REVIEWS
Geltman, Emanuel & Hausknecht, Murray & Wrong, Dennis & Rule, James B. & Fink, Leon
EUGENE V. DEBS, CITIZEN AND SOCIALIST, by Nick Salvatore. Part of the series The Working Class in American History. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 452 pp. $24.95. I n 1949 Ray Ginger...
...Lasch has "confused . . . peculiar excesses with the norm...
...And by reminding us of what was accomplished in the past, he makes it harder to bear with equanimity or good conscience any present inaction...
...environmentalists," was a search for "the abundant life...
...The decade's bleakness stands in contrast to the '60s when the Movement and the New Left seemed to promise the dawn of a new day in the country's political and social life...
...Only months before his death in 1926 Debs thanked "whatever gods there be" for "the darkest days [that] have brought me the most light...
...You got an escort, an assistant, a VIP officer's billed-hat, and a lot of respect...
...Well, perhaps holistic running and primal screaming are aspects of the search for transcendence...
...This new Debs is no less lovable but sadder, more mortal than the earlier one...
...The final wound was a long piece of shrapnel from a mine, driven into the base of his brain, leaving him largely paralyzed and taking him out of the war for good...
...I worry about where and how we will find successors to such men who are the finely distilled products of the disasters of 20th-century politics...
...Draper's range is extraordinary...
...Not everyone gained nor did everyone make equal gains...
...The Yagoda Brigade...
...The entry is quoted in the translator's Introduction...
...The changing face of the ambitious 19th-century town of Terre Haute and its impact on the dreams of the young Debs are skillfully depicted...
...His prison term became a "species of purging...
...While some of his contemporaries might worry that this "small-town" socialist appeal represented less a revolutionary understanding of capitalism than a primitive rage directed against an inevitably more integrated social order, Debs's ability to mix "Biblical appeal, democratic ideology, and growing class awareness" explained the "potency of his agitation...
...And her direct iron-blue gaze was tinged with fear...
...the heart still flutters around them...
...The latter's work, although "full of intriguing insights...
...On Greeman's evidence, he probably would not...
...He makes convincing connections between the ideological focus on autonomy and personal freedom and Debs's deep feelings of insecurity and dependence, most 132 obvious in his relation to McKeen and later Victor Berger, and a factor in his frequent indisposition at moments of crucial political decisions...
...The crow's feet near his eyes met furrows rising from the corners of his mouth...
...What makes you think it's not obvious you escaped from the camp...
...Even a social biography cannot expect to provide a sufficient handle on the overall experience of American socialism, although this one goes about as far as a biography could...
...Soon he left the railroad to become an accounting clerk at Herman Hulman's wholesale grocery...
...nevertheless, "the Judeo-Christian metaphor of salvation informed the personal searches of Pentacostal Christians and adherents of Arthur Janov's primal therapy, of mainline Protestants, of devotees of est, and of many political and cultural radicals...
...Salvatore recognizes the year 1885 as a turning point in Debs's thinking toward a sharper-edged republicanism allowing for social conflict...
...While respective embrace of the Populist ballot, utopian cooperation, and finally, political socialism etched a path of further radical ideological development in the post-Pullman period, Salvatore shrewdly notes that they also marked a flight from tangible workers' struggles and organizing strategies, a weakness that would continually bedevil Debs's "mature" socialist years, and indeed the American socialist movement in general...
...almost seems calculated to . . . persuade sympathetic readers of the futility of any collective action short of an unlikely socialist revolution...
...Clecak reminds us that in the '70s, as in the '60s, we were not wasting our political lives...
...The actual combat scenes remind one of blast furnaces or volcanoes— but these are infernos created to destroy human beings and their possessions...
...Only in these last years did the great public figure, seemingly so ebullient and full of good cheer and humor, openly admit his private pain...
...Many are faces—American and Asian—transformed by fear, revulsion, grief, or agony...
...That, I think, would have surprised him...
