In 1932, William Z Foster, the Communist candidate for President, published Toward A Soviet America, perhaps the least welcoming campaign book in the history of that genre.  Once a brilliant labor organizer, Foster now seemed intent on shocking voters into immediately ditching all their “bourgeois” ideas and traditions.  he mocked religion as a “monstrous system of dupery” clung to by “superstitious dolts”‘; vowed that Communism would “liquidate” all other political parties and anyone who engaged in a “socially useless” occupation such as law or advertising, and promised that a workers’ state would nationalize the press and radio and transform them into “institutions of real education”.  With such talk, it’s no wonder Foster’s comrades had trouble winning votes among the uninitiated.  As one Chicago militant put it, “w had not only to teach the principles of Communism, but we had to create a dictionary.  The workers did not know what we were talking about.”

— American Dreamers
Michael Kazin
2011
p 165

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