04 September 23
Half man, half myth, Debs turned a radical creed into a deeply American one.
Jill Lepore
/
The New Yorker 04 September 23
Eugene Victor Debs left school at the age of
fourteen, to scrape paint and grease off the cars of the Vandalia
Railroad, in Indiana, for fifty cents a day. He got a raise when he was
promoted to fireman, which meant working in the locomotive next to the
engineer, shovelling coal into a firebox—as much as two tons an hour,
sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Firemen, caked in coal dust,
blinded by wind and smoke, had to make sure that the engine didn’t
explode, an eventuality they weren’t always able to forestall. If they
were lucky, and lived long enough, firemen usually became engineers,
which was safer than being a switchman or a brakeman, jobs that involved
working on the tracks next to a moving train, or racing across its top,
in any weather, at the risk of toppling off and getting run over. All
these men reported to the conductors, who had the top job, and, on
trains owned by George Mortimer Pullman, one of the richest men in the
United States, all of them—the engineers, the firemen, the brakemen, the
switchmen, and even the scrapers—outranked the porters. Pullman porters
were almost always black men, and ex-slaves, and, at the start, were
paid nothing except the tips they could earn by bowing before the fancy
passengers who could afford the sleeping car, and who liked very much to
be served with a shuffle and a grin, Dixie style.
Every man who worked on the American railroad in the last decades of
the nineteenth century became, of necessity, a scholar of the relations
between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the masters
and the slaves, the riders and the ridden upon. No student of this
subject is more important to American history than Debs, half man, half
myth, who founded the American Railway Union, turned that into the
Social Democratic Party, and ran for President of the United States five
times, including once from prison.
Debs, who wrote a lot about manliness, always said that the best kind
of man was a sand man. “ ‘Sand’ means grit,” he wrote in 1882, in Firemen’s Magazine.
“It means the power to hold on.” When a train stalled from the
steepness of the incline or the weight of the freight, railroad men
poured sand on the tracks, to improve the grip of the wheels. Men need
sand, too, Debs said: “Men who have plenty of ‘sand’ in their boxes
never slip on the path of duty.” Debs had plenty of sand in his box. He
had, though, something of a morbid fear of ashes. Maybe that’s a
fireman’s phobia, a tending-the-engine man’s idea of doom. In
prison—having been sentenced, brutally, to ten years of hard time at the
age of sixty-three—he had a nightmare. “I was walking by the house
where I was born,” he wrote. “The house was gone and nothing left but
ashes . . . only ashes—ashes!” The question today for socialism in the
United States, which appears to be stoking its engines, is whether it’s
got enough sand. Or whether it’ll soon be ashes, only ashes, all over
again.
Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, seven years after Marx and Engels published “The Communist Manifesto.”
His parents were Alsatian immigrants who ran a small grocery store.
Debs worked for the railroads a little more than four years. In the wake
of the Panic of 1873, he lost his job at Vandalia and tramped to East
St. Louis looking for work; then, homesick, he tramped back to Terre
Haute, where, in 1875, he took a job as a labor organizer, and, later,
as a magazine editor, for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. He hung
his old scraper on the wall, part relic, part badge, part talisman, of
his life as a manual laborer.
Debs was a tall man, lanky and rubbery, like a noodle. He had
deep-set blue eyes and lost his hair early, and he talked with his
hands. When he gave speeches, he leaned toward the crowd, and the veins
of his temples bulged. He was clean-shaven and favored bow ties and
sometimes looked lost in crumpled, baggy suits. He had a way of hunching
his shoulders that you often see, and admire, in tall men who don’t
like to tower over other people. In a new book, “Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography”
(Verso), drawn by Noah Van Sciver and written by Paul Buhle and Steve
Max, Debs looks like an R. Crumb character, though not so bedraggled and
neurotic.
People could listen to him talk for hours. “Debs! Debs! Debs!” they’d
cry, when his train pulled into a station. Crowds massed to hear him by
the tens of thousands. But even though Debs lived until 1926, well into
the age of archival sound, no one has ever found a recording of his
voice. When Nick Salvatore wrote, in his comprehensive biography, “Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist,”
in 1982, “His voice ran a gamut of tones: mock whisper to normal
conversation to full stentorian power,” you wonder how he knew. Debs
could speak French and German and was raised in the Midwest, so maybe he
talked like the Ohio-born Clarence Darrow, with a rasp and a drawl.
