Van Sciver, Noah; Buhle, Paul; Max, Steve and Nance, Dave, Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography

Van Sciver, Noah; Buhle, Paul; Max, Steve and Nance, Dave, Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography (New York, London: Verso Books 2018) 128 pp., $19.95.

Eugene Debs is a socialist legend, especially in the United States, where such legends are rare and even more rarely acknowledged, much less championed. In today's leftist milieu, some might even call Debs a hero. Even those who wouldn't, however, would admit his surge in popularity in the last few years is at best unexpected. Then again, so is the prevalence of the word socialism in modern US politics. Of course, the intended meaning of those politicians, pundits, and people using the word depends both on their knowledge of socialist theory and their personal political beliefs. For example, many of Donald Trump's right-wing advisors consider the post office to be socialist while Bernie Sanders and those to his left do not consider the Affordable Care Act to be socialist in any meaningful way, despite the proclamations of the capitalist health care industry and it sycophantic supporters in government. In other words, the definition of socialism is contested and its meaning uncertain and muddled in today’s United States.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Indeed, in the early decades of the twentieth century, socialism in the US was fundamentally understood to mean the end of capitalism and the rule of the capitalist class. In turn, that rule was to be replaced with the democratic rule of the workers. Revolutionary struggle was taking place in the streets of cities around the world; Russia had succeeded in overthrowing the Tsar and was in process of building a revolutionary socialist government. In the United States and much of the rest of the world, the ruling classes were truly concerned about their future. Men like Eugene Debs were considered genuine threats to the established order. In Debs’ case, this threat had grown to such proportions by the time World War One was in its full-on murderous mode he was imprisoned for opposing it. Still, he received around a million votes in the presidential election shortly after the war ended.

It was not the first time Debs had been imprisoned, of course. After leading the 1894 strike against the Pullman Company through the American Railway Union (which Debs was instrumental in forming), he was imprisoned after the strike was broken by the government and corporate America. Obviously a man who learned from experience, Debs had realized the nature of capitalism when it was under threat from those it employed. It would stop at nothing to protect its profits. It was during that imprisonment that Debs became a socialist, which was a fairly new political philosophy at the time, especially as informed by the writing of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Indeed, it was a gift from the socialists of Milwaukee of their work The Communist Manifesto that helped steer Debs on this trajectory.

This is just part of Debs’ biography. It is a biography told in many different books, most recently in the form of a comic illustrated by cartoonist Noah Van Sciver, whose work appears regularly in MAD Magazine. Titled Eugene Debs: A Graphic Biography, the text is written by the radical historian Paul Buhle, activist Steve Max and musician Dave Nance. It is a slender volume that packs a lot of information in its pages. The graphic element is broken up by a few pages of text throughout the book. Both elements combine to give the reader a fairly complete, albeit brief, biography of Debs and a radical history of the United States during his life. While it is crucial to remember while reading the comic that its production was partially funded by the reinvigorated Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), that fact does not affect the politics of the book much. I say this primarily because the socialism that Eugene Debs formulated and crusaded for during his life is the essence of, if not the actual practice of today’s DSA.

That being said, this text also reflects some of the differences between leftist understanding and practice in the United States before the period now known as the long Sixties and afterwards. Given the political origins of the book's writers and illustrators in the 1960s New Left and later, this is not surprising. Unlike some other biographies of Debs written before the advent of the New Left, Eugene Debs: A Graphic Biography highlights Debs’ vocal and consistent support for women's suffrage and against racial prejudice. As any student of the US labor and socialist movements knows, those positions were minority positions well into the twentieth century. Indeed, as far as much of the labor movement is concerned, they were minority positions into the early 1970s. In this text, however, Debs championing of these issues are part of the writers' underlying message throughout.

It is a challenge to provide a biography that shows the depth and variations of a human of Debs’ complexity and character. To do so within the confines of the graphic novel/comic medium is even more challenging. Together with the rest of the writing team, that challenge is more than aptly met here. The team of artists and writers involved in the production of this book are up to the task. Paul Buhle, who was a founder and part of the editorial collective of the New Left political magazine Radical America and the author of the classic radical history text Marxism in the United States, is an editor and scriptwriter of several graphic biographies. Their subjects include Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse, and the Beats. His encyclopedic knowledge of his subjects and history in general enhances the storytelling involved. Despite Buhle’s knowledge and experience in the medium, accomplishing that task in the limited amount of space a comic provides is still a challenge. To meet said challenge in a satisfactory manner, the artist needs to encapsulate the actions described in the words while simultaneously maintaining the forward flow of the story line. Artist Noah van Scriver has honed his craft through his work not just through his illustrations in MAD magazine; he is also the creator and/or illustrator of many other graphic works, including the critically acclaimed Blammo series and a darkly humorous trilogy titled Fantebukowski.

Hopefully, the fact of Eugene Debs’ (and the concept of socialism’s) recent upsurge in popularity in the United States is a harbinger of a meaningful and progressive change in the nation’s political future. Despite the desperate times of forever war, gross economic inequality, police brutality, anti-women legislation, ongoing racism and discrimination, and climate change that we currently face, there is a valid argument to be made that the situation was equally desperate during Debs’ political life—world war, labor strikes being met with state and corporate violence, lynchings, child labor, and overt and legal discrimination against Blacks, women and immigrants. The fundamental cause of the current crisis is—just as it was when Eugene Debs was organizing—capitalism. This fact is made clear in Eugene Debs: A Graphic Biography. That alone makes this unassuming and inviting text not just a biography, but an organizing tool, as well. In other words, the reader is advised: don’t just read, organize.

Ron Jacobs,
Independent Scholar
Asheville, NC
ronj1955@gmail.com