The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. I: Building Solidarity on the Tracks, 1877–1892

This is the first in a five volume series that will collect much of trade unionist and Socialist Party founding father Eugene V. Debs’ work for the first time in a single place. The collection makes readily accessible approximately 150 documents, only a few of which were ever subsequently republished, by one of the seminal figures in the labor movement of his era. Illuminating 19th Century labor history, particularly the complex and shifting situation in the transportation industry, this volume provides a basis for deeper understanding of Debs and his role later during the glory days of the Socialist Party of America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781608469734

Book preview

The Selected Works

of

Eugene V. Debs

Volume 1:

Building Solidarity on the Tracks,

1877–1892

edited by

Tim Davenport

and David Walters

Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

This groundbreaking project by Haymarket Books will republish more than 1,000 of the articles, speeches, press statements, interviews, and open letters of labor leader and socialist activist Eugene Victor Debs. More than 1.5 million words will be reproduced in six thick volumes—the vast majority of which seeing print for the first time since the date of their first publication.

Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926) was a trade union official, magazine editor, political opinion writer, and public orator widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of American socialism. Five times a candidate for president of the United States and twice imprisoned for his role as a strike leader and antiwar agitator, Debs remains today an esteemed and iconic figure of twentieth-century political history.

Published in 2019 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

[e-mail]

ISBNs: 978-1-60846-548-4 (hard cover)

978-1-60846-972-7 (paperback)

978-1-60846-973-4 (ebook)

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International, [e-mail]

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover and text design by Eric Kerl.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Contents

Introduction

1877

Letter to the Editor of Locomotive Firemen’s Monthly Magazine

Our Brotherhood

To the Friend of My Bosom

Further Suggestions on Insurance

Grand Lodge Address to the Fourth Convention of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Indianapolis, Indiana

1878

The Future Prospects of Our Order: Letter to the Editor of Locomotive Firemen’s Monthly Magazine

Closing Address to the Fifth Annual Convention of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen

1879

Benevolence

Sobriety

Industry

The Labor Problem

Temperance

The Rights of Labor

The Misrepresentations of Evil Thinkers

1880

Letter to the Seventh Convention of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen

Organize!

1881

The Power of Persistent Effort

A Gentleman

United Again

1882

The Square Man

United Efforts

Masterful Men

Sand

Labor’s Reward

A Feeling of Success

The Last Ride

1883

Labor, the Genius of Civilization

Man’s Power and God’s Power

Honesty

The Rights of Labor

Self-Respect

Old Time Prejudice

Backbiting a Calamity

Railway Officials

1884

The Mission of Our Brotherhood

Intoxication

Truth

Railroad Managers and the B of LF

Employer and Employed

Tramps and Tramping

What Is Success?

Labor and Law

1885

Speech to the Indiana Legislature Nominating Daniel W. Voorhees for the US Senate

Capital and Labor

The Lessons of Elections

Progress and Poverty

The Attempted Blacklist Degradation of Employees

War Clouds

When a Hundred Years Are Gone

Standing Armies

Dynamite and Legitimate Warfare

Railroad Kings

1886

William H. Vanderbilt

Employees the Wards of Employers

Overproduction

Reformations

Current Disagreements Between Employers and Employees 16

T. V. Powderly and the Knights of Labor

Boycotting

The Locomotive Engineers and the Locomotive Firemen [excerpt]

Why Eight Hours for a Day’s Work?

More Soldiers 19

1887

Politics

Pullman

Trial of the Chicago Anarchists

Abolitionists

Will Labor Organizations Federate?

The Situation in Europe

Labor and Station in Life

Labor Legislation

Opposites

Land, Labor, and Liberty

Child Labor

1888

Joining Labor Organizations

Federation, the Lesson of the Great Strike

The Policy of the Order of Railway Conductors

The Great Strike

The Scab

The Record of the CB&Q Strike

Federation of Labor Organizations for Mutual Protection

Invincible Men

The Common Laborer Is Essential

The Situation in the Great Strike

Home Rule in Ireland

The CB&Q and Pinkerton Conspiracy

The Pinkertons

Equality of Conditions

Federation

Night and Morning

General Benjamin Harrison—Relentless Foe of Labor: Speech in Terre Haute, Indiana

The Aristocracy of Labor

Necessary Strikes

1889

The Knights of Labor

The Progress of Federation

Triumph Through Federation

Termination of the Burlington Strike

The Future of the ORC

New Conductors’ Order Established

The Strength of All for the Good of All

Allegiance to Principle

The Brotherhood of Railway Conductors

Labor as a Commodity

The Labor Movement

The Church and the Workingman

Unmasking Hypocrisy

Jay Gould

Labor Organizations

Meeting to Perfect Federation

Pin and Principle

Truth and Fiction

Federation Inaugurated

Supreme Council of the United Orders of Railway Employees Established [excerpt]

The Johnstown Horror

Prize Fighting

Nationalism

The Dignity of Labor

The Sunday Question

Railroad Federation

Labor Day, 1889

The Triumph of Federation

Important Lessons

Land

The Tyranny of Austin Corbin

Open Letter to P. M. Arthur of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers

1890

The Knights of Labor and the Farmers

Carnegie’s Best Fields for Philanthropy

Looking Backward, 2000–1887

Knights of Labor to Shape Own Destiny

The Common Laborer

What Can We Do for Working People?

The Brotherhood of Railway Conductors and the Supreme Council of Federation

The Eight-Hour Movement

Mrs. Leonora M. Barry: General Instructor and Director of Woman’s Work, Knights of Labor

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Federation

The Buddhists of Burma

ORC Overwhelmingly Endorses Protection

Eight-Hour Day a Righteous Demand

The Higher Education of Women vs. Marriage

Is a Wrong Done to One the Concern of All?