Some of Debs’s early essays and speeches have just been published in the
first of six volumes of “The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs”
(Haymarket), edited by Tim Davenport and David Walters. Really, he
wasn’t much of a writer. The most delightful way to hear Debs is to
listen to a recording made in 1979 by Bernie Sanders, in an audio documentary
that he wrote and produced when he was thirty-seven years old and was
the director of the American People’s Historical Society, in Burlington,
Vermont, two years before he became that city’s mayor. In the
documentary—available on YouTube and Spotify—Sanders, the Brooklyn-born
son of a Polish Jew, performs parts of Debs’s most famous speeches,
sounding, more or less, like Larry David. It is not to be missed.
Debs began his political career as a Democrat. In 1879, when he was
only twenty-three, he was elected city clerk of Terre Haute, as a
Democrat; the city’s Democratic newspaper called him “one of the rising
young men of Terre Haute,” and the Republican paper agreed, dubbing him
“the blue-eyed boy of destiny.” Debs looked back on these days less
fondly. “There was a time in my life, before I became a Socialist, when I
permitted myself as a member of the Democratic party to be elected to a
state legislature,” he later said. “I have been trying to live it down.
I am as much ashamed of that as I am proud of having gone to jail.”
Throughout his life, he believed in individual striving, and he believed
in the power of machines. “A railroad is the architect of progress,” he
said in a speech at the Grand Lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive
Firemen in 1877, the year the President of the United States sent
federal troops to crush a railroad workers’ strike. The firemen’s
brotherhood was less a labor union than a benevolent society. “The first
object of the association is to provide for the widows and orphans who
are daily left penniless and at the mercy of public charity by the death
of a brother,” Debs explained. At the time, he was opposed to strikes.
“Does the brotherhood encourage strikers?” he asked. “No—brotherhood.”
For a long time, Debs disavowed socialism. He placed his faith in
democracy, the franchise, and the two-party system. “The conflict is not
between capital and labor,” he insisted. “It is between the man who
holds the office and the man who holds the ballot.” But in the
eighteen-eighties, when railroad workers struck time and time again, and
as many as two thousand railroad men a year were killed on the job,
while another twenty thousand were injured, Debs began to wonder whether
the power of benevolence and fraternity was adequate protection from
the avarice and ruthlessness of corporations backed up by armed men.
“The strike is the weapon of the oppressed,” Debs wrote in 1888. Even
then he didn’t talk about socialism. For Debs, this was Americanism, a
tradition that had begun with the American Revolution. “The Nation had
for its cornerstone a strike,” he said. He also spent some time with a
pencil, doing sums. Imagine, he wrote in an editorial, that a grandson
of Cornelius Vanderbilt started out with two million dollars—a million
from his grandfather and another million from his father. “If a
locomotive fireman could work 4,444 years, 300 days each year, at $1.50
per day,” Debs went on, “he would be in a position to bet Mr. Vanderbilt
$2.50 that all men are born equal.”
In 1889, Debs argued for an industrial union, a federation of all the
brotherhoods of railroad workers, from brakemen to conductors, as
equals. Samuel Gompers wanted those men to join his far less radical
trade union, the American Federation of Labor, which he’d founded three
years earlier, but in 1893 Debs pulled them into the American Railway
Union. Soon it had nearly a hundred and fifty thousand members, with
Debs, at its head, as their Moses. That’s what got him into a battle
with George Pullman, in 1894, and landed him, for the first time, in
prison, where he read “Das Kapital.”
Debs once said that George Pullman was “as greedy as a horse leech,”
but that was unfair to leeches. In the aftermath of the Panic of 1893,
Pullman slashed his workers’ wages by as much as fifty per cent and,
even though they lived in housing he provided, he didn’t cut rents or
the price of the food he sold them. Three thousand workers from the
Pullman Palace Car Company, many of them American Railway Union members,
had already begun a wildcat strike in May of 1894, a month before the
A.R.U.’s first annual meeting, in Chicago. As Jack Kelly recounts, in “The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America”
(St. Martin’s), Debs hadn’t wanted the A.R.U. to get involved, but the
members of his union found the Pullman workers’ plight impossible to
ignore, especially after nineteen-year-old Jennie Curtis, who’d worked
in the Pullman sewing department for five years, upholstering and making
curtains, addressed the convention. Curtis explained that she was often
paid nine or ten dollars for two weeks’ work, out of which she paid
Pullman seven dollars for her board and two or three more for rent. “We
ask you to come along with us,” she told Debs’s men, because working for
Pullman was little better than slavery. After hearing from her, the
A.R.U. voted for a boycott, refusing “to handle Pullman cars and
equipment.”
