American History

Eugene Debs was arguably the most successful Socialist activist in American history.  A Midwestern labor unionist who grew to national prominence around the turn of the century, he ran for president four times, garnering six percent of the vote in 1912 and, perhaps more impressively, appealed to three percent of the electorate while imprisoned for sedition and anti-war activities in 1920.  In his biography The Bending Cross, Ray Ginger characterizes Eugene Debs as a hero to millions.  Several decades later, in Eugene Debs Citizen and Socialist, Nick Salvatore deconstructs that heroism. The most salient difference between the two biographies is the way in which Salvatore complicates Gingers portrait of Debss movement from pure and simple trade unionism to a place in the socialist movement by showing how traditional American values shaped and anchored Debss peculiar form of Socialism.  While Gingers book, published approximately twenty years after Debss death, reveals his own activist leanings and springs from a sense of continuity with Debss own experience, Salvatores rhetorical distance and his emphasis on Debss populist individualism are in keeping with the authors early 1980s American context.  Other important differences in the biographers treatments include their narrative approaches, conceptions of Debss leadership role, and analyses of his sympathy with the 1917 Russian revolution.  In this paper, I will explore all of these differences, and their relation to authorial context, by way of a three-part chronological framework.  I will begin by touching on Debss early and distinctly American influences, before discussing his turn-of-the-century ideological transformation and, finally, analyzing his ambivalent attitude toward leadership.

The most striking quality of Eugene Debss life and thought is its paradoxical character.  He was at once a national political leader and a small-town worker, a Socialist revolutionary and an American constitutionalist, a local citizen and a citizen of the world.  Debs was born and raised in Terra Haute, Indiana, and it is in this experience that both Salvatore and Ginger locate his power as a leader.  According to the latter, Debss history meant that he was able to identify with working class Americans and thus gain their sympathy as a speaker.  Salvatore also acknowledges this identity, but he is more interested in how the values that shaped Debss small-town upbringing influenced his political thinking.  Salvatore uses the concepts of manhood and harmonytraditional American Protestant values ingrained in nineteenth century lifeas a lens through which to trace the activists personal and political development.

Salvatore characterizes Debss life as centered on the understanding of and desire for manhood and harmony.  These traditional values, though necessarily expanded and transformed by Debss social and political evolution, remained present throughout his career and so always anchored him to his specific Midwestern American context.  As a young man, Debs was preoccupied with the concept of manhood, a common social concern of his time.  This concept, which united morality with participation in industry, was used by conservatives as a way to maintain the status quo even as it contained the potential to critique that status quo.  Manhood, for Debs, meant the individuals refusal to bow down to the oppression of industrial capitalism.  Later in his life, Debs fused the concepts of manhood and community.  In asserting the power of fraternal unity based on an acceptance of individual responsibility, Debs sought to revitalize a more holistic view of mana view, he felt, that was the ultimate cultural defense against the revolutionary values of corporate industrial society.  In the shifting meaning of this concept, we see Debss struggle to reconcile his commitment to the culture from which he came with an increasing awareness of class struggle and economic injustice.
Another locus of his personal and political development was the civil and religious notion of harmony, which, like manhood, could be used both to enforce conformity to the extant social order and to prophetically critique it.  The value of harmony, Salvatore argues, led to a religious vision of a classless society, a manifestation of Gods specific will for America and for humankind.  This religious or millennial image became part of the fabric of the American Socialist critique.  Salvatore uses the concept of harmony to capture Debss complexity, showing how he was able to maintain continuity of thought while remaining open to the wisdom of experience.  For example, while Ginger implies a stable relationship between Debs and working people, a faith in all workingmen and a confidence that they would move forward by virtue of their own courage and unity that lasted his entire life, Salvatore gives a more subtle treatment of Debss development, showing how his understanding of harmony among workers changed as he delved deeper into the fray of labor unionism.

