The Human Being Inside Bill Foster
Still poring through Si Gerson’s books, I’m having fun playing labor historian, although I’m not sure who’s benefiting (a young comrade in another forum complained, “this post seems like a big name drop…I don’t really need to read the words of dead men to know how I think society ought to be structured.”). I came across a fascinating observation about William Z. Foster in Nat Hentoff’s lamentably brief biography of A.J. Muste. Muste is best known as a pacifist, a leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League, who mentored Bayard Rustin, David McReynolds and scores of other activists committed to nonviolent resistance and was a leading light of the opposition to nuclear armaments and the early stages of the Vietnam War (he died in 1967). He had quite the interesting biography before all that. A protestant minister who quit his congregation to resist the first World […]