Hello,
everyone. Hope you all have had a very Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and
wonderful spring break. But I bet you didn’t expect to see me again. Yep. It is
I, Matt Craft, Award-Winning (AW) Man, Myth, Legend (MML), Historical
Investigator (HI).
In case, you’re wondering what I’ve been up to
these past months, well, it’s quite simple: I’m slowly looking for a job and
chillaxing while I’m at it. You may think this is a dream come true or the best
of both worlds. It’s not! I’d very much rather be working and earning income
than chillaxing all day.
Anywho,
four members of the Belmont History Society plan to succeed me as co-writers on
The Bruin History Blog. But that
doesn’t mean I can’t still contribute. After all, I did birth this blog. So,
that’s what I’m doing here – I’m contributing.
Below
is the first half of my very groovy paper on the American socialist Eugene
Victor Debs, aptly entitled “Eugene V. Debs: The ‘Forgotten Red Saint.’”
I
authored this essay to fulfil an assignment for Dr. Brenda Jackson-Abernathy’s HIS
3050 – Writing History course in the 2012 spring semester. (FYI, you History
majors and minors will take Writing History in your junior or senior year.) When
I finished “The Forgotten Red Saint,” I proudly submitted the
twenty-plus-pager. At the time, this lengthy paper was the longest and best
piece I wrote.
I was so proud of this epic essay that I decided to
present it at the spring 2013 editions of the annual Phi Alpha Theta[1]
regional conference and the Belmont Undergraduate Research Symposium (BURS). In
order to present this paper, however, I had to shorten it as there was a time
limit in both conferences. Consequently, I produced a twelve-page abridged
version.
Twelve pages are still too long for The Bruin History Blog; therefore, I opted to split the abridged
version in half. And as I said above, part one is below today. Part two will
follow.
So, without any further ado, abridged “Eugene V. Debs:
The Forgotten Red Saint’” Part I...
Matt
Craft
Eugene V. Debs: The Forgotten Red Saint
HIS
3050 – Writing History
Dr.
Brenda Jackson-Abernathy
26
April 2012
Abridged:
21 February 2013
I
In
1912, almost one million Americans cast their votes in a surprising direction,
not for Theodore Roosevelt, not for Woodrow Wilson, and not for William Taft.
Captured by a socialist vision and hoping for a utopian future, they voted for
their socialist presidential candidate: Eugene Victor Debs who spearheaded a
new wave in American politics. Unheralded, almost forgotten, and equally
historic, the American Socialist Democratic Party gained its most votes ever in
the 1912 presidential election. That statistic surprises many students.
Across
early twentieth-century America, voters responded to the socialist cause; they
were not all immigrants working on the docks, nor all concentrated in urban
slums. The prosperity and power of the American industrial machine forged a
strong bond among rural and metropolitan workers nationwide for whom the socialist
dream embodied the path to freedom in the workplace. One man captivated them
and led them, and he sacrificed his life for the American socialist cause.
Debs, the forgotten “Red Saint,” represented both a convergence of American
working class people with reformers and the most significant departure of
voters to true socialism in an American election. The often overlooked socialist streak in the
1912 election beckons the historian to explore its significance.
Debs
personified important underground forces in 1912 but lurked in the shadows of
the other three presidential candidates: the charismatic Roosevelt, the
incumbent Taft, and the idealistic Wilson. Beginning with bold dreams to
unify labor and transform industry leadership, Debs experienced a socialist
conversion which catapulted him to greater lengths that effected more change
than mere collaboration. Debs’s strong personal appeal yielded the highest vote
total for a socialist candidate in American history amidst monumental election
choices, and his nationwide success signified a broad current that would not be
denied in American elections: the electoral power of labor.
Debs crusaded fearlessly as labor
organizer, union leader, Democratic state legislator, and presidential
candidate. An 1894 New York Times article
called him the “enemy of the human race.”[2] A
first-generation American descended from Alsatian parents, Debs inherited a
rebellious and uneasy tendency toward class separation. His pro-labor crusade
began at the railmen’s lodge but concluded on the national stage.