Specifically, the Burlington strike of 1888, which saw workers pitted against each other and some even siding with corporations, tested Debss belief in the continued power of the community and the practicality of the idea of harmony in industrial America.  He was forced to revise his understanding of harmony in order to make room for the diversity and messiness of working class reality.  But, because he was so firmly rooted in this nineteenth century American concept, he could not simply give it up.  Indeed, it was his commitment to such traditional American values that made his leadership so attractive to working people.  Thus, Salvatore argues, he was able to respond to disillusionment by evolving as a leader, without abandoning his vital hope for the creation of a just and equal economic community.

Ginger and Salvatore agree that Debss crucial transition from Midwestern labor unionist and Democrat to national symbol of American Socialism can be located in the events surrounding the Pullman strike of 1894.  Few events in American history have been so filled with meaning, Ginger states, as the Pullman boycott and its attendant circumstances.  Certainly its meaning in Debss life cannot be overstated.  The strike, which ended in violent clashes between strikers and federal troops, gave Debs his first taste of failure against the despotic power of the federal government.  This failure would be tasted again, more profoundly, during his imprisonment for sedition in the 1920s.

The Pullman strike began in a manufacturing community outside Chicago.  Due to widespread bankruptcy and decreased wholesale prices, many companies were attempting to lower their production costs while continuing to turn a profit by cutting workers wages.  The Pullman Company, which manufactured sleeper cars for trains, not only employed but also provided rental houses and other services to its workers.  Pullman was the only employer and only landlord and since there was no competing demand for labor, and since most of the Pullman workers lacked the money to migrate elsewhere in search of better jobs, they were forced to submit or starve.  The workers attempted a third option, and began a strike which would develop into a national frenzy, a crystallization of national tensions between workers and their exploitative employers.

Debs did not immediately support the strike, but as he became increasingly aware of the Pullman Companys abuses, and was staggered by the intervention of federal courts and troops, he developed into a kind of spokesman for the rebellion.  This position of prominence, while it landed him in prison for six months, also skyrocketed him to national fame.  Upon his release from prison at Woodstock, Illinois, having been exposed Marx and other Socialist thought, he was ready to speak out in a more forceful and radical way. Socialists across the country were ready to listen.

Ginger and Salvatore, while they agree on the importance of the Pullman strike and subsequent imprisonment in Debss ideological transformation, conceive of this transformation in different ways.  Salvatore cautions against mythologizing Debss conversion, advocating instead a fluid view of his change that allows for the synthesis of old and new values.  Ginger, although he softens the sudden conversion theory by acknowledging that Debs had moved slowly and backtracked often before deciding on this step toward Socialism, posits a clean break between Debss more traditional democratic and populist views and his newfound Socialism.  He claims that Debs never conceived of an economic system other than capitalism before his Woodstock imprisonment, and seems to suggest that when he decided to come out as a Socialist, Debs left most of his previous views behind.

Salvatores analysis gives a fuller, more realistic picture of Debss development.  During the Burlington strike of 1888, Salvatore shows, Debs was already engaged in a potent critique of capitalism.  Furthermore, even as this critique grew into a full-fledged Socialist ideology during and after Woodstock, Debs never left behind his faith in American revolutionary and constitutional principles.  His involvement in the Populist movement directly after his imprisonment did not, as Ginger indicates, end in 1896 when he decided to become Socialist.   Rather, it flowed into his Socialism, creating a unique and broadly appealing synthesis of Socialism and American revolutionary values.
Ultimately, of course, he would embrace the term Socialism, but he would bring to it a meaning specific to his earlier career and profoundly rooted in his understanding of the American democratic tradition.  The Pullman and Woodstock experiences do indicate a growing radicalization, but Debs took his inspiration from Jefferson and Lincoln and not from orthodox Socialist writers.

And, further on

Quote as he might Marx, Engels, Lassalle, or Kautskythe roots of his own social thought remained deeply enmeshed in a different tradition. Although a Socialist, Debs never embraced unequivocally that theorys determinism.  Rather he consistently addressed the necessity for individual freedom of action.

