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The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs
By Ray Ginger Eugene V. Debs was a labor activist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who captured the heart and soul of the nation’s working people. He was brilliant, sincere, compassionate and scrupulously honest. A founder of one of the nation’s first industrial unions, the American Railway Union, he went on to help launch the Industrial Workers of the World -- the Wobblies. A man of firm beliefs and dedication, he ran for President of the United States five times under the banner of the Socialist Party, in 1912 earning 6 percent of the popular vote. Many union activists and labor scholars see Debs as the definitive labor leader. He carried labor’s message of solidarity and its agenda of social and political reform into the broader community and educated the nation about some of its worst failings. This book is hands-down the best, most readable biography ever of a great man and great leader, the most eloquent spokesperson and leader ever of the U.S. labor and socialist movements. The Bending Cross had been out of print but has been reissued, with a new introduction by Mike Davis, a widely published historian and social commentator, a distinguished professor of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review. "The best biography of Eugene Debs yet published...A valuable contribution to the history of American political and economic radicalism."
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
"Masterful."
MICHAEL HARRINGTON, AUTHOR, THE OTHER AMERICA 516 pages paperback
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