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If you've just run across Newstalgia for the first time, please take some time to scroll down the page and check out the some 3,000+ posts, running the gamut from historic speeches (like this one) and historic events (like 3-Mile Island) to weekly Jazz, Rock and Classical concerts and everything in-between. It's all about history, all about information and all about our world.

I ran across an article about Eugene Debs the other day. Considered by many to be the first Socialist leader four-time candidate for President in the early 20th Century, firebrand labor leader and one of the more notable figures on the political scene from the 1890's until his death in 1926.

Here is an address, which has been attributed to an actor (Len Spencer) at the time, recorded shortly after he originally gave it in 1904.

Debs was renown for his public speaking, and his dramatic addresses were legendary. Although this is most likely not the real voice of Debs, Len Spencer was well aware of Debs' oratorical skills and was said to have captured the spirit of a Debs address quite accurately. Obviously, that isn't anything anyone can actually verify in 2012, so we'll have to take their word for it.

Here is the transcript of that address, as the original cylinder and recording techniques make it hard to understand at times:

Continue reading »

As names and titles and ideologies become blurred and distorted in recent years, the old adage that if you repeat a lie over and over enough times it winds up becoming fact certainly rings true where the subject of Socialism pops up. The tendency of our media and our friends on the right wing side of the spectrum to paint Liberals with the same brush as Socialists is one of those stereotypes that just ain't so.

From the same batch of interviews that gave us Saul Alinsky earlier this week, I also ran across an interview recorded two weeks later, also for Harper's Magazine and their weekly radio program At Issue, with Michael Harrington. A name not mentioned much these days, Michael Harrington was an American Socialist, political activist and Political Science Professor who was also founder of the Democratic Socialists Of America. A writer of several books, the most popular being The Other America: Poverty In The United States which came out in 1962. Since his death in 1989 he's been largely overlooked and mostly forgotten where discussions of political ideology are concerned. Too bad. Perhaps Harrington isn't as catchy a name as Alinsky.

In this interview he talks about the differences between Liberalism and Socialism:

Michael Harrington: “The Liberal is convinced that working within the structure of a Capitalist society, no matter how modified, still a Capitalist society; an ameliorated, reformist welfare-state Capitalist society. But a society in which wealth is systematically maldistributed. That working within the framework of such a society it’s possible to achieve a just social order through reform without attacking the basic fundamentals of the society, the structure of the society. I believe, and Socialists believe, that as long as you have that fundamental structure of inequality, every reform is going to be eviscerated or subverted. For example; although most people don’t know it, the money spent on public housing in the United States is about half the value of one tax deduction for the homebuilding, middle-class and rich. In 1962 we spent about $865 million on Public housing and that tax deduction for the one-fifth top income recipients in this country was worth a $Billion and a Half. Or let me take an example from Europe which is sited in my article in the current issue of Harper’s: In Europe, when industry was nationalized, the main recipient of benefit from that nationalization, and I’m in favor of it, but the main recipient of benefits from it was private industry.”

An insightful interview with more than the average number of eerie prophecies, particularly since the interview was conducted in February 1970.

More essential listening.