That Curtis had a voice at all that day was thanks in part to Debs,
who had supported the admission of women to the A.R.U. He also argued
for the admission of African-Americans. “I am not here to advocate
association with the negro, but I am ready to stand side by side with
him,” he told the convention. But, by a vote of 112 to 110, the
assembled members decided that the union would be for whites only. If
two votes had gone the other way, the history of the labor movement in
the United States might have turned out very differently.
Black men, closed out of the A.R.U., formed the Anti-Strikers
Railroad Union, to fill positions opened by striking whites. If working
on a Pullman car was degrading, it was also, for decades, one of the
best jobs available to African-American men. Its perks included safe
travel at a time when it was difficult for black people to make their
way between any two American cities without threat or harm. George
Pullman’s company was the nation’s single largest employer of
African-American men. Thurgood Marshall’s father was a Pullman porter.
The A.R.U. vote in 1894 set back the cause of labor for decades. The
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters achieved recognition from the
Pullman Company only in 1937, after years of organizing by A. Philip
Randolph.
The Pullman strike of 1894, one of the single biggest labor actions
in American history, stalled trains in twenty-seven states. Debs’s
American Railway Union all but halted transportation by rail west of
Detroit for more than a month—either by refusing to touch Pullman cars
or by actively unhitching them from the trains. Whatever Debs’s initial
misgivings about the boycott, once his union voted for it he dedicated
himself to the confrontation between “the producing classes and the
money power.” In the end, after a great deal of violence, George
Pullman, aided by President Grover Cleveland, defeated the strikers.
Pursued by a U.S. Attorney General who had long served as a lawyer for
the railroads, Debs and other A.R.U. leaders were indicted and convicted
of violating a federal injunction to stop “ordering, directing, aiding,
assisting, or abetting” the uprising. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld
Debs’s conviction. He and seven other organizers were sentenced to time
behind bars—Debs to six months, the others to three—and served that time
in Woodstock, Illinois, in a county jail that was less a prison than a
suite of rooms in the back of the elegant two-story Victorian home of
the county sheriff, who had his inmates over for supper every night.
“The Socialist Conversion” is the title of the half-page panel
depicting these six months in “Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography.” It
shows Debs in a prisoner’s uniform, seated at a desk in a bare room,
with a beady-eyed, billy-club-wielding prison guard looking on from the
doorway, while a cheerful man in a suit, carrying “The Communist
Manifesto,” approaches Debs, his speech bubble reading “This is a
present from the Socialists of Milwaukee to you.”
Very little of this is true. Debs’s time in jail in Woodstock was
remarkably comfortable. He ran the union office out of his cell. He was
allowed to leave jail on his honor. “The other night I had to lock
myself in,” he told the New York World reporter Nellie Bly, when
she went to interview him. “There was no sign of the prisoner about Mr.
Debs’ clothes,” Bly reported. “He wore a well-made suit of grey tweed,
the coat being a cutaway, and a white starched shirt with a standing
collar and a small black and white scarf tied in a bow-knot.” The
Milwaukee socialist Victor Berger did bring Debs a copy of Marx’s “Das Kapital.”
And Debs and his fellow labor organizers dedicated most of their daily
schedule to reading. “I had heard but little of Socialism” before the
Pullman strike, Debs later claimed, insisting that the reading he did in
jail brought about his conversion. But it’s not clear what effect that
reading really had on him. “No sir; I do not call myself a socialist,”
he told a strike commission that year. While in jail, he turned away
overtures from socialists. And when he got out, in 1895, and addressed a
crowd of more than a hundred thousand people who met him at the train
station in Chicago, he talked about “the spirit of ’76” and the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not Marx and Engels.
