An extensive compilation of articles, speeches, press statements, and open letters by American socialist Eugene V. Debs, this book is the first in a five volume series that assembles much of Debs's work for the first time in a single place. The collection makes readily accessible approximately 150 documents by one of the pivotal figures in the labor movement. Illuminating nineteenth century working-class history, particularly the complex and shifting situation in the transportation industry, this volume provides a basis for deeper understanding of Debs and his role later during the glory days of the Socialist Party of America.

Traces the life of the controversial American socialist and social reformer and assesses his role in American history.

In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s role in World War I. Though many called Debs a traitor, others praised him as a prisoner of conscience, a martyr to the cause of free speech. Nearly a million Americans agreed, voting for a man whom the government had branded an enemy to his country. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Ernest Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. Debs was one of thousands of Americans arrested for speaking his mind during the war, while government censors were silencing dozens of newspapers and magazines. When peace was restored, however, a nationwide protest was unleashed against the government’s repression, demanding amnesty for Debs and his fellow political prisoners. Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime. The Debs case illuminates our own struggle to define the boundaries of permissible dissent as we continue to balance the right of free speech with the demands of national security. In this memorable story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America’s most prized ideals.

A collection of speeches, pamphlets and writings from Eugene V Debs, from 1888 to 1925. Beginning his career as an organizer for the American Railway Union, Debs ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket five times, polling up to 6 percent of the total vote in 1912. Jailed in 1919 for an antiwar speech in Ohio, Debs ran for President from his jail cell in 1920, polling almost a million votes, 3.4 percent of the total votes cast.

The second volume of essays and speeches from an early leader of the labor movement, who “turned a radical creed into a deeply American one” (The New Yorker). Tim Davenport and David Walters have extracted the essential core of Debs’s life work, illustrating his intellectual journey from conservative editor of the magazine of a racially segregated railway brotherhood to his role as the public face and outstanding voice of social revolution in early twentieth-century America. Well over 1,000 Debs documents will be republished as part of this monumental project, the vast majority seeing print again for the first time since the date of their original publication. Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) was a trade unionist, magazine editor, and public orator widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of American socialism. “Tim Davenport and David Walters have given us, as they did with the first volume of the series, a real treasure, and a restoration.” —Paul Buhle, for DSAUSA.org “Gene Debs tirelessly urged the self-organization of working people in the United States as their only sure road to freedom. His role in the formation of the Socialist Party particularly provides lessons for our day.” —Mark Lause, author of The Great Cowboy Strike

The classic biography of Debs, one of the most important thinkers and activists in US.

First published in 1952, this work has taken its place as the standard history of the Socialist Party to 1912. The American Socialist Party, at the height of its power, had more than a hundred and fifty thousand members, published hundreds of newspapers, won almost a million votes for its presidential candidate, elected more than one thousand of its members to political office, secured passage of a considerable body of legislation, won the support of one-third of the American Federation of Labor, and was instrumental in organizing the Industrial Workers of the World. It counted in its ranks some of the most talented organizers, able thinkers, and colorful personalities of their generation, conducted an immense propaganda effort, and, for a time, multiplied its support and influence at an astounding pace. The rise and decline of the Socialist Party constitutes a most important and instructive chapter in American history. Few books have more to offer to the student of the movement than this one.

Eugene Debs, labor organizer and leader of the Socialist Party, describes his experience at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was imprisoned at the age of 63 for 32 months for criticizing the government's jailing of Americans who opposed World War I.