“Debs offers an American legend as big and meaningful as that of Johnny Apple-seed (aka John Chapman) or Martin Luther King, Jr., two real life figures different in so many ways, but both of them firm believers in non-violence and the hopes for a finer outcome to the national saga. They were both martyrs, John Chapman isolated and destitute (if by choice) in an 1840s America full of raging violence and visions of reform, King felled by a racist assassin amid the radicalized 1960s.
If we were to look at Debs in this way, the physically broken idealist who placed himself in the way of government persecution, and never recovered his strength after—then he, too, was a martyr. But we may be sure that through his many labor struggles, Debs himself would never have chosen “martyrdom” as his signature achievement or intent. Instead, “Solidarity,” what he sometimes called “the Christ-like practice of Solidarity,” signified an overcoming of brutal individualism, a self-confidence inhuman capacity that prompted him to say he would not lead workers into the Promised Land because someone else, some other foremost figure, could lead them out again. Debs, willing to be a leader, willing to sacrifice his health to this purpose, looked beyond himself and his own lifetime.”
—From the introduction for Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography by Paul Buhle, Steve Max, Noah Van Sciver, Dave Nance. An excerpt follows.
