William Z. Foster is best known as the Communist candidate for president of the United States in 1924, 1928, and 1932 and as an unwavering and unapologetic Stalinist whose leadership of the American Communist Party from 1945 until his death in 1961 coincided with the increasing alienation of the Party from the mainstream of American political life. Despite this apparent political failure, Foster made signal contributions to American labor history as a talented and successful union organizer, as a courageous strike leader and strategist, and as a prolific, radical polemicist on behalf of workers' rights, whose effectiveness as a trade-union militant was attributable to his deep roots in radical working-class experience.

William Edward Foster was born to James and Elizabeth McLaughlin Foster on 25 February 1881 in Taunton, Massachusetts, into an impoverished Irish immigrant working-class family. Foster was one of twenty-three children, most of whom died in infancy. In 1888, when Foster was seven years old...