3ĭebs was a fervent believer in grassroots democracy and was opposed to authoritarianism and the cult of personality. There is an important lesson to be learned from that erasure. While he has been dead for almost a hundred years, his life, work, and ideology remain enough of a threat to the corporate world that he has been virtually wiped out of our historical consciousness. He was a presidential candidate who received millions of votes and whose platform greatly influenced the New Deal, and a man of great courage who spoke out against US participation in World War I-which resulted in his being sent to prison for three years. 2ĭebs was a trade unionist who played a crucial role in laying the groundwork for the rise of industrial trade unionism in America and the eventual development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. I was motivated to do the video because it was distressing to me how few Americans were familiar with Debs. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings later released the soundtrack as a record. The video was sold to colleges and high schools. I was so impressed by Debs, his extraordinary life and work, that I created a short documentary about him in the 1970s, when I ran a small nonprofit media company.
Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. From the book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, by Senator Bernie Sanders, with John Nichols.