Agitation and Agitators

Labor Day

Powderly and Gompers

Strike

The Supreme Council and the New York Central Strike: Statement to the Press

Clarification of the Supreme Council’s Position on the New York Central Strike: Statement to the Press

Promiscuous Striking

The Strike on the New York Central [excerpt]

Power vs. Power

The Machine and the Man

Locomotive Engineers and Federation

Parties

The Knights of Labor and the Right of Organization

Pictures

Plan of Federation

1891

Fair Wages

Life at Halfway Station

Protection

The Seventy Millionaires

Bellamy Launches The New Nation

The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Supreme Council

The Farmers’ Alliance

Labor Organizations and the Labor Press

Corporations vs. Federation

Dishonest Bankers

Free Speech

Mankind in a Bad Way

The Almighty Dollar

Foreign Pauper Immigration

Labor Leaders

The ORC and the B of RC

Conditions

A Crisis of Federation Affairs

A Plutocratic Government

The Tramp

An American Aristocracy

The People’s Party

Remedies for Wrongs

The Expulsion of the B of RT

From Americans to Slavs and from Independence to Slavery

The Unity of Labor

Caste

Facts About Federation

National Prosperity [excerpt]

Revolution and Rebellion vs. Stagnation

The Lessons Taught by Labor Day

Persecution Because of Religious Opinions in Labor Organizations

Child Labor—a Crime Against Humanity

1892

Liberating Convicts

Letter to E. E. Clark, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

The Great Northwestern Conspiracy: Speech at a Mass Meeting of Railroad Workers, Battery D, Chicago

Is It Possible?

Is Legislation Needed? How Shall It Be Obtained?

Russia

Strikes

Arbitration

Rest

William Lloyd Garrison

Confederation Essential to Labor’s Prosperity

Labor Representatives in Legislative Bodies

May Day in Europe

Crimes of Christless Capitalists

Final Annual Meeting of the Supreme Council

Appendix

Official Circular No. 8 (1888–89)of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen

Official Circular No. 1 of the Supreme Council of the United Orders of Railway Employees

The Days of Long Ago: Letter to the Editor of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine (January 1912)

Introduction

This is the first of a six-volume series gathering the most important writings of American socialist and union organizer Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926). As there have been more than twenty dedicated volumes and countless scholarly articles focusing upon the five-time Socialist presidential candidate, it is frankly puzzling that no project of similar scope has been previously attempted.¹ Indeed, so much biographical information has seen print that the lanky orator from Terre Haute—he of the fiery speeches, the incorruptible ideals, and the two prison terms—would seem to be a Lincolnesque figure of American history, one needing no introduction. Debs’s personal life has been the foil for a historical novel by Irving Stone;² he is the stuff of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction;³ episodes from his childhood have been imaginatively invented to immortalize him as a paragon and prototype in a hagiographic communist children’s book of the 1920s;⁴ and the sons of strangers have been named in his honor.⁵ A symposium of maudlin poetry has been published to laud him.⁶ Claims have been laid on the man’s political legacy by liberals,⁷ social democrats,⁸ Trotskyists,⁹ mainline communists,¹⁰ independent radicals,¹¹ and sundry trade unionists from across the ideological spectrum. Indeed, there has been an enduring cult of hero worship of Eugene V. Debs on the part of the American left, a phenomenon described succinctly by University of Pittsburgh professor Richard Oestreicher:

To his Socialist Party comrades and to political soul mates of the Left ever since, Debs was a secular saint, the center of a modern morality play. A talented man who looked as if he were going to be an all-American success story, Debs gave up personal security to become the voice of the downtrodden and dispossessed. Ignoring his own safety, welfare, and even physical health, he spoke eloquently for victims of capitalism who would otherwise not have been heard. Twice he went to jail for refusing to abandon his principles, the second time, at the age of sixty-two, despite the urging of friends who feared that his unsteady health would not survive the rigors of prison. Indeed, when he left prison after three years, he was sick; and he died only five years later without ever regaining his earlier vigor, a martyr to the cause.¹²

Yet for all the books and articles written about Gene Debs, a vanishingly small percentage of his millions of preserved words have been gathered for a modern audience. Over the years a few limited attempts have been made, to be sure, including several worthy of mention. Debs’s third run for the presidency under the banner of the Socialist Party of America in 1908 provided inspiration for an initial effort to compile and republish some of his speeches and articles.¹³ That volume, Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, edited by Bruce Rogers, carefully gathered a poem, nine speeches, and thirty articles. Of this material, however, just seven pieces date from the nineteenth century and none of these published before 1894—at which time Debs was 40 years old, well into the second half of his life. The Rogers collection was expanded four decades later in a second major attempt to republish some of the key writings of Debs, a book edited by Joseph M. Bernstein, Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs.¹⁴ Bernstein added substantial material produced after the publication of Rogers’s 1908 book, doubling the number of republished Debs items.¹⁵ Virtually no effort was made to further explore Debs’s nineteenth-century writings, however.

To these important republications of Debs’s work may be added three lesser-

known compilations from the first half of the twentieth century: a slim tome published in 1916 by St. Louis socialist Phil Wagner, Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs;¹⁶ a 1919 pamphlet produced by Frank Harris of Pearson’s Magazine gathering five biographical articles written by Debs for his publication;¹⁷ and a diminutive volume of excerpts released in 1928 by the publishing house of the Workers (Communist) Party of America, Speeches of Eugene V. Debs, edited by Alexander Trachtenberg.¹⁸

It would be four decades before another effort was made to select and present the articles and speeches of Gene Debs for a new audience. Eugene V. Debs Speaks, edited by Jean Y. Tussey, was published in 1970 by Pathfinder Press, publishing house of the Socialist Workers Party.¹⁹ Unfortunately, only one of the thirty-four items selected by Tussey could not be found in a previous collection of Debs’s writings. Nor did Ronald Radosh, in his 1971 collection, Debs: Great Lives Observed, manage to plow new ground.²⁰

The first fifteen years of the twenty-first century have seen the publication of two additional volumes selecting Debs’s speeches and articles. The first of these, The Eugene V. Debs Reader: Socialism and the Class Struggle, edited by William A. Pelz, merely moves thirty-four items from the 1948 Bernstein volume to new covers,²¹ while a more recent effort, Lenny Flank’s Writings of Eugene V. Debs: A Collection of Essays by America’s Most Famous Socialist,²² published in 2009, does manage to save two new Debs works from the mists.

The nine projects mentioned above, published over the course of an entire century, have managed to preserve only about one hundred of an estimated four thousand published Debs items between book covers. Of these, a mere nine pieces date from the first half of Debs’s literary activity, the years of the nineteenth century. It is to these early years that we shall turn in the present volume.

