Nick Salvatore: Citizen and Historian
Nick Salvatore: Citizen and Historian
The author of Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist and other biographies, Nick Salvatore leaves behind a rich legacy that both challenges and inspires us at this historical moment.
When he took the stage on election night, New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani began his acceptance speech by quoting the American socialist icon Eugene Debs. “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” an unbowed Debs declared before a judge sentenced him to prison for opposing U.S. entry into the First World War. Coming from Mamdani on a night in which an avowed democratic socialist had won the popular vote to lead the nation’s largest city, these words sounded like a long-ago prophecy finally fulfilled.
The next day in Ithaca, New York, retired librarian and political activist Ann Sullivan replayed the opening of Mamdani’s speech for her beloved husband of fifty-one years, Nick Salvatore, who had recently entered memory care. He smiled. As author of the definitive biography Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982), the Brooklyn-born Salvatore understood perhaps better than anyone the historic significance of Mamdani’s victory, a development scarcely imaginable when his landmark book was published during the Reagan years. Sadly, he would not live to see Mamdani govern the city of his birth. Salvatore passed away on Thanksgiving weekend at the age of eighty-two.
For us, as for his family, colleagues, and friends, Salvatore’s passing was a deeply personal loss. For over forty years, each of us came to know him well, first as a trusted mentor and later as a devoted friend. Yet his passing is not only a loss for us, but for all those who look to history for inspiration, wisdom, and sustenance in the struggle to build a more just, democratic, and humane world. A pathbreaking scholar and an engaged public intellectual, Salvatore leaves behind a rich legacy that both challenges and inspires us at this critical historical moment. It is a legacy worth pondering as a democratic left seeks to rebuild under the leadership of figures like Mamdani.
Salvatore’s upbringing in a working-class Italian and Catholic Brooklyn neighborhood remained a powerful touchstone throughout his life and fueled his enduring interest in questions of identity. Although he abandoned the formal practice of Catholicism, Salvatore’s religious training, which included a year in a seminary, left him with a keen awareness of human frailty and what he called the “centrality of moral law,” a preoccupation with the concept of faith, and a commitment to social justice. It is not coincidental that analysis of both secular and religious sermons provided the key to understanding his main characters in his book on Debs and a later biography of civil rights leader C.L. Franklin. In a biography of African American Civil War veteran Amos Webber, an unheralded janitor and servant, he explored the moral universe of a community leader whose “uncompromising faith . . . caused him to hesitate before submitting to any ecclesiastical authority.” A similar hesitancy to submit would define Salvatore’s own encounters not only with ecclesiastic authorities but with political and intellectual ones as well.
After leaving the seminary in the 1960s, Salvatore worked as a Teamster and became deeply involved in the civil rights movement in New York City. “June 1963 was the turning point for me,” he later recalled in an unpublished manuscript. Joining protesters from the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who demanded that Black workers be hired to build the Downstate Medical Center, he experienced his first arrest. He also began hearing about Malcolm X. Not long after, he journeyed with fellow CORE activist Arnie Goldwag to Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm speak, noting that he “both educated me and moved me.”
Like many others of his generation, Salvatore’s civil rights activism soon flowed into antiwar activism. His close friendship with David Mitchell, founder of the End the Draft Committee, helped prompt this shift in political emphasis. Although he opposed the war, Salvatore refused to claim a student deferment, not wishing to exercise a privilege unavailable to so many of the young men with whom he had grown up. This sensibility helps explain why, years before the 1970 “Hard Hat Riot” rocked New York, Salvatore began questioning the tactics and rhetoric of an increasingly militant antiwar movement that were alienating many working-class New Yorkers. Having shed the rigidities of the Catholic catechism, he also rejected what he regarded as growing dogmatism on the left.
This aversion to orthodoxy guided Salvatore as he embarked on his intellectual journey. After a brief sojourn at Fordham, he received a degree from Hunter College’s Bronx campus (now Lehman College) in 1968 and won admission as a graduate student in history at UC Berkeley. Pursuing his doctorate on a campus that had served as an epicenter in the development of the New Left, Salvatore turned from political activism to history, seeking to understand the forces that had shaped the country he had been struggling to change. His mentors there were Leon Litwack, the eminent historian of slavery, and Robert Bellah, a leading scholar in the sociology of religion. It was under their tutelage that he settled on Eugene Debs as his first subject.
Biography became a perfect vehicle for much of Salvatore’s historical work. Although some critics viewed biography as a suspect methodology, constrained by a narrow chronology and the focus on an individual life, in Salvatore’s hands it was a powerful explanatory device. Each of his subjects—Debs, Webber, and C. L. Franklin—wrestled with the crucial question of what it meant to be an American. Each retained faith in the potential of America despite its troubled history of class conflict and racial injustice, and its failure to live up to its democratic and egalitarian ideals. And each saw self-knowledge as a prerequisite for effective social engagement in the quest to fulfill the country’s promise.
Salvatore’s prizewinning first book, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, sprang from his interest in exploring the dissenting tradition in America. It revitalized the genre of biography by taking a revered left-wing icon and offering fresh understandings of his political odyssey. He portrayed Debs as a singularly American product whose life represented a “continuous sermon” combining Christian influences, a belief in working-class potential, and the vision of an America that could fulfill its democratic ideals. Debs emerged, to use one of his favorite words, as a “complex” figure, both heroic and flawed, who reflected both the limits and possibilities of socialist politics in an inhospitable cultural milieu. Unlike previous Debs biographers, Salvatore was determined to analyze both a life and its legacy, not to burnish a legend. Ray Ginger’s hagiographic The Bending Cross (1949) took its title from the same Debs courtroom speech that Mamdani quoted. Tellingly, Salvatore included neither of those quotes in his book. He sought to illuminate something deeper than Debs’s rhetorical eloquence: his cultural and political significance.