The next year, Debs endorsed the Presidential candidate William
Jennings Bryan, running on both the Democratic and the People’s Party
tickets. Only after Bryan’s loss to William McKinley, whose campaign was
funded by businessmen, did Debs abandon his devotion to the two-party
system. The people elected Bryan, it was said, but money elected
McKinley. On January 1, 1897, writing in the Railway Times, Debs
proclaimed himself a socialist. “The result of the November election has
convinced every intelligent wageworker that in politics, per se, there
is no hope of emancipation from the degrading curse of wage-slavery,” he
wrote. “I am for socialism because I am for humanity. . . . Money
constitutes no proper basis of civilization.”
That June, at the annual meeting of the American Railway Union, Debs
founded the Social Democracy of America party. When it splintered,
within the year, Victor Berger and Debs joined what became the Social
Democratic Party, and then, in 1901, the Socialist Party of America. For
Debs, socialism meant public ownership of the means of production.
“Arouse from your slavery, join the Social Democratic Party and vote
with us to take possession of the mines of the country and operate them
in the interest of the people,” he urged miners in Illinois and Kansas
in 1899. But Debs’s socialism, which was so starry-eyed that his critics
called it “impossibilism,” was decidedly American, and had less to do
with Karl Marx and Communism than with Walt Whitman and Protestantism.
“What is Socialism?” he asked. “Merely Christianity in action. It
recognizes the equality in men.”
The myth of Debs’s Christlike suffering and socialist conversion in
the county jail dates to 1900; it was a campaign strategy. At the Social
Democratic Party convention that March, a Massachusetts delegate
nominated Debs as the Party’s Presidential candidate and, in his
nominating speech, likened Debs’s time in Woodstock to the Resurrection:
“When he came forth from that tomb it was to a resurrection of life and
the first message that he gave to his class as he came from his
darkened cell was a message of liberty.” Debs earned nearly ninety
thousand votes in that year’s election, and more than four times as many
when he ran again in 1904. In 1908, he campaigned in thirty-three
states, travelling on a custom train called the Red Special. As one
story has it, a woman waiting for Debs at a station in Illinois asked,
“Is that Debs?” to which another woman replied, “Oh, no, that ain’t
Debs—when Debs comes out you’ll think it’s Jesus Christ.”
“This is our year,” Debs said in 1912, and it was, in the sense that
nearly a million Americans voted for him for President. But 1912 was
also socialism’s year in the sense that both the Democratic and the
Republican parties embraced progressive reforms long advocated by
socialists (and, for that matter, populists): women’s suffrage,
trust-busting, economic reform, maximum-hour and minimum-wage laws, the
abolition of child labor, and the direct election of U.S. senators. As
Debs could likely perceive a couple of years later, when the Great War
broke out in Europe, 1912 was to be socialism’s high-water mark in the
United States. “You may hasten Socialism,” he said, “you may retard it,
but you cannot stop it.” Except that socialism had already done most of
what it would do in the United States in those decades: it had reformed
the two major parties.
Debs was too sick to run in 1916. The United States declared war on
Germany in April, 1917; the Bolshevik Revolution swept Russia that
November. Debs spoke out against the war as soon as it began. “I am
opposed to every war but one,” he said. “I am for that war with heart
and soul, and that is the world-wide war of the social revolution. In
that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make
necessary, even to the barricades.” Bernie Sanders recorded this speech
for his 1979 documentary. And, as a member of the Senate, Sanders said
it again. “There is a war going on in this country,” he declared on the
floor of the Senate in 2010, in a speech of protest that lasted more
than eight hours. “I am not referring to the war in Iraq or the war in
Afghanistan. I am talking about a war being waged by some of the
wealthiest and most powerful people against working families, against
the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country.”
