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Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982)

por Nick Salvatore

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1985136,110 (3.67)3
In this classic book, Nick Salvatore offers a major reevaluation of Eugene V. Debs, the movements he launched, and his belief in American Socialism as an extension of the nation's democratic traditions.
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In the first two decades of the twentieth century the Socialist Party appeared to be a growing force in American politics. As Socialist agitators and newspaper editors denounced the evils of the expanding capitalist system, organizers mobilized laborers into unions and Socialist candidates throughout the country won offices at the city, state, and even federal level. Yet by the early 1920s the Socialist Party was in a decline even swifter than their rise, with its membership riven by infighting and marginalized by the increasingly conservative mood of the nation.

No figure better personified the trajectory of the Socialist Party’s fortunes during this era than Eugene Victor Debs. As the party’s five-time nominee for the presidency of the United States, Debs was buoyed by rapidly increasing voter numbers during his first four campaigns for the office. When he ran for the final time in 1920, however, he did so from a federal penitentiary in Atlanta thanks to a wartime conviction for sedition. It was a testament to Debs’s appeal that even while incarcerated he received over 900,000 votes, though as a percentage of the vote is was little more than half of the total he had received in his last bid for the office. No subsequent Socialist party candidate was ever able to improve upon that result, however.

In his biography of Debs, Nick Salvatore makes it clear that a major reason why none of Debs’s successors could duplicate his achievement was because none brought what he did to the party. As a longtime labor leader, Debs possessed an unmatched credibility with working-class Americans, his sacrifices on behalf of whom was part of his appeal. Yet as Salvatore explains, the basis of Debs’s approach to socialism was far more complex than that. The son of French immigrants, Debs left school at an early age to work for one of the local railroad companies. In 1875 he joined the Brotherhood of Local Firemen, and quickly distinguished himself with his tireless activism on the organization’s behalf. It was as a union leader that Debs became nationally famous, as he worked to establish an industrial union in response to the growing centralization and corporatization of the railroad business in Gilded Age America.

The demise of the American Railway Union (ARU) in the aftermath of the Pullman Strike in 1894 convinced Debs of the inadequacy of unionization as a response to business concentration. While in jail for violating a federal injunction, Debs began reading texts advancing socialist ideas. Upon his release, Debs pushed the remnants of the ARU to join with others to create a new political party advocating for socialist policies. Debs’s prominence as a labor activist made him a natural choice as their presidential candidate in 1900, a task he accepted reluctantly but threw himself into with determination. Salvatore devotes as much attention to history of the Socialist Party during this period as he does to Debs himself, detailing the infighting that shaped its development. As he had as a labor leader Debs stayed clear of factional disputes, preserving his appeal within the fractious party but at the cost of allowing the personal and ideological disagreements to fester.

Though Salvatore describes the issues that divided Socialist Party leaders, he emphasizes that these were of secondary concern to Debs. Unlike the doctrinaire approach of many of its members, Debs grounded his Socialist advocacy in the Protestant theology and republican ideology he had inculcated since his youth. By positing socialism as the path towards realizing the nation’s democratic and egalitarian ideas, he made it far more appealing to American voters than abstract theories ever could have been. Coupled with Debs’s bona fides as a labor leader and his earnest and effective style of speechmaking, he became the party’s greatest asset for advancing its vision for a better tomorrow.

Yet Debs was far from the only critic of industrial capitalism in these years. As Salvatore notes, other presidential candidates were also denouncing its excesses and offering political solutions in an effort to win voters. While each election seemed to bring the Socialist Party closer to a breakthrough, the 1912 presidential election proved a high-water mark for their fortunes. As Progressive era reforms and the outbreak of war in Europe shifted the public discourse to other matters. Debs’s criticisms of the Wilson administration eventually resulted in his arrest and conviction, while his subsequent prison term proved detrimental to his frail health. Released after President Warren Harding commuting his sentence, Debs spent his final years as a shadow of his former self, trying to navigate a fractured socialist movement that struggled for relevance in the Roaring Twenties.

By situating Debs’s life within the context of the developing capitalist economy, Salvatore conveys insightfully the factors in his subject’s own transformation from a respected trade unionist and promising Democratic politician into the leading Socialist figure of his age. As a result, Debs goes from being a marginal political figure in the nation’s history to one at the heart of the choices faced by millions of Americans as values and social structures evolved in response to industrialism and the changes it brought. It makes for a book that is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in learning about Debs, and one that is unlikely ever to be surpassed as a study of his life and times. ( )
1 vote MacDad | Sep 13, 2020 |
Eugene Debs is now largely forgotten by all but historians, but in the first two decades of the twentieth century he was one of the most prominent and, by many, beloved political figures in America. A life-long labor leader, a charismatic spokesman for working people, and five-time Socialist candidate for president, Debs was, as Cornell historian Nick Salvatore puts it in this excellent biography, “the classic example of an indigenous American radical.”

