Notable Tauntonians: William Z. Foster, 'America's Lenin' ran for president 3 times

“The American Lenin” was born on Weir Street in Taunton.

William Z. Foster was the General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1945 to 1957.

Before he rose to prominence as a Communist, he was a labor organizer, instrumental in the meatpacking industry strike of 1917 as well as a major mover in the bitter 1919 steelworkers strike.

He ran for President of the United States three times: in 1924, 1928 and 1932.

When he died in 1961, his notoriety was such that he was given a state funeral in Red Square in the Soviet Union.

Throughout his life, his work made it so that he was “othered” by many of his fellow Americans. He was on FBI watch lists. Foster himself denigrated the American government.

And yet, his work with labor unions fighting for fairness from their employers is also a deeply American story, one that many people are still living today.

So who was William Z. Foster?

‘American Lenin’ was born in Taunton

Foster was born on Feb. 25, 1881, to James Foster and Elizabeth (McLoughlin) Foster. His father was a Fenian who fled Ireland after a failed uprising, and his mother came from a long line of textile workers from Carlisle, England. His father worked as a hostler, and struggled to keep the family in a permanent residence.

When Foster was born, the Taunton Directory for 1881-82 lists his family’s home as “house rear 50 Weir.”

According to “Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster,” by Edward P. Johanningsmeier, between 1872 and 1887, the family had nine different addresses in Taunton.

Foster would later say that his mother had 23 pregnancies. She had nine living children, four of whom survived to adulthood.

The family attended St. Mary’s Church while living in Taunton.

In “A History of Taunton Massachusetts,” William Hanna writes that Foster lived in Taunton for the first six years of his life, “while his parents tried to escape the grip of abject poverty.”

They moved to Philadelphia in the winter of 1887. Hanna writes, “where the hardship they endured was such that the young boy would pass a lifetime seeking retribution for the wrongs he felt had been done to his father and to all workingmen.”

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William Foster, labor organizer

Johanningsmeier writes in his 1994 biography of Foster, whose career spanned five decades, that he was first inspired to explore socialism by a soapbox speaker he heard while living in Philadelphia.

His father was also very politically active with other American Fenians, and Foster would later say that his father inspired him to become a “rebel” himself.

Their life in Philadelphia during the 1890s was one of extreme poverty. They eked out their meals with help from a nearby soup kitchen and the older children had to find work.

Foster was 10 when he left school and began working in 1891. He was also a member of the Bulldogs, a street gang who “ran” their neighborhood at the time.

According to Johanningsmeier, Foster described “his earliest work experiences in a bitter and angry tone: ‘Men could find no work but there were always places for child slaves,’ he wrote. He remember[ed] that, ‘denied the opportunity for an education and living in a poverty-stricken home, I early felt the iron of the class struggle sink into my heart …. I deeply resented the poverty in which I had to live.’”

By 1901, both of Foster’s parents were dead. He left Philadelphia that same year.

For many years, he was itinerant, moving from place to place and job to job.

And Foster worked many different jobs, including as a dye sinker, a factory worker, in railroad construction, as a longshoreman, a sailor and even a homesteader for a time.

In 1909 he joined the Industrial Workers of the World. He soon made a name for himself as a union organizer and activist.

He was instrumental in organizing a strike in 1917 throughout the meatpacking industry.

During WWI, workers were in a unique position to advocate for better treatment from their employers, given the labor shortage brought about by conscription.

Though ultimately the workers did not get the victory they had fought so hard for, a movement had begun that would not be crushed, with workers in unions all over America advocating for better treatment from their employers.

The result was similar for the massive steel workers strike in 1919.

A crucial error in solidarity had been made during both campaigns: many of the unions who had otherwise banded together to help each other excluded their Black coworkers from their organizing efforts. Women were also discounted. Rather than standing united, these union leaders chose the divisions of racism and misogyny.

Foster would never lead labor demonstrations quite as large as those of 1917 and 1919 again, but his notoriety remained. He exchanged letters with Upton Sinclair. Charlie Chaplin once hosted a party for him in Hollywood.

And Foster was about to begin the work that would define the rest of his life.

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General Secretary of the Communist Party USA and running for President of the United States

It was a 1921 Lenin pamphlet that got Foster interested in Communism. Johanningsmeier writers that this, and the Bolshevik Revolution, inspired him to visit Russia. The Bolshevik leaders already knew of him as a possible U.S. ally.

Upon his return to the U.S., Foster joined the American Communist Party at age 40.