The Early Years

The Debs story began during the second half of the 1840s in the ancient town of Colmar, located in the Alsatian region of northeastern France. Jean Daniel Debs, Jr.,²³ known as Daniel to differentiate boy from father, seemed to be blindly marching through life to a cadence played by the family patriarch, the prosperous owner of a textile mill and scion of a former delegate to the French National Assembly.²⁴ It was preordained: Daniel was to be educated well and then learn the textile manufacturing game, managing the factory before ultimately taking the reins of the family business. Alas, the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley²⁵—while apprenticing at the mill to learn the details of the production process, young Daniel made a grave error of the heart, falling in love with a working-class girl employed there. His father forgave neither Marguerite Bettrich’s social station nor her Roman Catholic religion,²⁶ and the relationship between stern father and willful son rapidly deteriorated. Following his father’s death in 1848, a bitter fight erupted among the family over disposition of his estate, with Daniel receiving a cash payout equivalent to $6,000 rather than the anticipated factory.²⁷

Exhausted with familial narrow-mindedness and parochialism, Daniel boldly cut ties and emigrated for a new life in America.²⁸ Leaving behind his beloved Marguerite, the twenty-seven-year-old Daniel set sail for the United States, docking in New York City on January 20, 1849. Unfortunately for the young transplant, between departure and arrival a confidence man managed to make Daniel’s acquaintance well enough to successfully relieve him of the bulk of his inheritance in exchange for a share of a nonexistent New York City tobacco shop.²⁹ Alone in the great city, Debs made a frantic search for the phantom business, but it proved fruitless. With his nest egg gone, Daniel found himself cast from his comfortable bourgeois upbringing into the ranks of the working class, forced for the first time to sell his labor for a living. Reality was harsh; plans to establish a comfortable home in America for himself and Marguerite began to seem unreachable. Dark clouds of growing melancholy crept into his letters home to France. Fearing a breaking point was near, Marguerite responded to one of Daniel’s particularly desperate letters in the summer of 1849 by resolving to join him in America. The pair were married two days after her arrival in New York City, on September 11, 1849. They would remain partners for life.³⁰

After a year in New York and a brief repose in Cincinnati, the émigré Debs family relocated in May 1851 to the midwestern town of Terre Haute, Indiana, a community of approximately five thousand souls. The town’s French-Canadian heritage was evident in the very name of the place, meaning High Ground in the mother tongue.³¹ Terre Haute would be the rich earth into which the Debs family set down roots. Located on the eastern bank of the Wabash River, Terre Haute had emerged as a transportation hub, with the community’s providential proximity to riverboat transit helping spur its industrial base—agriculture, grain milling, and pork processing. Between 1850 and 1860 the size of the town doubled, before doubling again in the ensuing ten years. It was an era with bright prospects for material advancement for the young and motivated, although such opportunity did not come without sweat. Upon arriving in Terre Haute in 1851, Daniel Debs took a job in a pork slaughterhouse, enduring long hours and miserable conditions in the stifling summer heat before leaving for less detestable work. A series of brief and arduous jobs followed, intersected by a short-lived return to New York.³² Back in Indiana, Marguerite and Daniel eventually managed to save $40 by 1855,³³ establishing a tiny grocery store with its limited inventory arrayed in the front downstairs room of the family home.³⁴ A freestanding market would eventually be launched as the Debs family reinvested its profits in the growing business, with the family relocating to relatively comfortable multiroom living quarters located above the store. Daniel Debs and his family would remain in the grocery trade for more than thirty years.³⁵

2

Eugene Victor Debs was born on November 5, 1855. He was the fifth-born of Daniel and Marguerite, their first son and third surviving child, two daughters having died at birth. His parents would later bring five more children into the world, three of them successfully navigating the perils of infancy. Eugene Victor was named by his father after two literary giants of his parents’ French homeland—Eugène Sue (1804–1857) and Victor Hugo (1802–1885). Indeed, the intellectual Debs paterfamilias was such a devoted fan of Sue, the novelist of religious rationality and working-class life,³⁶ that he and his wife would name a second child in his honor, their next-born daughter, Eugenia. To avoid confusion, the similarly named children adopted the nicknames Gene and Jenny, identities retained throughout their lives. A steady diet of books was provided from early years, with the family gathering each Sunday evening, as though for a religious service, for recitation and discussion of literary themes in the work of such classic writers as Goethe, Schiller, and Molière.³⁷

Gene was initially enrolled in the private Old Seminary School of Terre Haute, the family’s finances by now sufficient to be able to absorb the substantial tuition of $16 per semester. After the conclusion of the Civil War, state funding of public education in Indiana was increased and the public school system improved commensurately; in 1867 Gene was enrolled in Terre Haute’s public high school, where he thrived.³⁸ A good but not a brilliant student, Gene was ranked in the top 20 percent of his class and was the proud recipient of a prize for one term of spelling perfection—a copy of the Holy Bible, inscribed in ink with a stern mandate from his teacher: Read and obey.³⁹ In relating this tale of orthographic prowess and its rewards to friends some decades later, Debs added a memorable punch line, chiming in, I never did either.

This makes for a pithy witticism—indeed, one that has been repeated endlessly by Debs’s biographers⁴⁰—but it is a small joke that twists reality preposterously, as even cursory attention to Debs’s early writings will readily indicate. The articles and speeches of Eugene V. Debs are positively saturated with biblical quotations and allusions, moving historian David Burns to discuss Debs’s religious philosophy at chapter length in his 2013 study, The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus.⁴¹ Burns notes the confluence of religious influences upon Debs, including the unorthodox views of his Protestant father and Catholic mother, neither of whom seem to have attended religious services after Gene’s early years; the essence of parochial Terre Haute, called a God-fearing town where evangelical revivals were commonplace; his familiarity with the literary output of humanists Voltaire, Sue, and Hugo; and his admiration and personal acquaintance with agnostic orator Robert Ingersoll and later dissident religious thinker George Herron.⁴²

Gene apparently learned French in the home, it being his parents’ native tongue. One is struck by the fact that he never wrote letters to his parents in that language, nor did he incorporate more than a few French words into his writing or speeches—the recurring phrase avant courier being one rare example. Debs studied German in the classroom and was additionally exposed to the language through his father’s reading aloud to the family each week from the classics. Gene does not seem to have pursued the reading of the German literature of the international socialist movement in later life, although his copious scrapbooks do include a number of articles from the German-language periodical press. Participating in literary and debating societies from his school years, Gene began at an early age to develop the effective public-speaking skills that would ultimately serve him well.⁴³

In May 1870 the fourteen-year-old opted to leave school for the remunerative world of work, thus beginning his short career working on the railroad—a brief few years of youthful endeavor elevated by hagiography into heroic proletarian myth. Debs played his own part stoking the smoke generator, telling his official biographer David Karsner in 1922 that he went to work because I had to, because I knew that my mother and father needed my pennies.⁴⁴ This dubious assertion is contradicted by the middle-class prosperity of the family’s grocery enterprise. Rather, as Debs’s most thorough biographer, Cornell University labor historian Nick Salvatore, has observed,

