Eugene V. Debs Reader

Overview

Eugene Debs, one of the most radical labor leaders of the early 20th-century United States, was also an important figure in the American political landscape, running as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party five times and obtaining nearly a million votes in 1912 and 1920. This collection gathers some of Debs’s most representative writings and speeches, pieces in which he rails against the injustices of capitalism while arguing for a socialist system based on political and industrial democracy. The treatises see Debs defend workers and trade unions that are being assaulted by employers while advocating the formation of industrial unions and rejecting craft unions that only include skilled workers; come out against white hostility toward blacks, arguing that class, and not skin color, is of primary concern; and advocate for a broad and tolerant socialism that is open to debate. As revealing as they are about Debs’s political and social thought, these writings also paint a broader canvas of his life, demonstrating his conversion to socialism.

Author Biography

William A. Pelz is an academic historian and a specialist in European and comparative labor history. He is the author of, among others, Against Capitalism: The European Left on the March, and Karl Marx: A World to Win. His articles and reviews have appeared in various journals, including the American Historical Review, Film & History, the International Review of Social History, and the Journal of European Studies. He lives in Chicago. Mark A. Lause is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of the Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians, Price’s Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri, Race & Radicalism in the Union Army, and A Secret Society History of the Civil War. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Howard Zinn was a regular contributor to Progressive magazine and the author of many books, including the bestseller A People’s History of the United States.