The coming decades saw massive upheavals in leadership as well as the party’s ethos, but Foster managed to maintain a leadership role, and was General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1945 to 1957. In 1957, he became a chairman emeritus, and attended his last U.S. Communist convention.

During the 1920s and 30s, he ran for President of the United States three times: in 1924 (Calvin Coolidge won that year); 1928 (Herbert Hoover); and finally in 1932 against Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would win in a landslide.

Though the votes that Foster received in these elections were miniscule by comparison, they do offer some testament to his ability to reach people. According to his 1961 New York Times obituary, in 1924 he got 33,316 votes. In 1932: 102,881 votes.

During his 1932 campaign, Foster suffered a near-fatal heart attack, as well as a nervous breakdown. His health would never fully recover. From 1932 to 1935, he took a step back from party work at the advice of his doctor. His mental health had deteriorated to the point that he did not even read party news for a time.

His literary output began to increase steadily after 1935 and Johanningsmeier writes that Foster would end his career as the party’s most prolific writer.

Foster given state funeral in Soviet Union

Despite making an international name for himself, William Foster was a private person.

Indeed, for someone who had been arrested various times, was on J. Edgar Hoover’s watchlist, and was even indicted under the Smith Act in 1948 under charges of conspiring against the US government, the details of Foster’s private life are somewhat scant.

He added the “Z” to his name as a means to ensure that his mail would reach him, and wouldn’t go to another William Foster. It’s not even a middle name.

Foster married his wife, Esther Abramowitz, in Chicago in 1918.

He was a quiet man but had a quick temper.

Outside of his immediate family, he had few close friends.

He was on a USSR postage stamp.

His lifestyle was “ascetic in the extreme,” Johanningsmeier writes. He had few personal possessions. In his later years, “he never purchased clothes for himself, and habitually gave away whatever cash he possessed, much to the chagrin of his immediate family.”

When he was in good health, he enjoyed going alone to Yankee games and to the movies.

By 1957, his health was actively failing. In the last years of his life, he suffered from a stroke that limited his speech and mobility, and spent much of his time bedridden.

Foster soon came to the conclusion that he simply could not afford medical care in America. The most money he had ever made was $3,500 a year; by this time, he and Esther were living in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx.

Foster went to court in 1959 to try to get his indictments under the Smith Act lifted (his illness had prevented him from standing trial) so he could go to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. Permission was denied twice, and though his indictment was not lifted, he was finally issued a passport in December 1960.

Foster was on his way to the Soviet Union by January 1961.

He celebrated his 80th birthday there, feted by the Soviets, including Nikita Khrushchev, who visited his bedside.

William Foster died at a sanitarium outside Moscow on Sept. 1, 1961, with Esther by his side.

Foster, who had supported Stalin despite knowing of his murderous and totalitarian regime, had later joined the wider censure of the former Soviet leader, especially after Khrushchev publicly condemned Stalin.

Given his long standing as the Communist leader in America, and the inherent relationship that built for him with the Soviet Union, he was given a state funeral in Red Square at the Lenin Mausoleum. His two leading pallbearers were Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Suslov.

Before the funeral, his body lay in state in the Hall of Columns in Moscow’s Trade Union House, with Khrushchev standing as an honor guard.

William Z. Foster, an American 'un-American'

When Esther brought Foster’s ashes home to America, there was a memorial meeting at Carnegie Hall, with protesters outside with signs like “We Hate Reds” and “One Less Red Pest.”

In his Sept. 2, 1961 Taunton Daily Gazette obituary, he is referred to as “the American Lenin.”

And yet, the struggles of Foster’s early days, and his later advocacy, however “un-American” it became, was deeply rooted in what was an American experience, Johanningsmeier writes.

“His aggressive modernism was not an alien, ‘un-American’ mentality — its seeds were first planted into his consciousness in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, where his family powerlessness gave birth to his peculiar cynicism about working-class culture, tradition, and faith …. His wide and complex experiences as a worker and trade union organizer both contributed to his visceral hate of capitalist society and led him to accept vital aspects of the worldview and methodology of his opponents.”

If there is an American Dream, there has also always been an American Struggle.

Johanningsmeier concludes:

“Part of the irony and tragedy of his life is that he never understood himself as an American in this way, fully a product of the society he so despised.”

Taunton Daily Gazette/Herald News copy editor and digital producer Kristina Fontes can be reached at kfontes@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News and Taunton Daily Gazette today.

This article originally appeared on The Taunton Daily Gazette: Notable Tauntonians: The life of 'American Lenin' William Z Foster