Debsian socialism

In the interest of seeing whether it would be worth doing another graphic novel book club to follow up on the success (not mine) of the Red Rosa event in January, I borrowed Paul M. Buhle et al's Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography, published by Verso earlier this year. 

 

One cool thing about this book is that it's a joint publication between Verso Books and the DSA Fund, a little 501(c)(3) subsidiary of the national org that's dedicated to political education. So that's pretty cool, if you're a DSA member heavily involved in political education projects, such as me. 

 

Overall, I quite liked the book -- Eugene Debs is a giant of American history, and if you don't know much about his life, which I didn't, this book will fix that pretty quick. He seems to have had a pretty exciting time of it; there's lots of strikes, moving speeches, going to prison, running for president, and generally causing trouble with the IWW. Lots of interesting historical characters pop up, including some memorable cameos by Big Bill Haywood, who is always a fun time. Debs' career is put in context of the rise and fall of the socialist party; of the interactions between the socialist movement and other reform movements; and of the disastrous effect of World War One on... well, everything. 

 

The book is split into several parts, each prefaced by a short essay that sets it in context. This is a bit disruptive to the graphic novel format, but basically fine. Somewhat more disruptive is that the graphic novel itself is a little more disjointed and hard to follow than Red Rosa; they are both trying to pack a lot of life into a very short piece, but the Luxemburg one doesn't assume any prior understanding of the characters and issues involved. The Debs one is pitched for an American audience and about American history, but I think they might have overestimated how much Americans are likely to recognize literally anybody at all, up to and including U.S. presidents. 

 

I think a little more time to actually explain stuff and smooth out the transitions might have been freed up if the book had severely condensed or even nixed the final section on the Debs' legacy, which starts off fine with a mini-bio of the career of Norman Thomas, but then goes on to also discuss the career of Michael Harrington, which seems a bit self-indulgent; then of Bernie Sanders, which I'm pretty sure most of the readers remember pretty clearly but which I guess might be interesting in 20 years; and then the rise of the "new" DSA. Which... I mean, I know we paid for it, but do we have to make it so obvious that we paid for it? Can't we pay for a thing just because it's educational and cool without using it to advertise ourselves? We're a socialist group; do we really have to do content marketing? Can we not have the damn humility to just say we're striving to follow in the tradition of Debs without painting ourselves as part of an unbroken and direct line of successors that are mysteriously the only folks on that family tree?

 

Anyways, apart from the self-indulgent note it ends on, it's a readable little primer on American socialist history, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone whose knowledge of U.S. socialist history is very limited, which, the U.S. being what it is, is probably most of us. There's some important lessons on what made Debs such an effective figure, and it has its share of charming moments.