William Z. Foster

William Z. Foster (February 25, 1881 – September 1, 1961) was an American Communist politician and revolutionary who served as the first Premier of the UASR from 1933 to 1940.

Early years
Born as William Edward Foster in Taunton, Massachusetts on 25 February 1881, the future American Premier was a son of James Foster, an Irish immigrant who fled County Carlow after the failure of Fenian Rising of 1867 in Ireland and Elizabeth McLoughlin, an English Catholic textile worker. William was one of 9 surviving children of his mother who bore 23 babies.

The Foster family moved to the Irish area of Skittereen in Philadelphia in 1887, where his father worked as a stableman and was part of a group of Irish-American Fenians. Foster later wrote that he grew up in a slum where "indolence, ignorance, thuggery, crime, disease, drunkenness and general social degeneration flourished." Foster was forced to leave his school at the age of ten to search for work. Over the next ten years he worked in fertilizer plants in Reading, Pennsylvania and Jacksonville, Florida, as a railroad construction worker and sawmill employee in Florida, as a streetcar motorman in New York City, as a lumber camp and longshoreman in Portland, Oregon and as a sailor. Foster even homesteaded for a year in Oregon in 1905, although he also worked a series of odd jobs as a miner, sheepherder, sawmill worker and railroad employee during that year before abandoning the farm.

After having several menial jobs in Pennsylvania he moved to New York City in 1900.

Trade union work
Foster joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1901. In 1910, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World.