The tagline “Before Bernie Sanders, before Zohran Mamdani, America’s favorite socialist was Eugene Debs” adorns the back flap of Shawn Gude’s American Socialist. It’s an obvious hook to entice the double-digit percentage of socialist-curious voters turning up in surveys, but it actually sells its subject—who was so much more than a perennial political candidate—short.
Eugene Victor Debs was a man whose devotion to the working class and tireless campaigning inspired millions of American workers to challenge every powerful institution and American myth at the turn of the last century. Since Debs’s 1926 death, those segments of our educational system that are most influenced by corporate dollars and state ideology have worked assiduously to make the nation’s collective memory of his revolutionary threat fade over time.
Their fear has merit. Accidental exposure to even one of Debs’s acts of notoriety is enough to mint new socialists. I became a teenage socialist largely because Debs’s example couldn’t be fully suppressed by 1990s high school textbook editors. In the unit on early trade unions, Debs was introduced as an early proponent of industrial unionism (that is, of one big union of all workers in a certain line of work rather than balkanized crafts). In the unit on third party challenges to the Democrats and Republicans, Debs was acknowledged as a five-time candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket; his six percent of the vote in the “three-way” race of 1912 placed him in fourth. In the unit on World War I, he was highlighted as a free speech martyr, an old man whose life was shortened by a hard prison sentence for encouraging workers to resist military conscription. Then Debs ran again for president from jail, winning a three-and-a-half-percent protest vote in the midst of the first “red scare.”
Debs hasn’t exactly gone ignored by scholars. There have been a dozen credible biographies, as well as memoirs by comrades and family, a biographical novel and a graphic novel, plus a plan by Haymarket Books to publish most of Debs’s correspondence, speeches, and articles in five exhaustive volumes. Since 1982, the most academically rigorous account of Debs’s life, evolving ideology, and continuing influence has been Nick Salvatore’s Citizen and Socialist, but if you asked the average socialist on the internet about where to learn more about the great Socialist Party leader, most recommend Ray Ginger’s The Bending Cross. Published in 1947, The Bending Cross is a hagiography that lacks footnotes (as was the style at the time) but is nevertheless beloved by generations of labor partisans because it tells an engaging story free of academic jargon.
Gude’s American Socialist will likely replace Bending Cross as the sentimentalists’ favorite. His prose occasionally tends toward the purple, but the book is largely a project of translation, helping contemporary readers to understand the context that made Debs’s popularity possible. Gude patiently explicates the bygone society of more than a century ago—one in which corporate consolidation, the two-party system, the police state, and US imperialism and rapid technological advancement were new, felt beatable (or at least tameable) and molded the ambitions and naivety of the nascent socialist movement.
Gude portrays Debs as a product of those changing times. Beginning his career in the 1880s, Debs, as a railroad brotherhood union leader, eschewed strikes, believing that craft skill and sobriety could be the basis for labor-management partnership. When workers were forced to strike over wage cuts, Debs’s experience with court injunctions, the national guard, and private armies of Pinkertons (plus his own six-month jail term) radicalized him. Early experiments with building new model socialist communities (sort of the hippie communes of their day) led to his conclusion that capitalism couldn’t be boycotted. Debs helped build the new Socialist Party that aimed to replace one of the two capitalist parties as a step toward capturing national political power and nationalizing major industries.
Debs spent hundreds of nights a year for nearly two decades delivering hours-long barn-burner speeches about the evils of capitalism and the great hope of socialism—helping the Socialists grow to more than 120,000 dues-paying members. Debs had little interest in answering critics who asked for detailed formulas of how a socialist society would operate and became less and less invested in espousing the kinds of common sense reforms (like clean water sewage systems and regulated utilities) that were hallmarks of the Socialists elected as mayors and city council majorities in cities such as Milwaukee.
Debs’s “genius,” writes Gude, “was assembling a mix of ideological ingredients familiar in working-class circles—Christianity and labor republicanism, Marxism and the American revolutionary tradition—and alchemizing them into pure gold.”
Gude pays special attention to Debs’s approach to Black civil rights, which was simultaneously progressive for a white man of his era (arguing for the strategic necessity of equal rights and inclusion in the Socialist movement) and class reductionist. Gude argues that Debs’s rhetoric evolved after the 1903 publication of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Three of American Socialist’s 21 chronological chapters are devoted to Debs’s increasingly strenuous advocacy for Black civil rights and integration. Heretofore, Debs’s most famous statement on race was “We [the Socialists] have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races,” and most historians have pointed to the statement as evidence that Debs was the kind of white ally who would perpetually defer confronting white supremacy until “after the revolution.”
Gude aims to change that narrative. He marshals an impressive amount of correspondence and oral histories to prove that anti-racism was one of Debs’s major concerns (particularly as he got older). Nevertheless, the fact that the issue did not impress his many listeners and readers as one of Debs’s major causes, and that his advocacy on behalf of Black civil rights was largely forgotten as soon as he died, continues to speak loudly about the priorities of Debs and the early Socialists.
Gude pays more attention to Debs’s character flaws—his earlier penchant for “darky jokes,” later alcoholism and marital infidelity, distaste for the details of policy and internal politics—than any previous biographer. This choice seems pitched to movement activists of today, since who dares emulate a saint? Any flawed human with good intentions can become a socialist.
The rise of Democratic Socialists of America makes Gude’s book a well-timed addition to that movement’s growing bookshelf of the ABCs of socialism. Having arrived in bookstores a few weeks before voters have the chance to elect the largest-ever contingent of avowed socialists to the House of Representatives, American Socialist has the distinction of being the first Debs biography to be published while socialism is a growing movement, with no obvious limit to its potential growth.
I want to live in a world where American Socialist becomes a widely read classic. For now I strongly recommend it to neophyte socialists, the politically curious, undergraduates, and precocious teenagers. Movement leaders, who are trying to forge a mainstream American socialism, will still need to read beyond American Socialist; to Salvatore, and to writers like Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, and Gary Marks, who previously grappled with the age-old question of why—thus far—socialism “didn’t happen here.”
[The article originally appeared at Drafting The Past.]