Eugene V. Debs Portrait, 1919 -- Daily LIFT #7

Striking portrait of American Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs for the cover of the leftist magazine The Liberator, May 1919

The previous month Debs had entered prison to serve a ten year sentence for a speech he gave in opposition to the First World War. He would run for President in 1920 while still in prison. He was released by Presidential commutation in December, 1921 after a mass campaign for his freedom.

As he entered the prison Debs wrote “I enter the prison doors a flaming revolutionist, my head erect, my spirit untamed and my soul unconquerable.”

The portrait captures that spirit admirably.

For a letter Debs wrote about his imprisonment to readers of the magazine in March, 1919 see below.

(The Daily LIFT - Leftist Image for Today - is a new The Left Chapter feature posting a daily photo, cartoon, artwork or other image related to leftist history or contemporary realty.)

For a Socialist America! - Leftist #TBT

While ironically at the very time socialism as a "mainstream" political idea has been on the decline in Canadian political discourse -- with the NDP dropping the word from its constitution and its very vocabulary -- it has seen something of a renaissance in the United States of late.

The election of socialist (although not Socialist Party) Kshama Sawant in Seattle had and is having a serious impact on political discourse both in the city and more broadly.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, who openly describes himself as a socialist, is making a bid for the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party -- a bid that the mainstream media cannot ignore.

Today, for Leftist Throwback Thursday we look at the 1936 platform of the Socialist Party of America.

The party was founded in 1901 and reached the heights of its popular support with the Presidential candidacies of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas in the early 20th Century.

The 1936 platform is notable both for its economic radicalism, its ideas like a 30 hour work week and its emphasis on union and civil rights.

(Click on images to enlarge)