American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs

(Yale Strom, US 2018, 99 min., DCP)

Labor Film Series | Rochester Premiere. Leader of the American Railway Union’s great Pullman Strike of 1896 and a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, Gene Debs ran as a Socialist for president of the United States three times—once from prison, having been convicted of opposing military service in World War I. Filmmaker and ethnographer Yale Strom has turned his attention to this American political hero, hoping to define and contextualize the term “socialist” through an objective but passionate history of a movement that continues to have an impact on our lives today.