(That's David Walters, Marxmail subscriber.)
Was this how you met your now-coeditor, David Walters?
TD
Yeah. Once I was aboard with MIA I made the acquaintance of David
Walters, one of the founders and the most active volunteers at the site.
David saw this slew of previously unknown Debs documents that I was
finding and typing up for my site — unknown outside of a couple
scholars, I should say — and he was most enthusiastic: “Oh, this is
great — you need to do a Debs Collected Works!”
I put him off for a long time, several years, but I did make a point of
typing up every “new” Debs document that I came across, and he dutifully
began building a first-rate “Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/>” as part of MIA. This went on
for several years: David gently pushing me toward doing a true Collected
Works and me resisting because I knew how big the job would be. I told
him at one point that it would take a team of five dedicated scholars a
decade to do the job and that it would run to twenty or more thick volumes.
The key event came when I discovered the existence of/The Papers of
Eugene V. Debs, 1834–1945
<https://about.proquest.com/products-services/film/the-papers-of-eugene-v-debs-1834-19451.html>/microfilm
edition. Back in the early 1980s, Debs historianBob Constantine
<https://debsfoundation.org/index.php/2017/05/30/passing-of-j-robert-constantine/>had
worked with NYU’s Tamiment Library archivistGail Malmgreen
<https://queer.newark.rutgers.edu/interviews/gail-malmgreen>and made a
solid attempt to list and film all the known publications and
correspondence of Gene Debs. In 1990 Constantine had taken this project
to the next step, publishing three volumes of selections from the
correspondence as/Letters of Eugene V. Debs
<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1267524.Letters_of_Eugene_V_Debs?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=JPkzkXPfyN&rank=3>/.
However, for whatever reason he had never adapted Debs’s published
writing for similar treatment.
This was the real aha! moment — the “team of scholars” had already done
most of the hard work of discovery, so the job was already half done! It
was now possible for one or two people to resume that dropped project
and carry it forward. Instead of ten years, the job actually could be
done in five, I now guessed.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/eugene-v-debs-unions-american-socialism
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