12-01 | Meet the Author – Shawn Gude

Debs—part working-class agitator, part radical prophet—received nearly a million votes when he ran for president from behind bars. 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 an optimistic moderate who urged respectability and compromise. But this was the Gilded 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. It wouldn’t be easy. He would suffer from chronic illness, lose friends, enrage allies, and risk his marriage.

But he would also spark a profound shift in the American consciousness. Today, the ideals he spent his life fighting for are more popular than at any point since his death. Cofounding the Socialist Party of America, Debs would spend the rest of his life striving to convince his countrymen that being an American and a socialist was the most natural thing in the world.

A rousing, poignant, intimately human tale of struggle against the odds, American Socialist is a stunning portrait of one man’s radicalization—and of the country he radicalized in turn. Shawn Gude was an editor at Jacobin for ten years, before writing American Socialist . Born and raised in Des Moines, IA by two union public-school educators, he is the proud product of the state’s public schools, having attended them from kindergarten through college (go Hawks!).

Before becoming a full-time editor and writer, he worked variously as a grocery store stocker, a UPS Store clerk, and a porter at a luxury condo building. Basketball was his first love; he follows the Minnesota Timberwolves religiously. He has lived all over the country as an adult, but mostly in the Midwest (Minneapolis and Chicago).

He and his wife currently live in New York City. Shawn came to write about Eugene Debs because he wanted to tell the oft-forgotten, oft-suppressed story of American socialism. And what better way to bring that rich history to life than a biography of the movement’s most iconic figure during its golden age?

Plus, Debs was a Midwestern-bred Christian socialist, which felt very familiar to him since his parents were progressive Catholics. He worked on American socialism for six years. There were many weeks of research rabbit holes and many months of rewriting.

As he was working on the book, he switched exclusively to reading novels in an attempt to make the prose really sing. The final product is the first mass-market biography of Eugene Debs and a vivid story not only of Debs, but the countless ordinary people he inspired to fight for their freedom. Charlie Wishman, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor-AFL‑CIO, will moderate the discussion.