This is the first volume of a staggering six-volume series, especially staggering to any reader who picks them up together. It follows the multivolume selection of Debs correspondence published by the University of Illinois in the 1990s. The next volume of the new series will be “The Rise and Fall of the American Railway Union, 1892–1896.”
We should begin by assessing the ongoing “Debs Revival,” which Debs scholars would not have expected a few years ago. The federal persecution of Eugene Debs accelerated in 1919, a century ago, when the great socialist was sent to federal prison for resisting the demands of mobilization leading to US entry into the First World War. Further, 2020 marks the anniversary of Debs’s final run for president, when a man behind bars earned almost a million votes. But there is more to it: Bernie Sanders’s version of socialism may not be especially close to...
