Volume 4: Red Union, Red Paper, Red Train, 1905–1910 gathers for the first time approximately 180 articles, speeches, letters, and interviews from the prime years of American socialist and labor leader Eugene V. Debs. These include materials relating to some of the great events for which the Indiana orator is best remembered: the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (the red union), his move from freelance oratory to employment on the staff of the mass circulation Appeal to Reason (the red paper), and his coast-to-coast 1908 campaign for president of the United States aboard the legendary Socialist Red Special (the red train).
These were years of bitter struggle between concentrated capital and the fragmented and exploited labor movement. The period was marked by the illegal arrest and secretive extradition of Western Federation of Miners officials Charles H. Moyer and William D. Haywood in 1906 and the sensational legal proceedings which followed—activity which garnered Debs’ full commitment for more than a year.
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: December 16, 2025
“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