Skilled railroad workers . . . were among the most respected and highest paid workers in America during the 1870s and 1880s. Tradition held, and it was borne out by the experience of many, that the opportunities for advancement were impressive, even for a young lad beginning in an unskilled trade."⁴⁵

Working on the railroad offered both adventure and the opportunity for advancement for an ambitious young man exploring a future career. The rival recollection of Gene’s sister Emily seems more likely correct: that her brother had gone to work of his own volition despite the fact that their parents had pleaded time and again for their strong-willed son to return to school.⁴⁶

Gene found his first employment as a paint scraper in the shops of the Vandalia Railroad, earning the magnificent sum of fifty cents a day. His salary doubled in December 1871 when he advanced to a job firing the switch engines that were used to connect and unhook railcars in the yards of the Terre Haute and Indianapolis Railroad.⁴⁷ Firemen performed an arduous and dirty job, loading and breaking coal in a car behind the engine and feeding it into a small opening in the firebox inside the locomotive cab. The fireman also monitored the firebox crown sheet,⁴⁸ making sure it was constantly covered with water to prevent an explosion, and assisted the engineer as required. Engineer and fireman worked as a team, albeit in a hierarchical relationship akin to that of master and apprentice, with the engineer receiving approximately double the wages of the fireman, the prospective engineer-to-be.⁴⁹ These represented two of the four running trades of locomotive operations, crafts that included the all-important conductors—the captains of train operations, who were in charge of collecting fares and assisting passengers, maintaining freight manifests, inspecting each car and its couplings, and supervising train personnel. These supervised personnel included particularly the brakemen, the fourth and final craft of the running trades, who manually operated brakes and switches, coupled and uncoupled cars, served as signalmen as necessary, and announced arrivals at incoming stations. In the era before air brakes, some of the brakemen’s work was performed on top of a moving train, even in inclement weather, with brute strength employed to manually adjust a number of large brake wheels.⁵⁰ It is no exaggeration to say that nineteenth-century locomotive brakemen were employed in the single deadliest occupation in America, with a death toll exceeding the coal and hard-rock mining industries.⁵¹

Concurrent with his railroad work, Debs managed to return to the classroom, regularly taking courses over three years at a local business college.⁵²

Gene was soon promoted from the mundane chores of a switch engine fireman tethered to the rail yard to firing locomotives on the 70-mile run between Terre Haute and Indianapolis. ⁵³ This short-lived joy came to an abrupt end when a layoff during the panic of 1873 put him out of work. Gene was spurred to leave home in September 1874 for greener pastures, traveling to East St. Louis, Illinois, where a lengthy search landed him a job as a substitute night fireman in a railway switch yard. Away from his close-knit family for the first time at the age of nineteen, Debs took a room in a boardinghouse and made the acquaintance of a local French family during his brief sojourn. A speedy return to the secure parental nest was made the very next month, when Gene found himself unable to land a permanent post in the St. Louis area.⁵⁴

2

On the evening of February 27, 1875, Joshua Leach, the founder of a new labor organization, paid a visit to Terre Haute, Indiana, the self-proclaimed crossroads of America. There he hoped to organize a new lodge of his fledgling fraternal order, a society known as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (B of LF).⁵⁵ It was an organization of and for the workers. The early B of LF was not a trade union in the modern sense, maintaining a staunch position against the use of the strike and professing no aspirations to bargain collectively on behalf of its members. It was, rather, a fraternal lodge and insurance company—a closed society that provided the comradeship of regular personal communication with others in the field; imparted the unifying power of membership, ritual, and ceremony; and organized social activities with the community at large. It gained popularity as a mechanism for railroad workers, men of limited financial means who labored in a frequently deadly profession, to obtain comparatively inexpensive insurance against dismemberment and loss of life.⁵⁶ Although he would never fire a locomotive again, Gene Debs nevertheless at that time considered himself to be a coal scooper between jobs; the B of LF seems to have answered an idealistic youthful yearning to participate in a meritorious activity larger than himself. Gene ran for and won election as the first recording secretary of the new Vigo Lodge and would, for three of its first four years, represent his lodge brothers at the annual national convention of the order.⁵⁷

Simultaneous with his activity in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs embarked upon a new career path—one having nothing to do with the transportation industry. Coming from a family of grocers, Debs was hired in 1875 by Hulman & Company, a large regional wholesale supplier to the grocery trade, purported to be one of the largest such firms west of New York. Daniel Debs was a customer, neighbor, and friend of the firm’s proprietor, Herman Hulman, a relationship that paved the way for the employment of his son.⁵⁸ Debs would remain with the Hulman firm for five years, gaining stature and authority over time.⁵⁹ He would later claim that the move from the dangerous job of railway fireman to mundane work as a wholesale grocery warehouseman had been a conscious decision made to ease his beloved mother’s mind.⁶⁰ One must treat such a statement with caution, however; Debs’s commitment to business school and his subsequent political career as an elected white-collar city employee hints at a different youthful agenda. Similarly, Debs’s protestation during his sunset years that he had left the grocery business owing to his being unable to tolerate the grabbing for yourself implicit in petty commercial enterprise smacks of retrospective self-idealization or false memory.⁶¹

In his spare time, Debs was active in cofounding and leading a local Terre Haute organization known as the Occidental Literary Club, a debating society and lyceum that hosted lectures by special guest speakers. Under the group’s auspices Debs met three personal heroes: abolitionist Wendell Phillips and agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll in 1878, and pioneer of the women’s movement Susan B. Anthony in 1880.⁶²

The young Gene Debs was, in a word, ambitious. Money was never the object; rather, Debs was a young man in a hurry, anxious to exert his independent manhood, to build reputation and status, to make good in the world. He was aided by a friendly, winning way with strangers and a carefully developed oratorical prowess that allowed his enthusiasm and personal magnetism to shine. This skill set proved a perfect fit for a life in politics; local Democratic Party leaders, noting the youngster’s golden tongue and a palpable earnestness that could win a room, were eager to latch on to the blue-eyed Alsatian as a potential future star. And so, just as Debs had abandoned the uncertainties of railroad work for the stability of a job in the wholesale food industry in 1875, he left the grocery business for a career in politics in 1879, still remaining engaged with his beloved Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in an ever-growing capacity.