...We can only suppose what his reaction would have been to the uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland (in the book, characters discuss the possibility of uprisings in Russia...
...But the glossary is most useful for less familiar references...
...Not the baptism by fire into socialism that Debs would later claim for the event (he offered his enthusiastic backing to Bryan's free-silver candidacy as late as 1896), the Pullman defeat and Debs's subsequent sentence to Woodstock prison touched off a desperate search for alternative socialpolitical solutions...
...This neurasthenia was often associated with concerns about sexual adequacy and identity that also seem to fit the subject here...
...Self-fulfillment requires a "slice of social justice," and in the '60s and the '70s this entailed an assault on the "structure of disadvantage," that is, the inequalities of class as well as "the dominant cultural images and imperatives that hamper citizens in their quest for self-fulfillment...
...a headquarters for the security police, and still in Russia...
...In his "Afterword," the translator instructs us in the various symbolisms of people and places...
...His project is to read our recent history in a different way...
...Draper is too modest in calling what he does "present history," which he distinguishes from "contemporary history," and in speaking of his work in the same breath with journalism...
...Even for those radicals and liberals who have reservations about the '60s, the decade represents a peak from which the society has slid precipitously into the slough of the '70s...
...In this country, you'll learn there's no more anything: neither socialism, nor capitalism, bunch of syphilitic whores...
...Their "commitment to the ideas of order and stability and a hostility to the culture of modernism" as well as a "nostalgic preference for the bourgeois ethic" make the late '50s "their moment of greatest psychic ease...
...q PRESENT HISTORY: ON NUCLEAR WAR, DETENTE AND OTHER CONTROVERSIES, by Theodore Draper...
...He meets a fellow worker, a woman who shares her brandy with him...
...BUT WHAT, THEN, of selfishness, narcissism, and the decline of authority...
...If the author ever felt more than these occasional pangs, it does not come through in this book...
...Salvatore draws on two talents in particular to open his subject in an engaging way...
...The Nation had for its cornerstone a strike...
...There was, in short, "a proliferation of dissent" that took a variety of forms but with two main targets...
...I will always think that they make a great camera platform, but a better frame...
...jailed, deported, but finally allowed to leave for France...
...12:1 TIM PAGE'S NAM, by Tim Page...
...Yet it has to be said that he gloried in it—there is no other term: Sitting in the door gunner's seat in a Huey...
...One fully sympathizes with Draper when, reviewing Norman Podhoretz's tirade against the critics of the Vietnam war in whose ranks Podhoretz himself had been a far from obscure member, Draper wryly observes that "despite all the unpaid research I did for him, I earn Podhoretz's displeasure for having alluded to the war's 'shamefulness' and 'immoral conduct.' " It is hard to imagine that future historians, though they will, of course, know the eventual outcome and the wider context, will improve upon Draper's account of a number of matters, such as the confusing and confused policy recommendations of the Reagan administration on nuclear strategy (which drew a reply from Caspar Weinberger himself), or the exact sequence of events 135 preceding the Egyptian attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur War...
...In brief, "the bourgeois ideal of leisurely, gracious living has neither survived well among the very privileged nor spread throughout the society...
...the odds on getting it right are not very good...
...And Serge might have changed his mind...
...Join the Socialist Party," proclaimed the aging warrior soon to be incarcerated for a debilitating two and a half years in the Moundsville and Atlanta penitentiaries, "[then] you will know what it is to be a real man or woman...
...Richard Greeman has done a commendable job in supplying an outline of Serge's life...
...Salvatore records, with careful attention, the evolution of Socialist party policy—including Debs's fights, first with the Milwaukee "slowcialists" on matters of labor organization, then with such Wobblies as Big Bill Haywood over industrial violence, later with American "patriots" over what degree of resistance to take on World War 1, and finally his fights with both the left and right of the movement following the Bolshevik revolution...
...FIRST, THE EARLY DEBS...
