‘Cemeteries of the Living Dead’ 1 : Eugene V. Debs, Prison Abolitionist

Eugene V. Debs, five-times Socialist Party candidate for US president, internationally known labour union leader, advocate for prison abolition and reform, women’s suffragist and all-around radical is considered as influential a thinker as W.E.B. DuBois, as much an activist as Mother Jones and as charismatic a speaker as Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. His influence cannot be understated, yet his legacy is largely forgotten in the US. This chapter explores Debs’ contributions to American radicalism with a particular emphasis on prison reform. It interrogates the reasons behind his invisibility relative to his significance, arguing that the American popular imagination fails to embrace a structural, economically driven understanding of US history, given the predominance of the capitalist paradigm. As difficult as it is to confront racism in the US, it is even more difficult for Americans to reconcile the country’s economic inconsistencies. The ‘American Dream’ suggests that the US offers its citizens economic mobility, yet the existence of its permanent underclass reveals hard-and-fast, structurally based inequality. Debs’ prison writings highlight the confluence of racial and class-based structural inequality and provide a little-known window into 19th and early 20th-century radicalism more akin to that of Angela Davis over a century later.