Toward that end, Salvatore highlighted Debs’s failure to make the fight against white supremacy central to socialism’s mission. Until very late in his life, Debs adhered to what Salvatore called a “one-dimensional analysis” that saw racial prejudice as a mere outgrowth of class oppression, claiming “there is no ‘Negro problem’ apart from the general labor problem.” As someone who’d fought to integrate Brooklyn’s construction sites and been told by the president of Teamster Local 808, “You march with the n*****s in Harlem, you have no place in my union,” Salvatore knew better.
His subsequent biographies focused on men who, in W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous formulation, grappled with the “twoness” of being Black and American. His discovery of the extensive journals kept by Amos Webber, a Black veteran and worker who lived in the postbellum North, sparked a remarkable act of historical reconstruction. Mining the material in Webber’s “memory books,” he traced his creation of a moral universe grounded in personal integrity, a rich associational life in Black organizations, and the exploration of opportunities for interracial cooperation. The title of the book, We All Got History, underscored Salvatore’s belief that ordinary people led consequential lives. Webber’s story revealed “the complex pain and joy of being both black and American.”
In his final biography, a portrait of the influential Black preacher C.L. Franklin, Salvatore explored the role of faith in shaping both personal and political expression. Like thousands of Black Americans, Franklin fled the oppressiveness of the Jim Crow South, eventually landing in Detroit, where he assumed leadership of New Bethel Baptist Church in 1946. Always attentive to social context, Salvatore described the fierce resistance Black Detroiters faced from much of the white community, their embrace of unions and political participation, and the inspiration they found in music and religious practice. To capture the essence of Franklin’s message, Salvatore analyzed his popular and inspiring sermons with Talmudic precision. Steeped in the call-and-response tradition in which ministers sang and chanted their sermons, Franklin urged his congregants to find an “inner sense of freedom” and self-worth in faith that would support their efforts to effect political change in the secular world. Through the experiences of Franklin and Webber, Salvatore discovered a theme that held deep personal and historical meaning: the redemptive role of faith as a force in both private and public life.
Beyond his biographies, Salvatore wrote widely for both academic and popular audiences, publishing pieces in outlets such as Dissent, New Politics, and the New York Times. After several years at the College of the Holy Cross (where McCartin met him), Salvatore spent almost four decades at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School (where Bussel was his mentee). Teaching at ILR, he retained an abiding interest in the prospects of the union movement and the working class. As a former Teamster, he was an early supporter of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. He also wrote about the evolution of left-liberal politics in the United States and the role of religion in public life.
Salvatore was especially vocal in discussing the role of history and the obligations of historians. He came of age with the “new labor history” inspired by the British historian E.P. Thompson, which looked to workers’ activities outside of an institutional union context. He supported this focus, while questioning what he considered a tendency in the subfield toward romanticization. He remained sobered by the power of individualist influences in American culture, the inability of American workers to create a “self-conscious and self-sustaining oppositional ideology,” and the challenges of achieving solidarity within a diverse and constantly changing working class.
Salvatore also wrote frequently about the misuses of history. This concern led him to question scholarship he saw as too eager to apply the “lessons” of history to contemporary problems and too willing to disregard evidence that contradicted a favored hypothesis. His best-known broadside on the subject was a sharp critique of Herbert G. Gutman, whom he chastised for his willingness to “reduce religious experience to a justification of a left historian’s imagined past.” Such critiques naturally generated fierce and even angry responses.
As his evaluation of Gutman suggested, Salvatore’s criticisms could be blunt, impatient, and occasionally (as some believed) even dismissive. Yet, as students whose work benefited from his critical eye, we valued his candor and admired his courageous iconoclasm. We understood that his critiques were expressions of how deeply he cared about our shared craft and the honesty of the stories we told through it. His sharpest words were meant to reinforce the importance of understanding the past on its own terms if we wanted to see our present clearly and to find means within it to build a better future.
For us, winning Salvatore’s trust as a mentor led to gaining his devotion as a friend. We were graced by his infectious laugh, his sharp wit, profound warmth, and lack of pretension. He maintained an active interest in our careers and our families. And when we each assumed roles as directors of labor studies programs, Salvatore supported our work even as he lamented the diminished state of unions and their future possibilities.
For those who were not so fortunate to know Salvatore as we did, his legacy is no less profoundly worthy of attention. More clearly than most, he saw the rise of Donald Trump not as aberrational but rather as a manifestation of dark forces that had historically undermined the promise of America. Salvatore had encountered these forces personally on civil rights picket lines in 1960s Brooklyn. His biographical subjects had also struggled against these forces, which he believed too many historians and left intellectuals had underestimated. While he smiled at Mamdani’s invocation of Debs in his victory speech, we have no doubt that if Nick Salvatore were present today, he would urge us both to keep the faith and never to forget for a moment the immensity of the challenges that lie ahead.
Robert Bussel is professor emeritus of history and former director of the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon.
Joseph A. McCartin is professor of history and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor & the Working Poor at Georgetown University and current president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).
