Tim Davenport and David Walters have extracted the essential core of Debs’s life work, illustrating his intellectual journey from conservative editor of the magazine of a racially segregated railway brotherhood to his role as the public face and outstanding voice of social revolution in early twentieth-century America. Well over 1,000 Debs documents will be republished as part of this monumental project, the vast majority seeing print again for the first time since the date of their original publication.
Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) was a trade unionist, magazine editor, and public orator widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of American socialism.
Tim Davenport (b. 1961) is an independent scholar from Corvallis, Oregon. He holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from Oregon State University. He has been a very active content-writer for Wikipedia since 2008, concentrating on early 20th century political biography and the history of political organizations. He is the creator of the Early American Marxism website (marxisthistory.org) and a long-time volunteer with Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) and regularly contributes scans of rare material to the Internet Archive (archive.org).
He has co-edited The "American Exceptionalism" of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940 with Paul LeBlanc [Haymarket, 2018] and The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs with David Walters [in six volumes, Haymarket, 2019–].
Davenport is a member of the Organization of American Historians, Historians of American Communism, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Labor and Working Class History Association. He is also an active collector of political books and pamphlets.
David Walters lives in Pacifica, California, originally hails from New York City. Having been formally a member of several socialist organizations since High School in 1972, David was active in the labor movement and is now a retired member of IBEW 1245. He now dedicates himself toward the building of the Marxists Internet Archive which he helped found in the mid-1990s. Additionally he is the Director of the San Francisco based Holt Labor Library, a brick-and-mortar library for papers, documents and journals of the labor and revolutionary left.
Publication date: May 19, 2020
"Tim Davenport and David Walters have given us, as they did with the first volume of the series, a real treasure, and a restoration." —Paul Buhle, for DSAUSA.org
"Gene Debs tirelessly urged the self-organization of working people in the United States as their only sure road to freedom. His role in the formation of the Socialist Party particularly provides lessons for our day." —Mark Lause