...Does it belittle Debs's ideas and actions to recognize that in part his public strength offered an exit from private weakness, that the man who could profoundly touch the multitude withdrew into himself off the stump...
...are side effects of the democratization of personhood, consequences of rising expectations and rising satisfaction among a growing number of citizens in all social categories...
...Introduction by William Shawcross...
...There is, for example, a point in the novel where several of the characters, living miserably, still loyal to the party, discuss the "Red Plebiscite" in Germany, in which the Communists joined the Nazis against the Socialists on the premise that, once rid of the "social-fascists," they would easily displace Hitler...
...attorney general in the Pullman strike and boycott in 1894...
...The publicly serene, confident leader here betrays the inner struggle behind his rocklike political faith...
...So far as this reviewer knows, Oppositionists never escaped Stalin's camps and prisons, while revolutionaries had often accomplished this feat under the Czar...
...119 pp...
...Clecak argues that the critics assume that the "extremes" of behavior and thought are the dominant patterns without showing that this is so...
...12.95...
...But every so often, a delicately drawn passage pierces the gray-dark with a description of nature that can't be brutalized—the freshness of the night air, a bud coming to flower...
...WHO WAS VICTOR SERGE...
...Still very much an admiring portrait, Salvatore's Debs is less masterful than Ginger's...
...A dramatic and openly adulatory narrative raised appreciation of Debs without really explaining him...
...Nowhere in the book is this more evident than in the last chapter, "The Beginning...
...One does not need to reach back into Debs's unknown infancy to sense some psychological connection between these episodes...
...Serge takes us into the puzzled, persecuted, despairing world of the Oppositionists, left and right, and of other "heretics"— pickpockets, religious believers—who share the same fate, skeptically, symbolically, because they have no illusions, nor do they care about regenerating the party or restoring power to the people...
...Born in Belgium of revolutionary parents who had fled Russia, he spent five years in French jails, 1911-17 (about which he wrote Men in Prison, published in France in 1930...
...His two books on American communism were traditionally historical, though drawing on his personal contacts with veteran American Communists...
...If the reader doesn't already know that the secretary general, "Iosif Vissarionovich," was Stalin, the book offers ample instruction...
...For liberals and radicals such developments, and these are but the most obvious ones, are welcome changes, and not to be deprecated as insignificant or as aspects of "mere reformism...
...14.95, paperback...
...This is true not only of his characteristic combination of bold rhetorical gesture and intellectual self-doubt...
...At some point, a confrontation with the responsibilities for our actions there awaits us...
...When America finally quit Vietnam, we closed that country out of our thoughts in guilty haste...
...For a black American, for example, it was harder 35 years ago to attain and maintain the inner certainty of his worth as a person than it is today...
...At another level, traditional expectations were reshaped as in the instance of gender roles...
...Two of the longer ones, on Vietnam and on the first volume of Kissinger's memoirs, appeared in Dissent...
...Time-Life paid all his medical bills," Shawcross notes, "and, after persuading him to sign a form releasing the corporation from any further responsibility for him, gave him a pourboire of $15,000...
...One was "industrial civilization, including science, technology, and the institution of capitalism," and the other was "the dominant WASP culture" with its "standards of beauty, taste, morality, leisure, success, work, and sex...
...The single exception is a long analysis—over 60 pages —of the present disarray of the Western alliance, which first appeared two years ago in the Washington Quarterly...
...His cheeks were concave...
...These effects have appeared because "ideas of fulfillment grew more rapidly than opportunities for fulfillment" and, therefore, "assertions of supremacy of the self and the irrelevance of all modes of authority usually constituted unfulfilling versions of fulfillment...
...government in the Pullman strike, then served five times as presidential candidate of the Socialist party, paying twice with prison sentences for some of his efforts, were clearly shown...
...The glossary helps...
...Clecak's latest book is a vigorously argued dissent from this consensus...
...Thus, without minimizing their political importance, the movements of the '60s are "better understood as a manifestation of the manysided quest for self-fulfillment...
