This being an election year — and accordingly, utterly infuriating on a daily basis for the MAGA stupidity it embodies — I thought it might be the time at last to pull a long-neglected book down from the shelf and learn about the sort of principled Hoosier who rarely exists any longer: Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, by Marguerite Young.
Eugene Victor Debs (1855 – 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States (Wikipedia).
I’ve never been sure which of Debs’ claims to fame is more impressive: living in Terre Haute, or running for president in 1920 as a socialist while imprisoned in Atlanta for sedition (and receiving one million votes).
The author Young (1908 – 1995) was born in Indianapolis. Young is a rather obscure figure now, but several decades ago she was praised for her poetry and a novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Young also wrote about fellow Hoosier writer James Whitcomb Riley, and afterwards turned to Debs, commencing a biography that remained...Read more