Debs’s first venture into electoral politics came in the Terre Haute city election of 1879. During this period of American history, primary elections were largely unknown; rather, parties assembled their slates of nominees in closed conventions of the political faithful. Announcing his candidacy for Terre Haute city clerk in March, the twenty-three-year-old Debs became a part of a field of five local Democrats seeking their party’s nomination for the paid government position—a list of prospects that included the incumbent officeholder. Debs positioned himself as an outsider, joining with city attorney candidate Thomas Harper as part of a reform slate, running as good-government advocates in opposition to the self-interested. The charismatic Debs quickly gained traction, motivating two regulars to quit the campaign so as not to split the vote against him. Gene triumphed nonetheless, garnering 16 of 30 votes at the city convention to gain the Democratic nomination. Bolstered by support from local business leaders, many of whom were Republicans acquainted with Debs through his employment at Hulman & Company, Debs then swept to victory in the May general election, winning majorities in five of the city’s six electoral wards in a three-way race against Republican and Greenback Labor Party candidates. Debs’s 2,222 votes proved to be more than those accorded Benjamin Havens, the successful Democratic candidate for mayor.⁶³

Although he had run for office under the vague and ill-defined slogan of reform, Gene’s service as an elected city official was ordinary, with the youngster winning plaudits for the effective performance of his duties. The local press noted the efficiency with which he conducted the city’s business and his thoroughness in keeping the citizenry apprised of the activities of the Terre Haute city council.⁶⁴ Debs did nothing to alienate the local Democratic establishment, campaigned on behalf of the party’s ticket in 1880, and was renominated without incident for a second term in 1881—a race that he won easily.⁶⁵ Debs would serve the entire four years of his consecutive terms as Terre Haute’s city clerk, departing the job only after the election of 1883, by which time he had successfully made the transition to a new position of status and importance, secretary-treasurer of the B of LF and editor of its monthly official organ, Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine.

Local Democratic worthies remained eager to tap Debs for high office. In 1884 the twenty-nine-year-old was nominated by the Democrats for a place in the Indiana state legislature in the Eighth Assembly District, encompassing Terre Haute and the rural areas of Vigo County. Once again, Debs demonstrated a native aptitude for retail politics, winning majorities in four of the six city wards and garnering sufficient votes from the townships and rural areas of the county to emerge victorious. Debs’s crossover appeal to voters other than Democrats was obvious, with his vote tally in Vigo County exceeding the number of votes offered to Democrats Grover Cleveland for president and John Lamb for Congress, both of whom emerged victorious.⁶⁶ As a freshman legislator, Debs was afforded the high honor of nominating for reelection Senator Daniel W. Voorhees, a fellow Terre Hautean, who was dutifully returned to Washington by the legislature’s Democratic majority.⁶⁷ Drawing upon his Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen experience, Debs self-identified as a reform-minded labor representative rather than a member of the conservative Democratic establishment, introducing bills relating to railway safety and establishment of liability of employers for injuries suffered by employees in on-the-job accidents. Both of these pieces of proposed legislation passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, only to be so badly gutted by amendments in the more conservative Senate that they were finally withdrawn from consideration.⁶⁸

On June 9, 1885, at the zenith of his six-year apprenticeship as an aspiring Democratic politician, Gene Debs married Katherine Kate Metzel, stepdaughter of a wealthy Terre Haute druggist. Kate began the couple’s life together as a traditional helpmate, maintaining the home while acting as a secretary and personal assistant for her ambitious husband. Four years after their marriage, by which time Debs had become a well-compensated functionary of the rapidly growing and prosperous Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Gene and Kate Debs would have a large home built in one of Terre Haute’s best neighborhoods. The house, with its expansive front porch and costly imported tile in the dining room, remained the family residence for the duration of the couple’s lives, although Gene would spend protracted periods away from home as a touring orator and sometime candidate for political office.⁶⁹ The couple never had children.

2

Each of the various railway crafts established their own fraternal benefit societies during the years of rapid railway expansion following the Civil War. The first of these was the Brotherhood of the Running Board, founded in 1863, subsequently renamed the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. This organization gradually gained its place in the world, providing a model for other railway crafts, including the Order of Railway Conductors, established in 1868, and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, organized in 1873. As a member of the B of LF and the leading figure of its Lodge No. 16 from its launch in early 1875, Debs was an active member of the organization from its pioneer years and consequently able to assume a place of national importance and influence in a comparatively short period of time. He regularly attended annual conventions of the B of LF as the delegate of Vigo Lodge, beginning in 1876.⁷⁰ He was an enthusiastic reader of the brotherhood’s monthly magazine launched in December of that year, penning an adulatory letter of congratulation to editor William N. Sayre.⁷¹ When its chief executive officer, Grand Master W. R. Worth, proved unable to attend the opening of the organization’s 1877 annual convention in Indianapolis, it was to the enthusiastic Gene that the other officers turned to deliver a keynote address summarizing the work of the B of LF.⁷² Debs was elected to the ceremonial position of grand marshal of the B of LF by the 1877 convention, and at the following year’s convention in Buffalo was unanimously elected associate editor of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine.⁷³ Despite his associate status, Debs seems to have begun writing immediately, and a portion of the magazine’s unsigned editorial content from the next two years can be attributed with confidence to his pen.⁷⁴ Debs’s written output became more voluminous with his July 1880 promotion to full editorship of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine. He would remain in the editorial chair until the fall of 1894, publishing approximately 170 monthly issues of the journal—a total of perhaps 2 million editorial words.

Debs’s thinking evolved enormously over time—a transformation paralleled by ideas of the American labor movement in general and the attitudes of society at large as the Gilded Age of corporate authority gave way to the Progressive Era of popular reform. Every serious Debs biographer since the publication of David A. Shannon’s influential 1951 article, Eugene V. Debs: Conservative Labor Editor, has made note of the future socialist’s early-1880s commitment to the primacy of self-improvement and the notion of collaboration between railway workers and their employers in common cause for prosperity. Throughout the 1870s and the first half of the 1880s, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and the sibling orders of engineers and conductors saw their function as one of social service to their memberships and as brokers of reliable labor to their employers. Railwaymen were a notoriously hard-drinking, transient, and ornery lot; the railway brotherhoods attempted to provide a civilizing influence, urging obedience to workplace regulations, disciplining alcohol abuse and sexual impropriety, and attempting to build a sense of neatness, pride of craftsmanship, and loyalty to the employer and the brotherhood alike.⁷⁵ Once orderly and faithful behavior was instilled, the brotherhoods believed, then their members would find themselves regarded as desirable employees by intelligently managed modern railroads, and fair and appropriate remuneration would inevitably follow.

Debs’s gradual embrace of working-class consciousness, his adoption of anti-corporate politics, and his growing acceptance of the necessity of class struggle for economic improvement is one fundamental thread to be seen in this book.

