Debs In Canton

Debs in Canton is original historical audio fiction.

On June 16, 1918, America’s leading voice of conscience, Eugene Victor Debs, stepped onto a stage in Canton, Ohio, and gave a soul-stirring speech against American intervention in WWI. He did so knowing the cost would be severe: Debs was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and sentenced to 10 years in a federal penitentiary for sedition. The 63-year-old cofounder of the Socialist Party of America ran for president from his jail cell in 1920. He received nearly a million votes. 

Debs was an architect of FDR’s New Deal policy that saved the American working class and gave the middle class a chance to build a better and more just life. Today, he is known as being a personal hero to contemporary political thinkers like Bernie Sanders. To those who knew him as “The Man from Terre Haute”, Debs was a simple man, an extraordinary writer and orator, and an energetic believer in the best of humanity and the promise of this great nation. 

Debs’ unwavering social conscience and his deeply held Christian faith created the foundation of his political philosophy. But it has never been easy for any man to risk everything – from his possessions, his family, his freedom, or his health – to do what he knows is right. Debs’ crisis is dramatized in Debs in Canton, a new work of audio fiction from SueMedia Productions and MidSummer Sound Company that looks at what his life might have been like in the months leading up to this seminal moment in American history.

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Praise for Debs In Canton

This well-produced radio drama--complete with the ambient sounds of trains, tavern chatter, and the clink of a cell door, as well as tunefully performed rounds of song--contextualizes the personal and political time leading up to socialist activist Eugene Debs's final speech in Canton, Ohio, and his arrest for sedition in 1918. Phil Proctor, as Debs, sounds appropriately gruff and gentle, by turns. The supporting cast of Robert Fass, P.J. Ochlan, L.J. Ganser, Melinda Peterson, Doug Shapiro, Anne Bobby, and the very young Micah Gellert are equally compelling and engaging. This audiobook provides accurate, empathetic, and insightful entertainment in our own politically beleaguered time.

- AudioFile Magazine

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"Thank you more than I know how to say for Debs in Canton. It is a truly brilliant production! Phil’s performance was perfect - but I can’t exactly call it a stand-out, because EVERYBODY in the cast was just wonderful. Superb work, and the writing was so RIGHT for the people and the subjects. It was extremely timely, and I am honored to have been able to broadcast it on WFHB-FM.”

—Richard Fish, host, WFHB-FM, 91.3FM

"With a story torn right out of the pages of U.S. history and a number of toxic political labels seemingly lifted from today’s headlines, veteran Hollywood voice actor and long-time political satirist, Phil Proctor, leads an award-winning cast in telling the true tale of how Eugene V. Debs, a third-party activist, crossed the wartime government of Woodrow Wilson and ended up in jail. 'Debs In Canton' gives a human voice to cautionary storytelling."

— Brian Price, Great Northern Audio Theatre

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