But he didn't start out that way. Growing up in post-Civil War Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs was imbued with the traditional American values of faith, individualism, and equal opportunity for all. He never gave up on those values, but gradually came to feel that they were betrayed by the growth of industrial capitalism, as ever-expanding corporate power broke the personal bonds between owners and employees and reduced workers to nameless “hands,” just another input, like coal or iron, to the industrial process. The vicious labor strife of the 1890s, especially the Pullman strike of 1894, shattered Debs's belief (and that of hundreds of thousands of other workers, farmers and small business-owners) in corporate benevolence and led him to socialism. But though committed to destroying capitalist control over the means of production, Debs's vision for a socialist future was less influenced by Marxist theory than by the religious faith and belief in individual rights of his youth. It was this amalgam of European socialism and American values that strengthened his popular appeal and prompted Salvatore's description of “an indigenous American radical.”

Salvatore's focus is on the development of Debs's political ideas and his growth as a leader of the labor movement. There is relatively little here on Debs's personal life (and what there is is used primarily to illuminate Debs's personality and behavior). But then labor organizing and, later, socialist politics seem to have been his whole life. And his life can be read as a microcosm of labor's response to the growth of industrial capitalism in America. Reading Salvatore's careful description of Debs's slow, painful evolution from loyal trade unionist to socialist radical, one can't help but be struck by his tenacious but ultimately fruitless effort to find a common ground where labor and capital could both benefit from the expanding industrial society. Debs searched most of his life for an accommodation that would ensure both capitalist profits and the individual dignity and independence of working people, but the hostility of corporations – backed up by local and federal governments – to any labor resistance to the supremacy of corporate control (and profits) frustrated him at every turn. He finally concluded that accommodation was impossible and he turned, in the end, to socialism and to a vision of an American economy and political system under the control of working people.

Salvatore provides no explanation as to just how this vision would have played out, perhaps because Debs's himself never articulated one. His political life was consumed with organizing and speaking to workers, and with fighting endless factional battles with other socialists. There clearly was no consensus within the Socialist Party, which was largely dominated by European-born leaders more concerned about theoretical purity than practical accomplishments. But however utopian Debs's goals may have been, Salvatore's analysis makes it clear that his response to industrial capitalism was rational, clear-eyed, and anything but utopian. Like thousands of other Americans during the early twentieth century, Debs was seeking a means of regaining the individual rights and dignity which unfettered capitalism had taken from working people. The votes Debs received in his presidential campaigns (nearly one million in 1912) and the support Socialists received in local elections (especially in the west and southwest) demonstrate the tremendous sympathy many Americans had for socialist ideas.

But in the final analysis, most Americans could not follow Debs in his quest to completely reorganize the American political and economic system. Even Progressive reformers (whom Debs dismissed for believing that the existing system could be reformed) lost momentum after World War I and the economic boom of the 1920s. It took the economic cataclysm of the 1930s to bring reform back into favor and to create the regulatory mechanisms that helped find some balance between the interests of individuals and corporations. The tragedy of Eugene Debs is not the failure of his socialist dreams, but that his fierce vision of individual justice and rights has been overshadowed by libertarian paranoia about government intervention and socialist bogeymen. What Debs had to say about the corporatist control of our society and lives still has considerable relevance today. ( )
1 vote walbat | Jun 4, 2010 |
I read this because it in 1983 won the Bancroft Prize. It is the 36th such winner I have read. The author is quite sympathetic to Debs, though he does not hesitate to criticize him and point out his faults. But the book is not sprightly but is written rather ploddingly. The long delving into intra-socialist squabblings is boring. The interesting legal cases Debs was involved in are not told very well, or at least not to a lawyer's satisfaction. Debs was not well educated, but was a powerful orator. I surely think the case which sent him to prison could have been more ably expounded upon by the author. ( )
  Schmerguls | Aug 18, 2009 |
1/18/23
  laplantelibrary | Jan 18, 2023 |
currently reading
  mamorico | Apr 20, 2007 |
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In this classic book, Nick Salvatore offers a major reevaluation of Eugene V. Debs, the movements he launched, and his belief in American Socialism as an extension of the nation's democratic traditions.

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