Size: 366.4 MB | Language: English | Uploaded by: anonymous | Seeders: 40 | Leechers: 42
Even opponents would describe Debs as Christlike. Born in Indiana in 1855, he’d dropped out of school at fourteen to work on the railroad. He’d seemed a rising star in the Democratic Party: an optimistic moderate who urged respectability and compromise. But this was the Gilded Age: an era of corporate tycoons and outrageous sums of money in politics, of grueling hours and few (if any) rights for workers. And when, in 1894, the president sent thousands of troops to break a railroad strike Debs had helped organize, he was radicalized. He emerged from a six-month prison sentence as a crusader, a stirring orator who would soon see all forms of unaccountable power—rich over poor, men over women, white over Black, colonizer over colonized—as poisonous to human freedom.