2

The second half of the 1880s was a time of realignment for both Debs and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Debs set aside personal political aspirations and intensified his commitment to the B of LF as an institution and the organized labor movement as a whole. Working full time as the paid grand secretary-treasurer of the prosperous and growing B of LF, the newly minted labor official Debs began to look at the wageworkers of the United States with a fresh set of eyes. Pushed forward by rank-and-file demands for improved wages, Debs began to move past simple platitudes relating to human perfection through temperance, cleanliness, and thrift toward more mature consideration of such systemic issues as unemployment and poverty and their offspring: hunger, criminality, child labor, and despair. Socialism was never part of Debs’s agenda during this interlude. Rather, Debs’s grand vision revolved around the achievement of equality of employees with their employers at the bargaining table during the wage negotiation process—a parity that would be possible in the railroad industry only as the result of federation on a broad basis.⁷⁶ Through the unified action of the brotherhoods of the railway running trades—engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors, together with the switchmen who operated the yards—unfair unilaterally imposed wages dictated by railroad operators would become unthinkable, owing to the likelihood of a financially devastating strike. A new era would be ushered in, featuring the patient consideration of grievances when presented though the mechanism of voluntary arbitration.⁷⁷

Debs saw the right of workers to organize as fundamental and inalienable. He asserted with equal force the right of workers to not join a labor association, should they so choose—a perspective regarded today as open shop.⁷⁸ He held an intermediate perspective toward the labor theory of value as advanced by Karl Marx, declaring on the one hand that only work produces revenues, only work produces wealth, while taking umbrage to the notion that labor itself was a commodity, feeling the equation of human lives with inanimate commodity inputs to be dehumanizing, a relic of slavery, and a severe obstacle to parity between employers and their employees at the negotiating table.⁷⁹

Full employment was a paramount goal for Debs. A strong Protestant work ethic underlay this worldview, with Debs asserting that the fruit of employment is virtue, that of idleness, vice. The solution of the unemployment problem, to Debs’s thinking, was as simple as shortening the hours of labor, with a move from the ten-hour day to the eight-hour day instantly creating massive new opportunities for the jobless to find gainful employment.⁸⁰ Debs was deeply committed to the idea that America’s fundamental social ailment was a maldistribution of wealth, and he earnestly believed that politics, pulpit, and press were corrupted by this inequality. It would be the effective use of democratic processes, with the working people of the nation making use of the ballot in unison, that would make fundamental change possible, according to Debs. All the working class asked, he naively asserted, was simple justice and honest pay—an equitable share of the wealth it created. Only then, at last, labor troubles will cease, the strike, the lockout, the boycott will disappear, and the senseless gabble about the conflict between capital and labor will cease.⁸¹

2

The 1888 strike against the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company (CB&Q, known colloquially as the Burlington, the Quincy, and the Q) was a seminal event in American transportation history and put a brutal end to any vague vision that the lion of capitalism would someday congregate blissfully with the labor lamb. The strike began with the grievances of the engineers, including complaints about unpaid work switching cars, unreasonable lengths of time away from home, and demands for pay for time wasted when delayed on the road. The enginemen also sought an appeals process for unjust discharge and institution of a mileage-based system of pay, as was standard with other rail lines of the Midwest.⁸² Under the existing pay system, engineers were paid a fixed rate per trip, a figure that varied substantially depending on the route’s importance. A fourteen-member grievance committee of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (B of LE) for the Burlington line had been established early in 1886, which had drawn up a set of rules to be brought before management—provisions that called for adjustment of the rate of pay of locomotive firemen in fixed proportion to the rate of pay of engineers.⁸³ A parallel grievance committee of fourteen members of the B of LF was subsequently established and the two committees joined into a single bargaining unit for both trades of enginemen in January 1888. A joint set of proposals to the company was compiled.⁸⁴

General manager of the CB&Q Henry B. Stone had defended the current system of rules and compensation and an impasse was reached on February 23, 1888, with conservative head of the B of LE Peter M. Arthur sanctioning a strike unless passenger locomotive engineers were paid at a rate of not less than 3.5 cents per mile.⁸⁵ Last-minute negotiations had proved fruitless, and at noon on Sunday, February 26, a strike against the CB&Q was announced to begin at 4:00 a.m. the following day. The suddenness of the strike caught company officials by surprise, with the company seemingly believing that ample time remained for further negotiation. The work stoppage on February 27 was almost universal, with only 22 engineers and 23 firemen out of the 2,137 enginemen employed by the company crossing picket lines.⁸⁶

The scarce human commodity were the locomotive engineers, with the B of LE banking on an assumption that there were fewer than three hundred unemployed locomotive operators in the entire country; this, if true, would make the simultaneous walkout of more than one thousand engineers an insurmountable obstacle. The strikers had believed that the railroad would be forced to shut down owing to the lack of operational personnel, but the railroad successfully raised a motley array of office workers, mechanics, shop workers, conductors, and brakemen to run the engines in the first days after the strike. A hunt for permanent replacements was immediately begun. The company posted notices up and down the Burlington line announcing that all workers who failed to report for duty before noon on February 29 would be considered terminated. Applications for the job of fireman began to accumulate, many from rural men who had never before worked in an engine but for whom the task of breaking coal and stoking a boiler seemed sufficiently simple and adequately remunerative.⁸⁷

Burlington officials retained another powerful card in their hand—the bitter enmity between the B of LE and the Knights of Labor (K of L), an organizational rival for the affections and support of railroad workers. Resentment was deep in K of L circles over the way the B of LE had kept the trains running on the Southwest system during an 1886 strike of K of L shopmen, thereby contributing mightily to the failure of the work action. Adding insult to injury, the collapse of the 1886 Southwest strike was followed by Grand Chief Arthur requiring all B of LE members who held dual membership in the K of L to quit the latter organization or face expulsion.⁸⁸ Despite official warnings in the Journal of the Knights of Labor that K of L members should respect the B of LE strike, unemployed union members were in no mood to lend support to an organization that had contributed to the defeat of their own interests only recently; hundreds of railroaders, many of whom were unemployed Knights, descended upon Chicago to fill the jobs of brotherhood strikers. Moreover, the two other brotherhoods representing the running trades—the Order of Railway Conductors (ORC) and the Brotherhood of Railroad Brakemen (BRB)—held aloof from the enginemen’s strike, continuing to work aboard trains operated by scab crews in the cab. The costly strike faltered. Even the eleventh-hour decision of the Switchmen’s Mutual Aid Association (SMAA) to join the ranks of strikers made little difference to the final outcome of the conflict, which was finally called off on January 8, 1889.

