (1917–1918) and applied it to steel: unite dozens of craft unions under a single National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, and pursue mass organization that included immigrant and unskilled laborers. The AFL offered tepid endorsement and scant funding, but Foster nonetheless extended his network from Chicago and Gary, Indiana, into the heart of the industry, the Monongahela Valley, signing up as many as 350,000 workers before the strike vote.

The repression was swift and brutal. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, banned public assemblies of three or more people and deputized 5,000 vigilantes to enforce the order. Within ten days, fourteen people were killed: all of them strikers or strike sympathizers. Foster himself was expelled from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, at gunpoint by a posse of forty men. Summoned before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, he was interrogated about his radical background and his 1912 pamphlet Syndicalism; the committee’s report concluded that organized labor ‘must keep men who entertain and formulate un-American doctrines out of its ranks.’ The strike collapsed on January 8, 1920. Foster resigned from the National Committee, but the defeat radicalized him. The experience convinced him that transformation within the AFL framework had reached its limit, and the following year, after attending a Profintern conference in Moscow, he joined the Communist Party. The Great Steel Strike was crushed. But it made Foster the national face of American radical labor and marked the pivot from trade-union strategist to revolutionary.

In 1944, CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder interpreted the US-Soviet wartime alliance as the end of class struggle between socialism and capitalism. He dissolved the CPUSA and replaced it with the Communist Political Association (CPA), conceived as a Marxist advocacy group within Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Most party members went along, but Foster quietly prepared his opposition. In January 1945, as postwar tensions mounted, he drafted a letter to American Communist leaders criticizing Browder’s revisionism. The letter influenced a landmark article by French Communist leader Jacques Duclos, ‘On the Dissolution of the Communist Party of the United States,’ which condemned Browder’s line as a fundamental betrayal of Marxism-Leninism. Opinion turned rapidly: Browder was denounced as a class traitor, and at an emergency CPA convention in July 1945, the CPUSA was reconstituted. Browder was expelled and a new leadership of Foster, Eugene Dennis, and John Williamson was elected. Foster served as General Secretary until 1957, preserving the party’s organizational continuity through the repression of the Cold War. This episode marks the definitive turn in Foster’s career: from labor strategist to ultimate guardian of communist principle.

Foster produced a substantial body of Marxist-Leninist historical scholarship that chronicled American and world labor movements. His landmark History of the Communist Party of the United States (1952) traced the CPUSA from its nineteenth-century Marxist antecedents through its founding and development, written from the inside by its longest-serving leader. Outline Political History of the Americas (1951) was a pioneering Marxist survey treating the entire hemisphere as a continuous story of imperialist plunder and popular resistance. The Negro People in American History (1954) reconstructed Black American history from slavery through twentieth-century civil rights struggles as a dialectic of class and racial oppression and liberation, laying groundwork for the CPUSA's Marxist analysis of the national question. The Twilight of World Capitalism (1949) analyzed the structural crisis of postwar state monopoly capitalism, while History of the Three Internationals (1955) and Outline History of the World Trade Union Movement (1956) became standard reference works in international labor history. His autobiography Pages from a Worker's Life (1939) remains one of the most vivid primary sources on early twentieth-century American radical labor. Though produced outside the academy, Foster's works endure as a major legacy of Marxist historiography reading American and world history from below.