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.
...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.
