About William Z. Foster
William Z. Foster (born William Edward Foster; February 25, 1881 – September 1, 1961) was a radical American labor organizer and Communist politician, whose career included serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1945 to 1957. He was previously a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, leading the drive to organize packinghouse industry workers during World War I and the steel strike of 1919. == Early life == He was born William Edward Foster in Taunton, Massachusetts, on February 24, 1881, the son of a Fenian, James Foster, who had fled County Carlow after the failure of the revolutionary Fenian Rising in Ireland and the waves of arrests that drove hundreds of others out of the country. His mother, Elizabeth McLoughlin, was an English Catholic textile worker. His mother had nine surviving children of 23 babies she bore. His family moved to the Irish area of Skittereen within the Moyamensing neighborhood of South Philadelphia, where his father worked as a stableman and was part of a group of Irish-American Fenians. Foster left school at the age of ten to apprentice himself to a dye sinker. Foster left that position three years later to work at a type foundry and then in a white lead factory. Over the next ten years he worked in fertilizer plants in Reading, Pennsylvania, and Jacksonville, Florida; as a railroad construction worker and lumberman in Florida; as a streetcar motorman in New York City; as a lumberman and longshoreman in Portland, Oregon; and as a sailor. He also homesteaded in Oregon from 1904 to 1907, working various odd jobs as a miner, sheepherder, sawmill worker, and railroad employee during that time.
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