...q AMERICA'S QUEST FOR THE IDEAL SELF: DISSENT AND FULFILLMENT IN THE 60S AND 70s, by Peter Clecak...
...138 Add a heightened consciousness of how inadequate our knowledge seems to be to the tasks ahead and the seeming exhaustion of the radical imagination— the temptation, then, to lapse into apathy and indifference becomes a strong one...
...The conventional wisdom overlooks the central fact that the heart of the political and cultural upheayals of those years was the quest for personal fulfillment that has run through American culture from its inception...
...These include: Debs's physical and emotional distance from his wife, frequent drinking bouts, sentimentalization of his mother and emotional reliance on his younger brother Theodore, a furtive decade-long love for socialist-feminist Mabel Curry, and a series of crippling "collapses," variously laid to "lumbago," "rheumatism," "exposure and overexertion," calmed only by rest cures at sanitoriums or doses of morphine...
...But Draper's methods, if not his subjects, are closer to those of the most rigorous scholarly historians in their nearly total reliance on public documentation...
...The Enthusiasts' Brigade...
...325 pp...
...All the others, except one, were originally printed in the New York Review of Books, Commentary, Encounter, the New Republic and the New York Times Book Review...
...The second skill is a use of the tools of intellectual history...
...Dissent and the quest for fulfillment were a kind of "culture storm" that changed the landscape of American life, in some cases permanently...
...136 The other side of the coin of personal salvation was a commitment to "the idea of social justice...
...DRAPER'S GENERAL POINT OF VIEW might be described as "humane realism...
...In Terre Haute Debs was accepted as a trustworthy social broker for consolidating industrialists such as McKeen, who personally bailed out the BLF at a moment of financial exigency...
...The author does, however, more neatly suggest that at this crucial moment in his life Debs veered visibly away from (or at least complicated) a simple "masculine" success ethic, associated with both McKeen and his marriage, toward a deeper "feminine" emphasis on compassion and justice, which would ultimately flower as Debsian socialism...
...Sitzfleisch rather than legwork or interviewing skills is Draper's major resource and no less an historian than Jack Hexter in his Doing History has insisted that Sitzfleisch is the one truly indispensable attribute of the firstrate professional historian...
...Each of these is the subject of from one to four essays-16 essays in all...
...For more than 30 years Ginger's lively prose stood as the best available introduction not only to the career of America's greatest socialist but to the exciting years when radical, even revolutionary hopes about American life first swelled, then foundered...
...Critics such as Lasch, to say nothing of the neoconservatives, provide us with respectable rationales for inaction...
...We still look up when one clatters overhead...
...Not that I want to depreciate journalism, which is always necessary and whose best practitioners are often people of intellectual stature...
...In this friendship too, despite the necessary subterfuge in arranging visits and frequent "passionate avowals of love," Debs remained "physically and emotionally removed...
...Readers may now enjoy two fine biographies of Eugene V. Debs...
...Ideologically, Debs was probably closest to J. A. Wayland and the Appeal to Reason's "socialism as 20th-century American individualism...
...It means the subjection of a complicated issue to the kind of intensive, enormously detailed, and scrupulously researched analysis exhibited in these essays and in Draper's earlier books...
...One can quarrel with Clecak in some of the same terms he quarrels with Bell or Lasch...
...By addressing these riddles, Nick Salvatore proves himself a worthy successor to Ginger as a Debs scholar...
...The time has come when we shall know whether this is a republic or a despotism...
...He resolutely ignores the "variegated patterns of normality" that continue to exist in American society between the extremes of the classical Freudian neuroses of the 19th century and today's "pathological narcissism...
...It records the changes in world politics since the NATO treaty was signed, changes that have made the alliance "obsolescent" in its basic assumption of American strength and European weakness...
...Out of what social and intellectual fabric did Debs's labor radicalism and later political socialism emerge...