After Debs, socialism endured in the six-time Presidential candidacy
of his successor, Norman Thomas. But it endured far more significantly
in Progressive-era reforms, in the New Deal, and in Lyndon Johnson’s
Great Society. In the decades since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980,
many of those reforms have been undone, monopolies have risen again, and
income inequality has spiked back up to where it was in Debs’s
lifetime. Socialism has been carried into the twenty-first century by
way of Sanders, a Debs disciple, and by way of the utter failure of the
two-party system. Last summer, a Gallup poll found that more Democrats
view socialism favorably than view capitalism favorably. This brand of
socialism has its own obsession with manliness, with its “Bernie bros”
and allegations by women who worked on Sanders’s 2016 Presidential
campaign of widespread sexual harassment and violence. Sanders’s
campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, recently addressed some of these charges:
“Was it too male? Yes. Was it too white? Yes.” Hence the movement’s new
face, and new voice: the former Sanders campaign worker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Debs wrote its manifesto, but there’s a certain timidity to the new
socialism. It lacks sand. In 1894, one Pullman worker stated the nature
of the problem: “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman
shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church,
and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.” We live in Amazon
houses and eat Amazon groceries and read Amazon newspapers and when we
die we shall go to an Amazon Hell. In the meantime, you can buy your
Bernie 2020 hats and A.O.C. T-shirts on . . . Amazon.
Debs was arrested in Cleveland in 1918, under the terms of the 1917
Espionage Act, for a speech protesting the war that he had given two
weeks earlier, on June 16th, in Canton, Ohio. “Debs Invites Arrest,” the Washington Post
announced. Most of the nation’s newspapers described him as a dictator
or a traitor, or both. And, because what he had said was deemed
seditious, newspapers couldn’t print it, and readers assumed the worst.
But the speech was vintage Debs, from its vague blandishments and
programmatic promises—“We are going to destroy all enslaving and
degrading capitalist institutions and re-create them as free and
humanizing institutions”—to its astute observations and forceful
repetitions: “The working class who fight the battles, the working class
who make the sacrifices, the working class who shed the blood, the
working class who furnish the corpses, the working class have never yet
had a voice in declaring war.”
Debs was one of thousands of socialists jailed during the First World
War and the Red Scare that followed, when the Justice Department
effectively tried to outlaw socialism. His defense attorney compared him
to Christ—“You shall know him by his works”—and called no one to the
stand but Debs, who, during a two-hour oration, talked less about
socialism than about the First Amendment. “I believe in free speech, in
war as well as in peace,” Debs told the court. “If the Espionage Law
stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead.”
The socialist Max Eastman, watching him speak that day, described
Debs’s growing fervor. “His utterance became more clear and piercing,
and it made the simplicity of his faith seem almost like a portent,”
Eastman wrote. But it’s the speech Debs gave during his sentencing that
would be his best-remembered address, his American creed: “While there
is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of
it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
After being sentenced to ten years, he was taken, by train, from
Cleveland to a prison in West Virginia, where he was held for two months
before being transferred to the much harsher Atlanta Federal
Penitentiary. On the wall of a cell that he shared with five other men,
he hung a picture of Jesus, wearing his crown of thorns. Refusing to ask
for or accept special treatment, he was confined to his cell for
fourteen hours a day and was allotted twenty minutes a day in the prison
yard. He wore a rough denim uniform. He ate food barely fit to eat. He
grew gaunt and weak.
Debs came to think about the men he met in prison the way he’d once
thought about men he’d worked with on the railroad. “A prison is a cross
section of society in which every human strain is clearly revealed,” he
wrote in a memoir called “Walls and Bars.” But, if the railroad was a
model of hierarchy, prison was a model of equality: “We were all on a
dead level there.”
He became an American folk hero, a champion of free speech. In his
“from the jail house to the White House” campaign, in 1920, he earned
nearly a million votes running for President as Convict No. 9653. But a
vote for Debs in 1920 was not a vote for socialism; it was a vote for
free speech.
Convict No. 9653 refused to ask for a pardon, even as he grew sicker,
and leaner, and weaker. His reputation as a twentieth-century Christ
grew. (Kurt Vonnegut’s much beset narrator in “Hocus Pocus”
says, “I am so powerless and despised now that the man I am named
after, Eugene Debs, if he were still alive, might at last be somewhat
fond of me.”) His supporters began holding Free Debs rallies. President
Woodrow Wilson refused to answer calls for amnesty. Warren Harding
finally released him, on Christmas Day, 1921. Debs never recovered. He
lived much of what remained of his life in a sanatorium. In 1925, he
said that the Socialist Party was “as near a corpse as a thing can be.”
He died the next year.
Debs understood capitalism best on a train, socialism best in prison.
One of the last letters he wrote was to the judge who had sentenced him
in 1918, asking whether his conviction had left him disenfranchised or
whether he still had the right to vote.
