William Z. Foster

William Zebulon Foster (February 25 1891- September 1 1961), known as William Z. Foster, was the long time general secretary of the Communist Party USA and trade union leader.

Foster was born in Taunton, Massachusetts. His family moved to Philadelphia. He left school at the age of ten to work. Foster joined the Socialist Party of America as a child labourer in 1901 and was a member until he was expelled in 1909 for activity in a left wing faction of the party in Washington state. Foster the joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1909 and became a leader of the union. In 1911, Foster argued that the IWW should disband with its members entering the American Federation of Labor and "boring from within" in order to take it over but his arguments were rejected and he resigned to form the Syndicalist League of North America and then the International Trade Union Educational League which promoted his position of orienting towards the mainstream trade union movement with a strategy of winning positions and influence within the union leadership.

Foster became a rail car inspector in Chicago and a member of the AFL. He became an active member of the Chicago Federation of Labor, and attracted wide attention through his leadership of thousands of packinghouse and steel workers in AFL-sponsored organizing struggles in 1917-18 and 1919.

He successfully argued for a resolution in favour of nationalization of the railroads at an AFL national convention and he supported John L. Lewis against Samuel Gompers when Lewis ran for the presidency of the AFL in 1921.

He joined the Communist Party USA in 1921 led a trade union faction within the party in alliance with a smaller faction led by James P. Cannon was able to control the majority of the party's leadership in 1923 and again in 1925. For most of the 1920s, however, the party was led by the Charles Ruthenberg - Jay Lovestone faction that was largely made up of foreign-born workers and represented the vast majority of the party membership. A firm supporter of Joseph Stalin, Foster split with Cannon in 1928 and supported his former ally's expulsion for Trotskyism. Foster was made general secretary of the party in 1929 with the support of the Comintern deposing Jay Lovestone who was sympathetic to Bukharin and whose policies of American Exceptionalism was anathema to Stalin's new Third Period line.

Foster was also the party's candidate for President of the United States in the 1924, 1928 and 1932 U.S. presidential elections.

He suffered a heart attack in 1932 and was forced to step down as leader of the party in favor of Earl Browder, however, when Browder was removed in 1945 due to the hostility of Moscow to his policies Foster was reinstated as party leader.

In 1948 he was among the party leaders indicted for subversive activity under the Smith Act, but, because of his precarious health, he was not brought to trial.

Foster was a firm Stalinist and turned the party into an uncritical supporter of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He rallied the party's hard core when the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress led to the exodus of 80 percent of the CPUSA's membership. Foster retired in 1957 and assumed the title of Chairman emeritus of the party to make way for the younger Gus Hall in an attempt to staunch the exodus from the party. The change was cosmetic, however, as Hall was as staunch a defender of the Moscow line as his predecessor. Foster died in Moscow in 1961.