...19.95...
...structured Debs's core vision of the world...
...You will lose nothing but you will find something of infinite value, and that something will be yourself...
...Midnight, first published in France in 1939 and written in French, lacks the concentrated force of Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev (a novel about the great purges, unfairly overshadowed by Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon...
...Germany is merely an overtone, but there is no mistaking that Midnight is coming elsewhere as well...
...Page's first wounds he treated as nothing more than a new kind of stimulant: "They fed me cognac and dope and cleaned out the shrapnel and I went right back the next day...
...TIM PAGE'S PICTURES are brilliantly horrific...
...Also, for his impatience with moral posturing and ideological cant—one sometimes has the impression that "fatuous" is his favorite adjective applied even-handedly to leftist sentimentality and neoconservative bluster...
...Illustrations by Vlady...
...The late dusk extract from some precarious rock pile of a guaranteed miserable night, back to a marine-run press center of stateside T-bones, and Vodka Collins, gung-ho back-slapping, and then, at last, an opium solace...
...One will still want to read Ginger for the image of the folk hero---for the moral grandeur of the man who could leave 2,300 federal inmates in joy and tears at his release, for understanding the easy camaradererie that linked the nation's foremost radical with the homespun Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley...
...Active in the town's debating society and cultural life, a Democrat in politics, and a model employee complimented by both McKeen and Hulman, Eugene (for reasons still not entirely clear) also threw his energies into organizing a local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF...
...Screw the lot of 140 them, citizen...
...Over them hangs the presence of real, nonfictional people and institutions, explained in a glossary...
...Similarly, an "American woman" today is a different person from what she was 20 years ago...
...In Clecak's estimation, Bell shows more appreciation of the complexities and ambiguities of social reality than does Lasch...
...It is only in coming to grips with the implications of Debs's private life that Salvatore seems analytically to shy away from his own evidence...
...New York: Random House...
...A thoroughly respectable social trajectory seemed sealed in 1885 with his marriage to Katherine Metzel, the status-conscious daughter of a wealthy drugstore owner...
...Rodion swims a river, "drowns," just about, but is saved by a symbolic forest dweller, "Ivan Nobody," who lives by killing wolves and roasting them, himself virtually a beast, but one who can quote Pushkin and Shakespeare, even Hegel: You can take your comrades and shove 'em up your arse...
...Yet it was sad to think that many of them would never really understand the effect they were having ashore...
...q MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY, by Victor Serge...
...On the other hand he had little sympathy with rankandfile movements, opposed populism as well as socialism, and still reflected the craft unionists' antipathy for the black and the new immigrant worker...
...Incidentally, Clecak, unlike one "leftist" reviewer of his book, recognizes that valuing dissent and democracy means being prepared to hear from the Jerry Falwells of the world as well as from one's own kind...
...The verb "to Draperize" almost suggests itself...
...For the boundaries that separated this deeply caring man from the sustenance of an intimate emotional and sexual relationship, Debs substituted drinking nights with male friends, visits to brothels, and the uncritical devotion of roaring crowds...
...In his first ten years with the union Debs was an articulate advocate of a most conservative brand of craft unionism...
...131 Caught between older habits and new problems, Debs by 1890 was "a confused and confusing labor leader...
...He often seems to me to be an American counterpart of such men as Richard Lowenthal, Walter Laqueur, and his friend the late George Lichtheim—one who started out in the '30s on the left, became quickly disillusioned by Stalinist duplicity, but never surrendered to the temptation of making anticommunism or even antitotalitarianism into an all-embracing counterideology, choosing instead to become an analyst of world events, a defender of democracy, warts and all, skeptical of the pretensions of statesmen without ever succumbing to cynicism or tough-guy Realpolitik attitudinizing...
...But one comes to feel that what Page calls the "sexiness, the romance of power over life" was an essential ingredient of our participation...
...What was less clear was exactly how, when, and why Debs made his long political journey...
