Posts Tagged ‘Eugene Debs’
Christmas, 1921: Eugene Debs Is Released From Prison And Meets President Warren Harding
By December of 1921, Eugene Debs, prominent American labor leader, dedicated activist and five time Socialist candidate for President of the United States, had been imprisoned since April of 1919. Now he was to be released on Christmas Day of 1921, thanks to President Warren Harding of Marion, Ohio. Harding asked Debs to visit the…
Read MoreThe Books of 1919–And The Life of The Times–In “The Year Our World Began”
1919—just the alliterative sound of it calls to mind the American Century and the birth of the post World War I era. The Treaty of Versailles, Prohibition, the Red Scare, race riots and Woodrow Wilson. Dempsey versus Willard, Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox, Walter Hagen and Babe Ruth. Arthur Fields sang “How Ya Gonna…
Read More1918: Some Books From A Century Ago
1918. On November 11 of this year the First World War finally came to an end. Millions had died in the conflict that began in August of 1914, and large sections of France and Belgium were nothing but wasteland after years of battle. But the end of the conflict was welcome news across the globe.…
Read MoreA Free Soul Bound For Jail: Eugene Debs Speaks in Canton, Ohio–June 16, 1918
June 16, 1918 was a warm summer day in Canton, Ohio. The Socialist Party of Ohio had gathered in the city for its yearly convention. On this day, in Nimisilla Park, the speaker was arguably the best-known Socialist in America: Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana. Debs’ progressive credentials were impeccable. By this time he…
Read MoreA Treasure Trove of History: The Eugene Debs House in Terre Haute, Indiana
Debs. Eugene Debs, the legend…… Debs the labor leader, rallying the boys to the cause, standing by the men of the Great Northern Railway, the men who built the Pullman cars, the miners in the Colorado coalfields, always ready to fight for the American worker. Debs jailed in Woodstock, Illinois in 1894, convicted of impeding…
Read MoreJohn Dos Passos on Eugene Debs: “Lover of Mankind”
The novelist John Dos Passos (1896-1970) gave us one of the great fictional treatments of the United States coming of age during the early twentieth century in his trilogy U.S.A., which consists of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). The trilogy follows a series of characters through the early years…
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