13:
Eugene V. Debs, five-times Socialist Party candidate for US president, internationally known labour union leader, advocate for prison abolition and reform, women’s suffragist and all-around radical is considered as influential a thinker as W.E.B. DuBois, as much an activist as Mother Jones and as charismatic a speaker as Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. His influence cannot be understated, yet his legacy is largely forgotten in the US. This chapter explores Debs’ contributions to American radicalism with a particular emphasis on prison reform. It interrogates the reasons behind his invisibility relative to his significance, arguing that the American popular imagination fails to embrace a structural, economically driven understanding of US history, given the predominance of the capitalist paradigm. As difficult as it is to confront racism in the US, it is even more difficult for Americans to reconcile the country’s economic inconsistencies. The ‘American Dream’ suggests that the US offers its citizens economic mobility, yet the existence of its permanent underclass reveals hard-and-fast, structurally based inequality. Debs’ prison writings highlight the confluence of racial and class-based structural inequality and provide a little-known window into 19th and early 20th-century radicalism more akin to that of Angela Davis over a century later.
-
Alexander, M. (2020) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, New York: New Press.
-
Baptist, E. (2014) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, New York: Basic Books.
-
Barnes, H. (1921) ‘The Historical Origin of the Prison System in America’, Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, 12(1): 35–60.
-
Barnes, H. (1927) The Evolution of Penology in Pennsylvania, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrell.
-
Barrett, J. (2012) The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City, New York: Penguin.
-
Barrett, J. and Roediger, D. (2005) ‘The Irish and the Americanization of the new immigrants in the streets and in the church of the urban United States, 1900–1930’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 24(4): 3–33.
-
Beckert, S. and Rothman, S. (eds) (2016) Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
-
Bell, S. (2008) Crime and Circumstance: Investigating the History of Forensic Science, Westport, CT: Praeger.
-
Cole, P. (2021) ‘Prisoner No. 9653: Eugene Debs on capitalism, incarceration, and solidarity’, North Meridian Review, 2(1): 64–81.
-
Currarino, R. (2010) The Labor Question in America: Economic Development in American during the Gilded Age, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
-
Davis, A. (2003) Are Prisons Obsolete?, New York: Seven Stories Press.
-
Davis, A. (2005) Abolition and Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, New York: Seven Stories Press.
-
Debs, E.V. (1908) Debs: His Life, Writings, and Speeches, Chicago: Kerr.
-
Debs, E.V. (1927) Walls and Bars, Chicago: Socialist Party.
-
Dikotte, F. (1998) ‘Race culture: recent perspectives on the history of eugenics’, American Historical Review, 103(2): 467–478.
-
Dix, D. and Lightner, D. (1999) Asylum, Prison, and Poorhouse: The Writings and Reform Work of Dorothea Dix in Illinois, Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press.
-
Frankel, N. and Dye, N. (eds) (1991) Gender, Race, Class, and Reform in the Progressive Era, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
-
Freeberg, E. (2008) Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, The Great War, and the Right to Dissent, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
-
Ginger, R. (1949) The Bending Cross, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
-
Glickman, L. (1997) A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
-
Harvel, T. and Wright, P. (2011) Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration, New York: New Press.
-
Jenkins, W. (2003) ‘Patrolmen and Peelers, immigration, urban culture and the Irish police in Canada and the United States’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 28–29: 10–29.
-
Johnson, P. (2010) Making the Market: Victorian Origins of Corporate Capitalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Jones, W. (2008) ‘“Nothing special to offer the negro”: revisiting the Debsian view of the Negro Question’, International Labor and Working Class History, 74(1): 212–224.
-
Lindsey, A. (1942) The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-
Maddox, L. (2005) Citizen Indian: Native American Intellectuals, Race and Reform, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
-
Madison, J. (2006) The Indiana Way: A State History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
-
McCormick, M. (2005) Terre Haute: Queen City of the Wabash, Charleston, SC: Arcadi.
-
Miller, B. (2023) ‘The failed fight for workers’ rights: Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union in the Pullman strike of 1894’, The Alexandrian, XII(1).
-
Monkkonen, E. (1981) ‘A disorderly people? Urban order in the 19th and 20th century’, Journal of American History, 68(3): 539–559.
-
Mottier, V. (2010) ‘Eugenics and the state: policy making in comparative perspective’, in A. Bashford and P. Levine (eds) Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 134–153.
-
Muhammad, K. (2010) The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
-
Papke, D. (1999) The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
-
Ross, J. (2015) The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
-
Rothman, D. (1995) ‘Perfecting the prison, United States, 1789–1865’, in N. Thomas and D. Rothman (eds) The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, New York: Oxford University Press, pp 100–116.
-
Rothman, D. (2002) The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, London: Routledge.
-
Rubin, A. (2021) The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America’s Modern Penal System, 1829–1913, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
-
Salvatore, N. (1982) Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
-
Schnierov, R., Stromquist, S. and Salvatore, N. (eds) (1990) The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
-
Sklar, M. (1988) The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Smith, P. (2020) ‘Solitary confinement: effects and practices from the nineteenth century until today’, in J. Lobel and P. Smith (eds) Solitary Confinement: Effects, Practices, and Pathways toward Reform, New York: Oxford University Press, pp 21–42.
-
Southern, D. (2005) The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900–1917, New York: Wiley.
-
Struthers, D., Zimmerman, K. and Cole, P. (eds) (2017) Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the Industrial Workers of the World, London: Pluto Press.
-
Sullivan, L. (1990) The Prison Reform Movement: Forlorn Hope ,New York: Twayne.
-
Tussey, J. (ed.) (1970) Eugene V. Debs Speaks, New York: Pathfinder.
-
VanWienen, M. (2012) American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W.E.B. DuBois, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
-
Varg, P. (1948) ‘The political ideas of the American Railway Union’, The Historian, 10(2): 85–100.
-
White, R. (2011) Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America ,New York: W.W. Norton.
-
Wilson, J., Marable, M. and Ness, I. (eds) (2006) Race and Labor Matters in the New US Economy, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
| May 2022 onwards | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 19167 | 19167 | 187 |
| Full Text Views | 6 | 6 | 1 |
| PDF Downloads | 3 | 3 | 3 |
Institutional librarians can find more information about free trials here
We are a leading social science publisher
committed to making a difference.
Bristol University Press and
Policy Press
bristoluniversitypress.co.uk