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 War, he became a labor activist and leader of the failed Amalgamated Textile Workers union following the second Lawrence strike, headed up the radical Brookwood Labor College in the 1920’s and became a leading Trotskyite in the 1930’s. Here is where the Muste story gets particularly juicy and weird. Apparently, in 1936 Muste set sail for Europe to meet with the exiled Russian revolutionary. When he returned, he spoke little of the meeting but was no longer a Trotskyite and instead had returned to Christian pacifism.
Hentoff unfortunately skims over the details of Muste’s labor activism. That’s a great disappointment because while I am familiar with Muste’s pacifist work, I was shocked to find venomous denunciation of “the Musteites” in so many Communist Party-related publication starting around the mid-1920’s while researching Michael J. Obermeier, Foster and others. That’s why this observation from Muste about Foster’s visit to Brookwood in 1923 is so tantalizing and frustrating:
“One of the questions in the minds of all labor activists at that time was whether Bill had joined the Communist Party. He sought to create the impression that he had not. I have carried with me all through the years a vivid recollection of that day nearly forty years ago. I have lived it over again at fairly frequent intervals since. It was a feeling of uneasiness, certainly not of hostility in the personal sense. I felt there was a human being inside him, but that it was under restraint, hidden somewhere. The element of straightforwardness was now lacking. There he was, over there, and here I was. It would remain so.”
William Z. Foster also had an interesting biography. He was a brilliant union organizer and tactician. It is on the one hand incredibly impressive and, on the other, terribly pathetic, that articles and plans that the man wrote in the 1910’s are still directly relevant and prescient today. Foster started out as a syndicalist who was expelled from the Socialist Party during the days of dynamite and gravitated towards the IWW. Sent by the Wobblies to European labor confabs, Foster witnessed firsthand huge and impressive union demonstrations in France and came to appreciate the C.G.T.’s policy of boring from within the traditional craft unions to turn them into revolutionary organizations and returned to the U.S. to advocate that the I.W.W. abandon its “dual unionism” and commit to transforming the American Federation of Labor into a militant and radical movement. His proposal was seriously considered and rejected, and Foster set out on his own.
Foster set out on his own to spearhead two huge organizing campaigns during the Great War under AFL auspices and his own, brilliant “amalgamated” formula (i.e. working through an umbrella organizing committee of the various craft unions). One, the Chicago stockyards, was an unqualified success. The other, the steel industry, was a fiasco of historical proportions. Following the October Revolution, Lenin endorsed Foster’s program of boring from within the conservative craft unions, and the free-thinking boy genius of the labor movement married his fortunes to the new Communist movement. At first, as Muste wrote, Foster kept his affiliation secret. By 1924, he was the presidential candidate of the party’s legal expression, the Workers Party. Shortly thereafter, he became the chairman of the Communist Party USA and pawn and apologist for Stalinism.
It was only years later, near death, that Foster allowed any hint of “human being inside him” to be glimpsed in his delightful memoir, “Pages From a Worker’s Life.” One wonders what would have become of the brilliant tactician if he hadn’t cast his lot in with the Communists. His biography and writings indicate that he was developing a pragmatic syndicalism that I’d like to think would have nudged labor in a more radical and independent direction. But we’ll never know. We can only lament what could have been, if Foster could have been the “human being inside” that summer at Brookwood.