Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster.

As we survey the barren, desolate landscape of the American Left at the end of the Twentieth Century, we have every right and reason to ask, What happened? How did we arrive at this forsaken place? Where did we take a wrong turn--if we took a wrong turn?

There were times in this century, after all, when the most solidly entrenched plutocrats thought a new American revolution was in the offing. There were times when labor unions were determined to transform--not merely meliorate--the lives of working people, times when movements of the Left mobilized millions of Americans, times when every dirty electoral trick had to be deployed to keep, for example, Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign from turning California upside down, times when radical newspapers rivaled the commercial press in circulation and influence.

How did we come to lose all that? What brought us to the poor, shriveled prospect that is the Left today?

Oh, I know there are devoted individuals and even dynamic groups waging intensive political struggles in behalf of the interests to which they assign priority--environmentalists, feminists, lesbians and gays, African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, the disabled, the elderly, people on welfare. There are dedicated activists committed to resisting militarism and war, and to protecting civil rights and civil liberties. In no way do I denigrate any of these admirable efforts when I say that, even taken together, they are no substitute for a broad, visionary political movement that focuses on building a better society and, for that matter, a better world for all.

Without self-consciousness or embarrassment, the Left used to talk about its concept of "a beautiful tomorrow." How did we lose that dream?

We need to ask the question not to assign blame or engage in sectarian recrimination. The Left, even in its heyday, did too much of that, and what's left of the Left still does too much of it even in its current pitifully debilitated state. But we need to understand the past if the Left is ever to have a future.

The easy explanation, of course, is that we fell victim to the wily misrepresentations and repressive machinations of American capitalism and its obedient servant, the State, which deprived the Wobblies of their free-speech rights and locked Gene Debs away in the Atlanta penitentiary and smashed radical organizations in the Palmer Raids and mounted a great Red Scare after World War I and another after World War II, invoking the Smith Act and the FBI's COINTELPRO program. And all of those measures and many more did have telling consequences. But they don't explain the total rout of the American Left.

Fortunately, we can begin our search for understanding with a recent spate of books--histories, biographies, analyses from varying perspectives--that focus on the Left's triumphs (there were a few) and defeats (there were many) in this century.

Those who recall William Z. Foster's name at all these days may recognize it as that of an austere, dogmatic American Communist who was a leader of his party for the better part of three decades until his death in 1961. During that period, the party reached its peak and then declined dismally in numerical strength and political significance. When Foster joined its ranks it was still in its infancy, but already a force to be reckoned with on the Left. When he died, it was, to all but a handful of diehards, a laughing-stock. That wasn't all Foster's doing, but as Edward P. Johanningsmeier, a University of Delaware historian, makes clear in a thorough and thoughtful biography, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton University Press. 433 pp. $29.95), he did his share.

Anyone who encountered Foster's jargon-ridden Communist rhetoric and his slavish devotion to Stalinism in his middle and late years might have found it difficult to believe that he started out as an authentic American radical--one of the few Communist leaders of his generation, in fact, to spring from genuine working-class roots. Foster grew up in the grinding poverty of Philadelphia's Irish slums and started his working life--and his career as an agitator and organizer--on the railways. In 1909, as a young labor journalist covering one of the Wobblies' free-speech fights in Spokane, Washington, for the Workingman's Paper, he was jailed for forty-seven days, including a stretch in solitary confinement on a bread-and-water diet, for helping to organize IWW activities among his fellow prisoners.

By the time Foster joined the Communist Party in 1921, at the age of forty, he had been an organizer--and, by all accounts, an extremely effective one--in the meat-packing and steel industries. Three years later, he was the party's Presidential candidate, a task for which he had little enthusiasm, though he undertook it twice more. Even in 1924, he displayed a newly acquired talent for stiff ideological rhetoric that would repel rather than attract American workers.

"Some day," he wrote, "a Communist will lead the government that rules over America, [but] when that time comes the position will not be called president, it will be chairman of the all-American Soviet." As Johanningsmeier observes, "Increasingly, Foster's rhetoric departed from the vernacular and slipped into the style of the Third International." Foster's 1932 book, Toward Soviet America, setting forth the aims of the Communist Party, was "heavy with line and jargon, statistics and apocalyptic predictions."

But the rhetoric wasn't the disease; it was merely a symptom--a manifestation of the two central assumptions that guided Foster and his party and ultimately contributed substantially to the decline of the Left. One assumption was that a Leninist vanguard was indispensable to the struggle for a better world; he defended "with clerical certainty," says Johanningsmeier, "the idea that a militant minority, a gifted priesthood of revolutionists, could somehow design the downfall of a corrupt and inefficient capitalist order." The other assumption was that unwavering support of the Soviet Union was vital to the success of the American movement.

These were fatal defects. They led inevitably to the party's isolation from the rest of the Left--and from America's working class. And they led just as inevitably to political analyses and policies that diverged drastically from reality. Foster believed that unity on the Left was "a waste of time"; that Communists should work with the two major parties until a labor party emerged; that American unions would inexorably increase in power, and that the 1956 merger of the AFL and CIO--a rightward move from which labor has not yet recovered--was "a long stride towards independent working-class political action."

It's difficult to imagine anyone being more consistently wrong in his political judgments. But Foster, says Johanningsmeier, "refused to be constrained by a coherent set of beliefs." Earl Browder, his long-time comrade in the party leadership (until he was expelled on Soviet orders after World War II), said Foster "could abandon his ideas with the greatest facility of any man I've ever met--and repudiate them publicly, without the slightest embarrassment." That description applied to the party, too, and accounted for its total loss of credibility, effect, and influence. And it stunted the growth of the entire Left, which devoted much of its energy and resources to evading Communist manipulation or at least dissociating itself from the Communists.

Whatever inner doubts Foster may have had--and Johanningsmeier suggests he had them--his public stance was ruthless intolerance of critics and "revisionists." In the turmoil that followed Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin's crimes, Foster's choice was to preserve the old party structure and the old party line. Even when he was in the grip of his final illness, he wrote from Moscow to his designated successor, Gus Hall, "Our Party is part of a great world-wide Communist movement.... It is indestructible, and is part of a movement which will eventually dominate the world."