Readings for Revolutionaries: “An American Socialist”

by Barry Weisleder / February 2010

There was a time when hundreds of thousands of American workers defied politicians, courts, the cops, and paramilitary gangs to strike for decent wages and union rights—and when over a million men voted for a revolutionary socialist to be president (before women won the right to vote). The first great U.S. mass radicalization against deadly work conditions and miserable exploitation produced a generation of proletarian rebels.

“Eugene V. Debs, A Biography”, by Ray Ginger (Collier Books, New York, N.Y., 1962, 543 pages) is the story of the leading voice and most resilient symbol of that late-19th-century generation.

Eugene Debs (1855-1926), a shy, polite son of Terre Haute, Indiana, quit school to labour as a boilerman on the Vandalia railroad. When his friend fell under a train and died, Debs quit and pledged to reform the horrendous working conditions by recruiting for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen.

Starting with conservative views about strikes and political action, Debs radicalized alongside his co-workers, founded the American Railway Union, and became a leading proponent of industrial unionism and class struggle politics. He became a prominent national figure due to his tireless, eloquent, and courageous leadership of the Great Northern Railway strike of 1877 and the famous Pullman Boycott of 1894 (for which he went to jail).

He quit the Democratic Party and embraced socialism as the solution to economic tyranny, poverty, and waste. Though the momentous labour struggles he led suffered vicious repression, and often had mixed immediate results, they laid the basis for mass working-class self-organization. They also challenged the complacent, pro-capitalist policies of the dominant craft unions, symbolized by Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labour, with whom Debs frequently clashed.

The author portrays Debs in all his complexity. He was a chivalrous Victorian gentleman whose fiery speeches were the bane of the ruling class; a proponent of sedate home and family values who lived mostly on the campaign trail, away from his wife Kate for months at a time. He eschewed the comforts of union office, and routinely gave away his money, even his overcoat and jacket, to fellows he met who appeared to be in need.

Debs’s extreme selflessness had a political counterpart in his aversion to fight for his policies within his own organizations. This applied especially to the U.S. Socialist Party, whose candidate for president he was on four occasions. The SP was a broad coalition of disparate currents, from anarcho-syndicalists to Marxists to pro-business reformists.

Although the SP enjoyed a massive radical base, boasting up to 135,000 members and nearly half a million subscribers to its weekly newspaper Appeal to Reason, not to mention a host of other publications, its apparatus was dominated by crass reform politicians, dubbed ‘sewer socialists’ for their association with basic municipal improvements. Under their influence, the SP capitulated to the craft unionism of the AFL, to its tolerance of racist job segregation, and to the patriotic hysteria linked to the imperialist World War I.

In all his years as the leading spokesperson for the SP, Debs only once attended a convention of his party. He refused to organize a fight for revolutionary socialist policies within the organization, believing that his job was “to convert the rank and file, who would then convert the leaders”. Unfortunately, this extended to a belief that revolutionary politics would spontaneously survive and prosper in a broad, undisciplined party riven by factions.

Another weakness was his view that, despite widespread racism and sexism, socialists should advance no special measures, no affirmative-action policies for any distinctly oppressed section of the working class: his answer to oppression under capitalism was socialism, full stop.

Debs’ dream of the SP as the voice of a united, triumphant working class, independent of the bosses’ parties, was publicly desecrated when the party backed the capitalist Progressive Party in the 1924 election. After the vote, the Progressives dissolved and the discredited SP shrivelled. The nascent Communist Party, champion of the Russian Revolution (which Debs ardently supported, in contrast to the ambivalent SP leadership), attracted the bulk of radicals.

Although Debs’ health was broken by the two and a half hard years he served in an Atlanta, Georgia, prison for opposing World War I, his militant spirit, his promotion of industrial unionism and mass action, and his faith in socialism as the antidote to capitalist exploitation and war continue to inspire generations of fighters for social justice and workers’ power.

The great socialist was a leading campaigner for civil liberties and defender of victims of capitalist repression, from the Haymarket Martyrs to Big Bill Haywood. He identified closely with the victims of capitalist injustice. No one expressed the thought more forcefully, more eloquently than he did in his own defense in 1918: “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.”

This biography is worth reading, if only for the many fabulous quotes from some of the greatest speeches ever delivered by a working-class leader. Despite its superficiality in dealing with Marxist theory, competing tendencies on the left, and questions of political strategy, Ray Ginger’s book is artfully packaged with fascinating details, delivered in a heart-warming fashion, about a great man and a great time in U.S. labour history.