Book Description

The second volume of essays and speeches from an early leader of the labor movement, who “turned a radical creed into a deeply American one” (The New Yorker). Tim Davenport and David Walters have extracted the essential core of Debs’s life work, illustrating his intellectual journey from conservative editor of the magazine of a racially segregated railway brotherhood to his role as the public face and outstanding voice of social revolution in early twentieth-century America. Well over 1,000 Debs documents will be republished as part of this monumental project, the vast majority seeing print again for the first time since the date of their original publication. Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) was a trade unionist, magazine editor, and public orator widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of American socialism. “Tim Davenport and David Walters have given us, as they did with the first volume of the series, a real treasure, and a restoration.” —Paul Buhle, for DSAUSA.org “Gene Debs tirelessly urged the self-organization of working people in the United States as their only sure road to freedom. His role in the formation of the Socialist Party particularly provides lessons for our day.” —Mark Lause, author of The Great Cowboy Strike