...dissent and protest energized a largely irreversible, interactive pattern of cultural and political shifts that established fresh opportunities and fresh perils for self-definition and self-fulfillment...
...The American juggernaut in Vietnam was not launched by men like Page, of course...
...He clearly also was much influenced by the Christian social gospel of George Herron with its emphasis on the "struggle of man for the possession and direction of his own life, for that self-ownership which is the soil and substance of all liberty...
...According to Peter Clecak even the neoconservatives whose influence grew in the '70s find it an unattractive time...
...When in 1886 the Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, substituted its own relief agency for the mutualism of the brotherhoods, Debs spotted a threat to the "absolute independence" of the workingmen...
...The subjects dealt with in the present collection are undeniably the most urgent concerns of American foreign policy since about 1965, most of which, unfortunately, cannot yet be treated as finished stories providing grist for the long-range historian...
...Salvatore is probably right to attribute the distance in their marriage to the incessant emotional demands made on a more retiring woman, but the couple's inability to have children must surely have weighed on Debs, a lover of children, as well...
...With the coming of World War II, Serge managed to get out of France and go to Mexico...
...If Salvatore has uncovered a man and political career more complicated and troubled than even the author would have preferred to relate, he has nevertheless helped considerably to bridge the gap between the 19th-century man of the people and the 20thcentury radical struggling to understand the world and himself, determined to change both of them...
...Draper concludes: "A new Western front will be restored only when the isolation of the United States is seen as the greatest danger to Europe, and the estrangement from Europe is seen as the greatest danger to the United States...
...when he became a serious suitor, for example, he would think to present her only with a bound volume of the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine...
...While still opposing boycotts, his defense of citizenship rights and "manliness" of character allowed Debs to subtly adapt his old message of harmony to a new age of industrial conflict...
...But one will want to read Nick Salvatore to understand the man behind the image and something of the world in which he traveled...
...without much conviction...
...In Holistic Running . . . for example, Joel Henning declares that running is `indeed a form of worship, an attempt to find God, a means to the transcendent.' " Such extreme versions of the quest for salvation through therapy are "atypical" but "reveal in distorted forms the basic impulses of the quest...
...Ginger described the initial KateEugene courtship as one where she had to take the initiative with the shy Debs...
...Eugene was born in 1855, the first son of "mixed" Protestant-Catholic immigrant parents, who had fled familial intolerance in their native Alsace and after an initial struggle established a successful family grocery in Terre Haute...
...After one year of high school Debs left academia, captivated by visions of worldly success, quickly advancing from paint-scraper to regular fireman on William Riley McKeen's Vandalia Railroad, all the while attending business school at night...
...Debs's frequent appeal to the ideal of "manliness," more than a simple incantation of the craftsman's code of ethics, represented a deeply felt division of human sentiments and activity along a genderrelated divide...
...A revolutionary tainted with libertarian notions, a writer of some 20 books (fiction and nonfiction) who mounted the barricades and recreated history in his works, loyal to his own vision to the very end, when he was living from hand to mouth in Mexico...
...Disdaining not only the violence of 1877 but also the implicit class formation represented by the Knights of Labor, and ignoring even the pre-AFL moves toward craft-union confederation, Debs happily accepted a narrow definition of the BLF's aims of "Benevolence, Sobriety, and Industry...
...Our will and determination to continue the battle for equality and social justice are sapped when we contemplate, for example, the disparities of wealth and income between blacks and whites and how many barriers to "equal opportunity" still remain, or when we reflect on the failure of ERA...
...Serge died in 1947...
...This same year saw a shift away from Riley McKeen as Debs's personal hero toward a revered image of his mother, a move that also seemed to deflect his conflict-ridden feelings for his new bride, Kate...
...Still, in spite of trials and defeats that plagued every individual and group...
...On the one hand he sought in vain for cooperation among the self-protective railway brotherhoods in the face of corporate attack...
...What message accounted for his special following...
