Eugene Debs

[awecelot]

Check out this passage from "Endangered Dreams" by Kevin Starr, which implies that Debs was "ruined" by "booze."

Endangered Dreams: The Great ... - Google Book Search

[j_k_k]

Originally Posted by awecelot

Check out this passage from "Endangered Dreams" by Kevin Starr, which implies that Debs was "ruined" by "booze."

Endangered Dreams: The Great ... - Google Book Search

I was pretty sure Sinclair had leveled the charge at Debs (a political kindred spirit), which is one reason I gained determination to see if I could reach an informed conclusion.

[DC at the Ridge]

jkk, thanks for the update. While Sinclair may have included Debs in his list of people "ruined by booze", Sinclair's bias against any drinking still gives a lot of hedge room. I think you will have to find more conclusive information to make any real determination. But I do appreciate you coming back to this thread with information as you find it.

[j_k_k]

Originally Posted by DC at the Ridge

jkk, thanks for the update. While Sinclair may have included Debs in his list of people "ruined by booze", Sinclair's bias against any drinking still gives a lot of hedge room. I think you will have to find more conclusive information to make any real determination. But I do appreciate you coming back to this thread with information as you find it.

I agree with you about the jury still being out. The issue of Sinclair's documented hostility to alcohol doesn't really balance the scales with his political sympathy to Debs; it simply leaves each side of the scale with an ungainly weight, without balancing them. At this point for me the absences remain:

1) Except for specific incidents or anecdotes thereof, we don't actually get an opinion from Ginger on how often Debs imbibed. While the method of description implies that it was infrequent, Ginger never comes out and takes a position on this.

2) While Ginger was a professional historian and I don't believe Sinclair was, the whole CPUSA thing is sufficient, for me, to doubt his account to a degree. It is one thing when bias is included in Fox News (or Revolutionary Worker) style, where it's so meatheadedly obvious one wonders why they bother pretending it's news. It's another when a disciplined, capable historian displays it, because that person is used to searching for bias and knows how to put on a good show.

I'm not calling Ginger a liar or a willful omitter (in an historian, far as I'm concerned, the same thing), but I would feel quite a bit more confident in his words if someone with less natural political sympathy for Debs were saying them as well.

You mentioned earlier that you'd done a bit of reading on this yourself. What do you believe is the most balanced bio of Debs, or perhaps the best-done antagonistic bio?

[DC at the Ridge]

My interest in that time period was more about the social movements. The Agrarian movement, the Socialists and Communists, the Progressives, and so on. Since I lived in Northwest Arkansas, I first became interested in Coin Harvey, and my research grew from there. I used Ginger's book as the basis for a high school report on Debs, and supplemented it with information from Wilson biographies, and some of the books on early labor activists like Mother Jones. I have heard that the biography by Nick Salvatore is good, though I haven't read it personally. There are two books I do like--the Goldberg book on Grassroots Resistance, and the Chase book on the 1912 election. Debs is a topic in both, but not the sole topic.