Debs’s mother utilized meager
savings to open a grocery store in their home in Terre Haute, Indiana, and
rescued her husband from a physical breakdown engendered by labor in pack
houses and on the railroad. [3] Third
child and eldest son Eugene (the future “Red Saint”) clerked and stocked for
his father and read Friedrich Schiller[4]
and Victor Hugo.[5] Bored by the repetition and
confinement of school and grocery clerking, Debs left the classroom at fourteen
to service locomotives. The dirty, exhausting labor was anything but romantic;
nevertheless, working thrilled him and made him proud to belong to the
fraternity of railroad men.[6]
In
1871, Debs impulsively accepted the perilous responsibility of a locomotive
fireman when a drunk employee failed to show for his shift. Breathing soot and
fighting flame, the fireman rode behind the engine driver, stoking the fire to
create steam, and served as secondary watchman. From that moment forward,
sixteen-year-old Debs was a railroader at heart, riding up front behind the
powerful iron horse and feeding its steam engine, vital to the operation. When
Joshua Leach, Grand Master of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF),
visited Terre Haute in 1874 to recruit members, Debs not only attended the
meeting but joined the Vigo Lodge.[7] Biographer
Ray Ginger asserted, “Although he had worked on the railroad less than five
years, he had discovered the foundation for his entire career.”[8]
Debs pursued the goals of the BLF as
a mid-level union agent offering good, cheap insurance to railroad laborers. He
studied encyclopedias to improve his learning and participated in local oratory
to groom himself for union leadership. Debs became a national officer of the
BLF and journeyed all over the country. The 1873 depression had made the
workers’ plight a desperate one, and abuses such as eighteen-hour shifts, poor
pay, no rest, and few safety measures abounded. In late summer 1877,
conductors, brakemen, and firemen reached their limit and simultaneously halted
the trains. Riots erupted and consumed Maryland, West Virginia, and
Pennsylvania. The BLF and Debs frowned on violent action, but his opposition to
labor agitation evolved soon enough.
In 1878, Debs entered the political realm
and became City Clerk of Terre Haute. The BLF soon moved its national
headquarters there, for Debs was a man well positioned to swell the BLF’s ranks
during periods of uncertain employment for unskilled laborers. He edited a
printed arm of the Brotherhood, The
Magazine, and conscripted his relatives and friends into service. Debs organized
local chapters and represented their interests. In what became Debsian style,
membership ignited, enthusiasm spread, and contributions paid all outstanding fraternity
debts. By 1880, even William Vanderbilt[9]
endorsed the BLF’s ideals. [10]
Running
as the Democratic candidate from his district for the Indiana State House of
Representatives, Debs fared marvelously in the polls in a year when labor was a
major tenet of the Democratic platform. Historian Nick Salvatore recorded that with
5,603 votes, Debs outran Grover Cleveland in his own Vigo County wards and
townships. Debs’s appeal was broad enough to muster support across class lines.[11]
Salvatore identified disillusionment with mainstream American politics as
formative for Debs during his tenure in the State House. He proudly sponsored a
railroad labor reform bill which passed in the House, but the Senate’s burning
of the bill devastated Debs. “Horrified at the callousness of political
compromise,” Salvatore explained, Debs lost faith in the traditional American
system; this loss helped pave the way to his socialist conversion.[12]
In May 1886, an anti-labor wave
extinguished the flames of early reformist zeal when Chicago’s crowded
Haymarket Square saw a bomb light up the spring sky over a pro-eight-hour-day
rally. Injuries prompted law enforcement to retaliate violently. As Salvatore
revealed, Debs and his fraternity, in favor with railroad management, briefly
maintained a middle ground. The strike represented wholesale mayhem, and Debs
considered it an ineffective weapon.[13]
When
Benjamin Harrison won the U.S. presidency two years later in 1888, Debs’s
vehement dislike for Harrison’s completely anti-labor record propelled Debs to
take command of his first strike, that against the Burlington Railroad in
1888-1889. Debs participated for the
first time and, “more than any other single event in his early career; this
watershed event forced Debs to reevaluate prior opinions and strategies.” [14]
In August of 1890, Debs commanded a
massive railroad strike involving railroaders on the lines from Chicago to
Cincinnati to Buffalo. On August 23, 1890, various contemporaneous newspapers
ran identical front-page reports of Debs in the thick of decisive secret
meetings of the Brotherhoods of Firemen, Conductors, and Trainsmen at his Terre
Haute home. National delegates arrived there to establish a quorum of votes for
the organizations to signal or oppose a strike.
Historian
James Chace framed Debs’s 1894 launch
onto the national stage against railroad
tycoon George Pullman as “decisive in lifting him from a full-time union man to
a national labor leader, a man who did not merely support the workingman but
was also someone of enough moral force to go to prison for his beliefs.”[15]
Victorious against the Great Northern Railroad just one year earlier, Debs
stood proudly at the helm of his newborn American Railway Union. The ARU united
all railway employees except African Americans, whom Debs tried to include.
