Books, Arts & Manners: A Prudent Dreamer

Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist By Nick Salvatore The University of Illinois, 437 pp., $24.95

How could a young man from Terre Haute, Indiana, who was steeped in the virtues of small-town America and possessed of a conservative political philosophy become a passionate labor leader and the founder—and perennial presidential candidate—of the Socialist Party? This question pervades Professor Salvatore’s ponderous biography of Eugene V. Debs, which explores, in excruciating detail, this pilgrim’s progress from a Midwestern boyhood, where he worked as a paint scraper on the Vandalia Railroad for fifty cents a day, to his dalliance with state politics, and thence to his work as a labor leader and his growing conviction that corporate greed was a crown of thorns for the workingman.

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Alan L. Miller

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Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist By Nick Salvatore The University of Illinois, 437 pp., $24.95

How could a young man from Terre Haute, Indiana, who was steeped in the virtues of small-town America and possessed of a conservative political philosophy become a passionate labor leader and the founder—and perennial presidential candidate—of the Socialist Party? This question pervades Professor Salvatore’s ponderous biography of Eugene V. Debs, which explores, in excruciating detail, this pilgrim’s progress from a Midwestern boyhood, where he worked as a paint scraper on the Vandalia Railroad for fifty cents a day, to his dalliance with state politics, and thence to his work as a labor leader and his growing conviction that corporate greed was a crown of thorns for the workingman.