The American Radical.

Foster is the subject of one of forty-six profiles collected by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye in The American Radical (Routledge. 380 pp. $49.95, cloth; 17.95, paper). James R. Barrett, a labor historian at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), arrives at an assessment quite similar to Johanningsmeier's: "Both Foster and his Communist movement were born in the heart of the American working class, but their program and activities were fundamentally shaped by the influence of Soviet Communism. Foster and his party perished, isolated from American workers' daily lives and concerns."

Scott Molloy, an associate professor at the Labor Research Center at the University of Rhode Island, portrays an altogether different kind of socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs, who "stands alone," Molloy remarks, "at the acme of the American socialist pyramid, a symbol of courage and dedication even to those not associated with the cause." Perhaps the greatest tribute to Debs's stature is that communists, socialists, and independent radicals of sundry persuasions, who agree on little else, join in honoring his memory and claiming him as one of their own.

Debs came out of the railway labor movement and achieved prominence as leader of the great Pullman strike of 1894. He spent six months in prison for contempt of court and, Molloy notes, "emerged in mid-1895 as America's first national working-class hero." Like Foster, he was no great theoretician of the Left, but unlike Foster he never lost touch with the American tradition. Shortly after his release, he wrote: "To the unified hosts of American workingmen Fate has committed the charge of rescuing American Liberties from the grasp of the vandal horde that have placed them in peril."

Starting in 1900, Debs was the Socialist Party's standard bearer in five Presidential campaigns, garnering almost a million votes in 1912 and a similar number in 1920, when he ran from the Federal prison cell to which he had been confined for opposing World War I. Campaign badges of the time stated, FOR PRESIDENT--CONVICT No. 9653. But by the time Debs died in 1926, the Communist Party, more disciplined and advocating a more militant program, had come to dominate the Left.

Robert M. LaFollette Sr. didn't go to prison for opposing U.S. entry into World War I. He was, after all, a Republican, a U.S. Senator, and a former Governor of Wisconsin. Still, writes R. David Myers, the librarian at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, "vigilante groups called for his ouster, and the Senate ordered an investigation to consider his expulsion. He was deeply hurt by a petition signed by 421 University of Wisconsin faculty members who deplored his failure to support prosecution of the war."

Though LaFollette ran for President as an independent progressive in 1924 (and received an impressive five million votes), he never brought himself to a decisive break with the two-party system. And he never called himself a socialist, though his anti-corporate, anti-imperialist stance brought him many admirers on the Left.

The incredible range and diversity of America's radical heritage is amply demonstrated in The American Radical. From the Ottawa warrior Pontiac, who led a rebellion against Britain's North American empire in the 1760s, by way of such compelling figures as Tom Paine and Sojourner Truth, Walt Whitman and Emma Goldman, Mother Jones and Dorothy Day, Woody Guthrie and I.F. Stone, to the African-American poet Audre Lorde, who died in 1992 after a lifetime of artistic and political struggle, this book presents figures who inspire as well as instruct, and serves as an excellent introduction to American radicalism. The editors conclude with a quotation from the late University of Wisconsin historian, Harvey Goldberg: "For very compelling reasons, the study of American radicals should be essential homework for this generation: because their record can give heart and stomach to Americans who are watching democracy weaken under the weight of conformism; and because their insights and errors, their accomplishments and failures can cast light, even many years later, on the problems of the present."