American Socialist - Shawn Gude

The first popular biography of Eugene Debs, the railroad worker turned radical visionary whose leadership helped elect more than a thousand Socialists across the country during the Progressive Era and inspired generations of Americans to fight back against the power of the rich over our politics and our lives.Before Bernie Sanders, before Zohran Mamdani, Americas favorite socialist was Eugene Debs. There was a time, a little more than 100 years ago, when some 1,200 Socialists held elected office across the United States. Wisconsin had a Socialist congressman in Washington. Ministers in Oklahoma preached the gospel of Christian socialism at revival-style gatherings come summertime. And Eugene V. Debspart working-class agitator, part radical prophetreceived nearly a million votes when he ran for president from behind bars. Even opponents would describe Debs as Christlike. Born in Indiana in 1855, hed dropped out of school at fourteen to work on the railroad. Hed seemed a rising star in the Democratic Party: an optimistic moderate who urged respectability and compromise. But this was the Gilded Age: an era of corporate tycoons and outrageous sums of money in politics, of grueling hours and few (if any) rights for workers. And when, in 1894, the president sent thousands of troops to break a railroad strike Debs had helped organize, he was radicalized. He emerged from a six-month prison sentence as a crusader, a stirring orator who would soon see all forms of unaccountable powerri
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