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Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
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Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs description
Don't pick up this fascinating, deeply eccentric book expecting to find a conventional biography of Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926). The fiery American labor leader who founded the Socialist Party of America is not so much the subject as the central figure in a group portrait of utopian dreamers--including Karl Marx, Brigham Young, abolitionist Wendell Phillips, poet James Whitcomb Riley, and detective-agency founder Allan Pinkerton--from the time of the French Revolution through the dawn of the 20th century. Author Marguerite Young is a legendary Greenwich Village bohemian who died in 1995. She devoted the last 25 years of her life to this volume, which was intended as a recapitulation of the issues that had engaged Debs--justice for workers, peace for everyone, racial equality--and continued to galvanize America in the 1960s and beyond. Young doesn't provide a lot of straight factual information about Debs's life, but takes instead a snapshot of his soul as it was formed by reading and experience. The narrative closes (sort of) with the national railroad strike of 1877, a bitter defeat for labor that turned railroad worker and union activist Debs toward greater radicalism. Though not a work for the traditionally minded, Young's genre-bending book will thrill students of American social and socialist history. --Wendy Smith |
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Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Poetic
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I actually liked this book; this is apparently a minority view. I too was expecting a biography of Debs and got a more general history of 19th Century America and the Labor Movement (among many other things).
However, once I made the commitment to read it (I had just started a job with quite a bit of down time), I loved it. It was obviously the product of an enormous amount of work, both research and writing. It reads like a long love poem to the people and organizations who struggled to give us what we now consider an entitlement - weekends off, the minimum wage, basic safety and health regulations on the job, etc.
It also gave me a good introduction, which I found fascinating, to the various communes, cults and socio/religious/political movements that sprung up like weeds in the 19th Century.
This is a heartfelt tribute to a bygone era well worth reading.
However, if you want a biography of Debs, read something else after you read "Harp Song." |
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