With There Will Be Blood potentially set to rein in several awards at a certain upcoming ceremony, Ernest Freeberg takes to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to ask us to pour a little oil out for Upton Sinclair, who wrote the book--1927's Oil!--that inspired the film, a bit too loosely, in Freeberg's opinion.
Continuing his engagement with an American radical tradition we often seem all too willing to forget, Freeberg has written Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (coming May 2008), a wonderfully accessible history of American socialist leader Debs' 1920 campaign to go from the jailhouse to the White House, during which he garnered a million votes and unleashed a nationwide protest, by no means confined to the "radical left," against the government's ruthless suppression of dissenting views during the First World War (or "The Great War," as it was known at the time). Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime.
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