...an important corrective, illuminating the forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, and the exceptional efforts of his opponents to crush him and his movement. Along the way, the book reveals a deeper truth: that in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism ... Gude grapples throughout his book with this contradiction in Debs, the grandiose visionary and the man who craved constant affirmation, and whose heavy drinking at times meant that he needed a junior party member to get him to the stage on time ... Perhaps the story of Eugene Debs, told as meticulously as this, shows us that reinvention will not come from a single leader, no matter how inspiring, but from the collective resistance, and joyful community, of ordinary people.
Shawn Gude aims to write him back into the nation’s history with his first book, a warm caress from an unabashed admirer ... Even so, this book—the first comprehensive Debs biography since Nick Salvatore’s Bancroft Prize-winning classic of 1982—is competently researched, colorful and occasionally moving ... Mr. Gude presents Eugene Debs as a man not without failings but ultimately heroic. In some respects, that’s fair. Debs was steadfast in support of women’s rights and racial equality ... It has been a century since Debs’s death in 1926. Will today’s boomlet of socialist euphoria resurrect him from obscurity? Mr. Gude’s book is a step in that direction. More likely, relative oblivion will remain his lot, as his wife once forced him to contemplate.
This charmingly penned and prodigiously researched study both refreshes familiar stories and prods readers to reconsider common assumptions ... The story of Debs’s first incarceration and radicalization is familiar to readers on the Left, but Gude delivers it with both rigor and style ... A page-turning delight, American Socialist is an engaging and valuable tool for anyone who seeks to win a world where that kind of freedom reigns supreme.
... an elegantly written portrait of the ever-evolving Eugene Debs ... Debs was released from prison with weakened health to lead a diminished socialist movement—neither he nor his party ever recovered, and when Debs died in 1926, the Socialist Party was a skeleton of its pre-war self. Yet in Gude’s telling, Debs’s spirit, like Bruce Springsteen’s 'Ghost of Tom Joad,' has remained alive to counsel those who seek it. His spirit was alive in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, A. Philip Randolph’s civil rights advocacy, and Martin Luther King Jr’s public pressure campaign against the Vietnam War. Today, as a new generation of democratic socialists seek Debs, American Socialist is the book that will speak back to them.
...a magnificent biography ... Gude avoids hagiography—he points to flaws in Debs’s tactics and personal relationships—but he does explore how Debs’s supporters saw him as Christ-like in his ability to connect with people ('I had not had so much kindness shown me by the whole world altogether,' remarked a fellow prisoner). It’s a striking portrait of a remarkable political evolution.
