Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs

xiii, 331 pp. Introduction by Mark Van Doren. Marguerite Young's fascinating chronicle of two attempts to establish utopian communities in nineteenth-century America. Angel in the Forest recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana. The original community was founded in 1814 by the German mystic Father George Rapp, who, with a group of English immigrants, implemented his own theories for a perfect community, this time based on rationalism. Both experiments failed, but Young finds in both a distinctively American yearning for utopia, which continues to characterize the American spirit to this day: a tradition of faith and folly can be traced from Owen's New Moral World to George Bush's New World Order.