Ernest Freeberg
speaker
21 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 5 May
Ernest Freeberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
People were being tied to their jobs.
They were denied a democratic voice in the way they made a living.
So that's when he moved toward getting involved in founding the American Railway Union.
which was an attempt to organize workers across lots of different positions, working together and cooperating together.
Suddenly you have a tool that it's much harder for the railroad owners to ignore.
And I'm the author of Democracy's Prisoner, Eugene Debs' The Great War and the Right to Dissent.
And that set in motion... The most important labor conflict of the 19th century in the United States.
From Chicago West for some days and really paralyzed the American economy.
Ordered Debs to essentially stop the strike, which he refused to do.
He sent in troops.
And what was really needed was a party that represented the workers.
Things like more support for early childhood education.
The 40-hour work week.
Old age pensions.
Welfare programs for the poor.
Or worker safety protections.
These are things that were radical third-party innovations when they were first proposed by the socialists.
Socialism, you know, as a third party succeeded in accomplishing many of the things that we now take for granted as just part of the liberal state.
You know, the social safety network, the government oversight of health and welfare, some controls over the financial system.
Those were all part of the socialist program that were adopted first by the progressives in the early 20th century and then many of them by the New Deal and some of them ultimately by the Great Society programs in the 60s.
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