The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs

U.S. History & Politics

“Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”
--Eugene Debs in 1918

Orator, organizer, self-taught scholar, presidential candidate, and prisoner, Eugene Debs’ lifelong commitment to the fight for a better world is chronicled in this unparalleled biography by historian Ray Ginger. This moving story presents the definitive account of the life and legacy of the most eloquent spokesperson and leader of the U.S. labor and socialist movements.

About the author

Ray Ginger taught history at Harvard University and Brandeis.

Mike Davis is a MacArthur fellow as well as being a social commentator, urban theorist, and sociographer, and is best known for his investigations of class structures in his native Southern California. He is the author of many books including Ecology of Fear and The Monster at Our Door.

Video

Watch amazing footage from 1904, with sound from one of Deb’s many wonderful speeches:

Reviews

“A revelation.”
--Melvyn Dubofsky

“The best biography of Eugene Debs yet published….A valuable contribution to the history of American political and economic radicalism.”
--American Historical Review

“Masterful.”
--Michael Harrington

“The Bending Cross offers us an old-fashioned—and, yes, incorrigibly romantic—ethos for activism; an antidote to jaded postmodernist cynicism, made compelling and coherent by the example of Debs’s own life. It is ironic that the Socialist leader was imprisoned for ‘disloyalty,’ since what most distinguished Debs was his moral steadfastness and unbreakable loyalty to the labor movement.”
--Mike Davis, from the Introduction

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