Disunity between rival labor organizations spelled catastrophe for the Burlington strike. To Debs the true culprits in labor’s own camp were apparent.

2

The limitations of isolated craft-based railway brotherhoods fighting a united railroad corporation had become amply evident to Debs. A superior form of organization to unite trade-based railway brotherhoods in common cause for just and appropriate wages had become the order of the day. Debs became the most outspoken cheerleader of federation for mutual support of the brotherhoods of the railroad running trades, the engineers, firemen, conductors, and brakemen, as well as their closely related brethren of the railway yards, the switchmen. Debs explicitly dismissed the notion of amalgamation of the separate and distinct organizations into one conglomerate, instead seeking a new external mechanism to exact solidarity among the brotherhoods when one of its affiliated organizations was driven to the necessity of making a stand for its rights. Debs’s Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine emerged as a de facto organizing nexus for a new federative railroad labor organization.⁸⁹

Debs was hindered both by the jealous professional bureaucracies of brotherhood functionaries, seeking to hold what was theirs, as well as a general disdain on the part of the higher-skilled and more highly compensated crafts—the engineers and the conductors—toward joint action with their economic inferiors, the semi-skilled laborers working as firemen, brakemen, and switchmen.⁹⁰ Debs argued repeatedly for a general unity of the brotherhoods representing these crafts on the basis of equality regardless of remuneration, but until the summer of 1888 no concrete mechanism for achievement of this principle had emerged.⁹¹

Still, the federation idea moved forward. In September 1888, the B of LF at its Atlanta convention declared its support for formal alliance of the railroad running trades and the switchmen of the rail yards. Two other brotherhoods rapidly answered the call, each making a stand for federation at their fall annual conventions, with the Switchmen’s Mutual Aid Association and the Brotherhood of Railroad Brakemen voting unanimously to join the firemen in a formal alliance. It fell to the powerful Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, meeting in Richmond, Virginia, in November, to ultimately decide the matter. Despite their ongoing alliance with the B of LF in the Burlington strike, the B of LE yet again refused federation, delivering a mortal blow to hopes for a monolithic alliance of the running trades. Debs sought to paint this pivotal defeat optimistically, noting it had taken three years for an initial entreaty of the firemen to the engineers for joint action such as that which had been employed against the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy to be acted upon favorably; realistically, more time would be needed for the engineers to come around.⁹²

Despite the refusal of the engineers to participate, the efforts of Debs and others to achieve railway federation bore fruit in 1889 with the establishment of the Supreme Council of United Orders of Railway Employees, a small directorate of nine top officials, three each from the three constituent railway brotherhoods—firemen, brakemen, and switchmen. This body included Debs as one of the representatives of the firemen. The centralized group was to meet annually, holding additional sessions to deal with emergencies and critical events as required. The decisions of the Supreme Council regarding strikes were to be binding upon the member organizations. Virtual unanimity of the body was required for action.

The main organization of the conductors, the Order of Railway Conductors, proved to be even more hostile to the notion of federation than the engineers, with its 1888 convention reaffirming the group’s anti-strike policy despite growing support among the order’s rank and file for use of the work stoppage as a means of protection. Debs responded to this further setback with the burning of bridges, hailing with undisguised satisfaction the November 15, 1888, launch in Los Angeles of a new rival railway brotherhood for conductors, the Brotherhood of Railway Conductors—a group that promised the use of the strike to gain concessions and defend its organizational interests.⁹³

The story of the development of the Supreme Council and its subsequent demise in the aftermath of a dirty jurisdictional war between the organized brakemen and switchmen is another important theme of this volume.

2

By the opening of the 1890s, Debs had begun to absorb the ideas of radical populism and was well on the path to activity in working-class politics. In his article What Can We Do for Working People? Debs explicitly rejected the paternalistic paradigm, declaring the whole business of doing something for working people is disgusting and degrading to the last degree. Instead, he called for working people to liberate themselves by combining, federating, cooperating, and acting in concert, making use of their numerical superiority to make peaceful revolution by means of the ballot box and thereby achieve self-management, adequate pay, and true freedom.⁹⁴ Not only did Debs advocate adoption of the eight-hour day as a humanitarian and employment-bolstering standard, he was now willing to advocate a general strike to achieve the aim. If the ring of the anvil, the click of the shuttle, the whir and buzz of spindle and wheel can’t be permitted to sing in concert the triumph of justice to labor, let them remain silent, he advised, optimistically predicting that one day will suffice.⁹⁵

Debs greeted the establishment of the People’s Party with sympathy, noting the enthusiasm of the delegates to an organizational convention held in Cincinnati in May 1891, and the timeliness of their program advocating looser money and other reform measures.⁹⁶ He touted the new party in a syndicated article published in various newspapers the same month, declaring that its orators would plead the cause of justice to workingmen, the wealth producers of the country in a coming battle to overcome the power of organized capital, organized capitalists, [and] the plutocratic class.⁹⁷ Change was in the wind as he celebrated Labor Day in 1891, with Debs proclaiming that the era of robbery and of degradation is drawing to a close and that the actual dangerous masses threatening society’s peace and stability were not workers, but those who use their money power to filch from labor its just rewards.⁹⁸ The advocates of labor, regarded by a vast swath of respectable society as rabble-rousers and heretics to the gospel of American commerce, suffered a fate akin to that of the abolitionists of yore, Debs averred, working in pursuit of a righteous cause against all the slings and arrows of moneyed society and its press, pulpit, professorate, and politicians.⁹⁹

An early version of a class-conscious and radical Debs had emerged. By 1892, Gene Debs’s personal journey from paternalistic careerist to radical agitator was nearly complete.

General Series Notes

The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs will present his most important writings in six chronological volumes. Each book will include a brief introduction touching upon the major activities of Debs’s life during the period of coverage and pointing toward key elements of his evolving thought. Archaic spelling, idiosyncratic punctuation, misspelled names, misquoted sources, and typographical errors appearing in the original published versions have not been treated as sacrosanct, but rather have been silently corrected and standardized for consistency and readability. A few words from defective source documents that had to be guessed from context are provided within square brackets, as are substantive clarifications provided by the editors. The inclusion of full articles rather than excerpts has been given high priority, although a few items have been shortened for reasons of space or clarity. These editorial alterations have been marked by ellipses ( . . . ) for very short deletions and asterisks (* * *) for longer content removals. Debs himself periodically used a question mark inside parentheses to denote irony about the apparent misapplication of a term or phrase. This editorial oddity has been retained.