In Salvatores view, Debss political thought was always centered upon the primacy of the individual as conceived in the American constitution.  The ultimate goal of any Socialist revolution would be to secure economic justice for individuals, freeing them from the degradation of industrial capitalism.  Moreover, it was the individual who would, through self-development, secure this freedom for him-or-herself.  The heart of his political work lay in demonstrating to the individual voter the necessity of transcending previous political and cultural consciousness, and he understood that no party functionary or political machine could substitute for that critical process.  Just as his conceptions of manhood and harmony were based upon the interdependence of free individuals, so Socialism and individualism were synthesized in Debss thought.

Ginger, for his part, barely mentions Debss commitment to individualism, preferring instead to focus on his status as a radical leader.  He is more interested in recounting the activists meetings with anarchists like Emma Goldman than his dependence on American revolutionary ideas, a dependence that is clearly demonstrated in Salvatores work.  What accounts for this disparity  While Salvatores analysis, because of its complexity, is ultimately more satisfying than Gingers, both authors, to some extent, overemphasize one aspect of Debss politics while downplaying another.  Gingers glorification of Debss Socialist principles, along with his portrayal of Debs as a hero and savior to millions, suggests that his work is concerned with promoting Socialist activism.  Salvatores constant insistence on Debss individualism, in turn, reveals his 1980s American context, when anti-Communist sentiment had become a crucial part of American self-identity and the political climate was favorable to a resurgence of populist individualism.

This point is compounded by the authors differing treatments of Debss sympathy with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia.  Ginger repeatedly emphasizes Debss identity with the Bolsheviks and his sympathy with their suppression of civil liberties, finding this to be consistent with his Socialist commitments.  Salvatore, on the other hand, points to a deep gulf between Debss core belief in individual freedom and his support of the Bolsheviks.  His infatuation with the Russian Revolution and his advocacy, during 1918 and 1919, of the imminence of American soviets, contradicted the beliefs of a lifetime.  Ginger, because he fails to locate Debss activism in a commitment to individualism, finds no contradiction here.

For Ginger, Debs was preeminently a leader whose success in furthering the cause of American Socialism made him into a national hero.  Salvatore does not find in Debs a hero or a Socialist leader, but a man who had symbolized for many a commitment to a democratic, egalitarian movement.  Both authors agree that Debs displayed ambivalence with regard to leadership, preferring to teach his followers to lead themselves.  But Salvatore locates this ambivalence in Debss emotional vulnerability, his need for approval and the feeling of community, while Ginger locates it mostly in an ideological distrust of leadership.  This is in keeping with Gingers attempt to forward an almost mythological vision of Debs as a great man.  Salvatores approach, in turn, reflects the contemporary American culture in which he was situated, where individual psychological and emotional analysis by an outsider is the preferred mode of achieving self-understanding.  More importantly, Salvatores treatment of Debss emotional fragility is consistent with his overall intention to deconstruct Debss legendary heroism.

It is somewhat ironic, given these considerations, that Gingers narrative approach to The Bending Cross attempts, in a romantic and novelistic fashion, to get inside Debss mind and speak from his perspective.  Salvatore, although his analysis of Debss motivations places more emphasis on the activists emotional needs, takes a critical and detached approach.  This distinction can be traced not only to Gingers promotional motivation as opposed to Salvatores critical one, but also to the authors different eras.  Having written his work in the late 1940s, approximately twenty years after Debss death, Gingers narrative method suggests that he understands himself to be a part of Debss story in a way that Salvatore, writing in the 1980s, could not.

The differing perspectives of these biographies, along with the analysis of the possible reasons for their differences, provides us with a comprehensive vision not only of Debss life, but also of what he has meant to succeeding generations of Americans.  I have shown how, in the figure of Debs, seeming paradoxes like individualism and Socialism, small-town values and internationalism, and leadership and emotional fragility were, if not reconciled, then at least dialectically engaged in the figure of Eugene Debs.  This, above all, is why he appealed (and continues to appeal) to many Americans he was able to articulate and symbolize something of the severe dislocation experienced by all Americans in the transformation to industrial capitalism, a dislocation which was just as severe in Gingers and Salvatores times as it was in Debss and, indeed, as it continues to be today.