Brought into the fray by Pullman employees, Debs and the ARU cooperated in a
massive strike involving 100,000 men who walked off the job peacefully, halting
rail movement from Chicago to San Francisco. The New York Times termed these June 26, 1894 events the “Debs Rebellion,”
a moniker which stuck and migrated to other papers during the “struggle between
the most powerful railroad labor organization and the entire railroad capital.”[16]
Outrage
boiled on both sides. The July 11, 1894 Hartford
Herald featured a story out of New
York which expressed malcontent with troublemakers who interfered with the
running of trains. The front page articles painted a sensational portrait of
Debs. He was called both “extraordinary” and “unparagoned,” yet the
still-silent tracks appalled the nation. The
Hartford Herald continued: “Mr. Debs has with extraordinary alacrity
invited the whole population of the country to oppose the American Railway
Union by making the American Railway Union interfere with the whole country.” [17]
Posing
as the protector of the U.S. mail, President Grover Cleveland unleashed the
fury of federal authorities. They had no scruples, torched freight cars, and
sliced the fire hoses needed to quench the blaze. Amidst their own atrocities,
authorities arrested Debs and other union leaders on charges of conspiracy
against interstate commerce. Under the
front page headline “Dictator Debs Arrested,” the July 11, 1894 St. Paul Daily Globe cited Debs as
having ignited a strike which blocked mail transportation. Debs riposted with
his own scathing indictment of those who seized his private effects “like an
act of the czar of Russia rather than the act of a free country.” [18]
Championed
by an outraged Clarence Darrow, Debs and other union leaders received
acquittals for conspiracy but did receive prison sentences for contempt. Inside
Illinois’s cavernous Woodstock jail, Debs underwent an intellectual
renaissance, his vital rebirth as a “Red Saint.” He wrote, “a swift succession
of blows . . . blinded [me] for an instant and then opened wide my eyes—and the class struggle was revealed. This
was my first practical lesson in Socialism.” The language here evoked the
conversion by blinding light of the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. The
vandalizing of his office and the hostile media “baptized [Debs in] Socialism
in the roar of conflict.” [19]
The
political reversal of the prisoner came to completion after months of reading
socialist thought, all sent to him by zealous American compatriots. The press painted Debs as “the closest thing
to a folk hero ever produced by the American left.”[20] He emerged onto the national stage, serving
consecutively as the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate for twenty years
beginning in 1900. For the rest of his life,
Debs wrote, spoke, travelled, and fundraised almost constantly for the American
labor and socialist causes.
Debs
functioned professionally as an itinerant preacher, but in more deluxe mode: he
traveled in his own four-car train, the Red Special, crusading for a socialist
awakening across the country. He reached 500,000 listeners along his 1908
presidential tour, dispersing tracts and buttons, and then returned home to
write more inspirational pamphlets and articles. Debs’s language reflected the
religious fervor he sought to incite.
TO
BE CONTINUED…
You must hate me for saying “To Be Continued.” LOL! But
do not fret. Abridged “Eugene V. Debs: The Forgotten Red Saint’” Part II is
next. So, stay tuned!
Until next time…
AW MML, HI
[1]
Phi Alpha Theta – national honor history society.
[2] Qtd. in Earnest Freeberg,
Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the
Great War, and the Right to Dissent.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 13.
[3] Ray
Ginger, The Bending Cross: a Biography of
Eugene Victor Debs. (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 6.
[4]
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) – German scholar and
writer.
[5]
Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885) – French romanticist.
[6]
Ginger, 10-11; 13.
[7]
Ginger, 15-17; 21.
[8]
Ginger, 19.
[9]
William Henry Vanderbilt (1821-1885) – American entrepreneur.
[10]
Ginger, 29; 33-34.
[11] Nick
Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and
Socialist. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.), 42.
[12]
Salvatore, 43.
[13]
Salvatore, 45-6.
[14]
Salvatore, 68-9; 73.
[15]
James Chace, 1912, (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2004) 76; 74.
[16]
New York Times, qtd. in Chace 77.
[17]
Nym Crinkle for The New York World.
“The Pullman Boycott: Central Figure of the Great Railroad Strike,” Rptd. In The Hartford Herald, July 11, 1894, p.1. http:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov (accessed
April 20, 2012).
[18]
“Dictator Debs Arrested,” St. Paul Daily Globe, July 11, 1894. p. 1; p. 6.
http:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov (accessed February 26, 2012).
[19]
Debs, 82.
[20]
Scott Molloy, “Eugene V. Debs,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed.s Mari
Jo Buhle , Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 179.