Titles of articles and speeches as they appeared in the press varied greatly from publication to publication. Those appearing in Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine were written by Debs himself and have been generally retained without change unless the same title was used multiple times, as Debs was wont to do, e.g., Federation, The Knights of Labor, The Supreme Council, etc. A few Debs-generated titles that are particularly non-descriptive of actual content have been revised. The titles of articles and speeches appearing in publications edited by others have been either kept or rewritten for clarity as deemed most appropriate; those appearing previously in reprints of Debs’s works have been retained to avoid confusion in almost every instance. Whenever titles have been changed, original names are provided at the end of the piece, along with other publication information.

Material has been chosen with a view to illustrating the evolution of Debs’s thinking. Mundane contemporary affairs have been accorded low priority; matters touching on the events of the broader labor movement and society at large have been given closest attention. No material has been omitted or deleted for ideological reasons. We emphasize that Gene Debs was neither a saint nor a savant, but rather an evolving human being who was a product of his times, exhibiting at various times crassly individualistic aspirations; ethnic, racial, and gender biases; and ideological inconsistencies. We have attempted to chronicle these foibles and flaws rather than hide them through tendentious selection of content.

Debs never wrote a book in his lifetime, nor did he attempt to compile his memoirs.¹⁰⁰ All of his literary output was of an oratorical or journalistic nature, with the great majority of this material published as newspaper or magazine articles or speeches reproduced in pamphlet form. The editors attempted to review at least cursorily every known article, speech, or pamphlet by Debs for the time period covered by this volume. While this goal was more or less successfully realized, at least one potentially significant item out of more than 1,250 cataloged for the period of this first volume has escaped review: a January 8, 1885, political speech appearing in the Indianapolis press.

While the editors have received no financial support from any individual or institution in the preparation of this volume, they have nevertheless benefited immensely from the activity of others in the world of Debs scholarship, whose work is listed in the footnotes below. The editors additionally wish to thank Cinda May and Kendra McCrea of Cunningham Memorial Library, Indiana State University, and Ben Kite of the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, for their courtesy and assistance. Our friend Martin Goodman of the Riazanov Digital Library Project has aided in the investigation of certain rare publications from New York libraries. Similarly, the importance of radical booksellers to the cause of independent scholarship, especially John Durham and Alexander Akin of Bolerium Books in San Francisco and Lorne Bair of Winchester, Virginia, is worthy of mention. We also thank Nisha Bolsey, Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino, Eric Kerl, and Michael Trudeau, who skillfully handled the manuscript for Haymarket Books, as well as the entire Haymarket editorial board for their unflinching support of the Debs project.

The outstanding contribution to Debs scholarship was made by historian

J. Robert Constantine and former Tamiment Library archivist Gail Malmgreen, with their twenty-one-reel microfilm collection and printed guide, The Papers of Eugene V. Debs, 1834–1945. The editors note their debt to this pioneering effort to chronicle and collect the speeches, articles, and correspondence of Gene Debs—it is impossible to imagine the successful completion of this project without such an expert plowing of the field having previously been made. This material has already been harvested by Mr. Constantine for his outstanding three-volume collection, Letters of Eugene V. Debs, published by University of Illinois Press in 1990. The editors hope that these volumes edited by Mr. Constantine will occupy every shelf next to the volumes of The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs and be viewed as integral parts of the same project.

It is a matter of regret that Bob Constantine, the dean of Debs studies, died in 2017 at the age of ninety-three, before the editors were able to communicate news of this project to him. It is to his memory that this series is dedicated.

Notes1

A chronological list of the most important biographical sources on Debs in English should include the following: Stephen Marion Reynolds, Life of Eugene V. Debs, in Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches (Girard, KS: Appeal to Reason, 1908), 1–76; David Karsner, Debs: His Authorized Life and Letters (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919) and Talks with Debs in Terre Haute (New York: New York Call, 1922); Floy Ruth Painter, That Man Debs and His Life Work (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1929); McAllister Coleman, Eugene V. Debs: A Man Unafraid (New York: Greenberg, 1930); Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949; reissued by Haymarket Books); H. Wayne Morgan, Eugene V. Debs: Socialist for President (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1962); Bernard J. Brommel, Eugene V. Debs: Spokesman for Labor and Socialism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1978); Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982); J. Robert Constantine, Biographical Sketch, in Constantine and Gail Malmgreen (eds.), The Papers of Eugene V. Debs, 1834–1945: A Guide to the Microfilm Edition (New York: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1983), 4–33 (material which was adapted in the introduction to his three-volume Letters of Eugene V. Debs); and Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

2. Irving Stone, Adversary in the House (New York: Doubleday, 1947).

3. Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), a native of Indiana who styled himself a latter-day Debsian, if there is such a thing, made Eugene Debs a recurring figure in some of his later work.

4. Henry T. Schnittkind, The Story of Eugene Debs (Boston: Independent Workmens Circle, 1929).

5. One of these, Eugene Debbs Potts (1908–2003), was a conservative Democratic member of the Oregon State Senate for nearly a quarter century.

6. Ruth Le Prade, ed., Debs and the Poets (Pasadena, CA: Upton Sinclair, 1920).

7. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., introduction to Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948), v–xiii.

8. The literature is voluminous but see, for example, August Claessens, Eugene Victor Debs: A Tribute (New York: Rand School Press, 1946).

9. James P. Cannon, E. V. Debs: The Socialist Movement of His Time—Its Meaning for Today (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1956).

10. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Debs and Dennis: Fighters for Peace (New York: New Century Publishers, 1950).

11. Howard Zinn, Eugene V. Debs and the Idea of Socialism, Progressive, January 1999.

12. Richard Oestreicher, Saint Gene: A Review Essay, Indiana Magazine of History, vol. 88, no. 1 (March 1992), 49.

13. Reynolds, Debs: His Life, Writings, and Speeches. According to David Karsner, this book was compiled by Stephen Marion Reynolds, who contributed the biographical introduction.

14. Joseph M. Bernstein, ed., Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs., introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948).

15. Despite this expansion, a mere five nineteenth-century Debs articles were selected for publication.

16. Eugene V. Debs, Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs, introduction by Henry M. Tichenor (St. Louis: Phil Wagner, 1916).

17. Eugene V. Debs, Eugene V. Debs, Pastels of Men, introduction by Frank Harris (New York: Pearson’s Magazine, 1919).

18. Alexander Trachtenberg, ed., Voices of Revolt, Volume IX: Speeches of Eugene V. Debs: With