Analyses the career of William Zebulon Foster, a leader of the
American Communist Party, and a three‐time candidate for President of
the United States under that party′s banner. Foster rose from the slums
of Philadelphia to earn the reputation of an accomplished labour
organizer and then to embrace communist ideology. The poverty of his
immigrant parents, and the endless series of dreary jobs he was forced
to enter, beginning at age ten, nurtured his rebellious spirit and
cultivated an antagonism towards capitalism. Emphasizes the evolution of
his ideology from socialism to syndicalism and finally Marxism‐Leninism.
William Foster found his vocation as an organizer of trade unions on
behalf of the Communist movement. He was a prolific propagandist for and
historian of the Party. Never deterred by tortuous twists and turns of
the party line, he followed it faithfully and inflexibly until his death
in Moscow in 1961.