The socialists are coming!
Debs is the subject of a new documentary, American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs. The film is screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center from Friday through Thursday, and director Yale Strom is scheduled to appear at the Saturday showing for an audience discussion.
But as American Socialist shows, socialists had their biggest impact a century ago, when Debs and the labor movement helped push through the New Deal, labor laws, even the creation of Labor Day itself. In 1919, Debs’s Socialist Party claimed more than 100,000 dues-paying members, much more than the the DSA’s 33,000 or so by the end of the 2017. But hey, with LaPierre’s red-baiting speech reportedly tripling the DSA’s average daily sign-ups—that could be changing.