...joined the Bolsheviks...
...More influential on the young Debs than the works of the French philosophes and romantics that his father read to him (Eugene Victor Debs was named after Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo), it seems, was the entrepreneurial spirit and success literature that circulated in Terre Haute...
...Distributed in the U.S...
...Through supple and serious attention 130 to the texts of Debs's voluminous speeches and writings, Salvatore leads us on an unbroken path from the thoughts of the boy paint-scraper seeking the main chance on the Vandalia Railroad to the Democratic politician and craft-union official, and then to the American Railway Union's experiment in industrial unionism...
...There is also a final section that goes back much further into the past to explore the prescient views of earlier thinkers, including de Tocqueville, on future Russian-American relations as well as a discussion of continuing ambiguities in the role of intellectuals in politics...
...End of story and book...
...After employer intransigence, governmental injunctions, and quarreling amongst the railroad unions had humiliated the BLF in the Burlington strike, labor solidarity alone—it now appeared to him—could spare America from a future in which "the dollar is to be everything, the corporation is to rule, and workingmen, with their faces in the dust, are to serve...
...There is nobody left who knows what the Russian Revolution was really like, what the Bolsheviks were really like—and men judge without knowing, with bitterness and a base rigidity...
...Are critics of American society and culture wrong in detecting the rise of "psychological man" (Philip Rieff), a person succumbing to the lure of "hedonism" (Daniel Bell), someone best described as a "narcissistic personality" (Christopher Lasch...
...To his parents' worries about the dangers of railroad work, 19-year-old Eugene would reply that "I only want to stay long...
...Whether intellectuals versed in dialectical materialism or proletarians, loyal or disaffected party members, they are people, "types" Serge would have known...
...Still, even among liberals and radicals there is a tendency to resist a view like Clecak's (witness the ambivalence lurking in the title of this review), and not always because one is unpersuaded by the reasonableness of the argument or the adequacy of the evidence...
...This one essay apart, I shall take the liberty of assuming that most readers of Dissent will be broadly familiar with the contents of the others...
...Listen," he said softly, "do you know what we are...
...While borrowing a good deal of specific analysis from such leaders as Victor Berger, Morris Hillquit, and later Bill Haywood of the IWW, Debs placed his own characteristic stamp on things—a blend, in Salvatore's view, "far more appealing to Americans than any alternative at the time, or indeed since...
...I would not omit a single item from the record, nor blot out a single experience, but if I did I should wish it to be the most joyous one rather than the bitterest of them all...
...Why not...
...I shall therefore limit myself to some general observations on the qualities of mind that Draper brings to bear on subjects he seeks to illuminate...
...Time-Life was one of the big buyers of his material...
...The overturning of the injunction, followed by a smashing victory over James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad, brought the ARU 150,000 members and the attention of the entire country...
...The eight or so years we spent tearing that country to pieces wrought commensurate destruction to our own shared cultural and emotional life...
...The novel is peopled by characters whom Serge hardly had to imagine...
...was active in the Revolution...
...She considered him with astonishment...
...AS THE MOST POPULAR STANDARD-BEARER of the socialist movement and five-time presidential candidate from 1900 to 1920, Debs's greatest achievement lay in fusing the historical-cultural commitments of radical republicanism with the economic theory of the international socialist tradition...
...Finally, how does one account for the lapses of leadership, the consistent indecision—in short, the weaknesses as well as strengths of this legendary "father" of the socialist movement in America...
...London: Writers and Readers...
...by W. W. Norton...
...There's only you and me, and if that makes one too many, the question will be easy to settle without consulting the masses...
...In summary, the political and cultural storms of the '60s and the '70s left behind a "progressive democratization of personhood in America...
...Without it, revulsion would surely have overtaken the whole enterprise long before it finally did...
...an individual's opportunity to define and enact possibilities of feeling and mind as freely and as fully as possible...
...But, Clecak responds, could the causes of the '60s and the '70s "have succeeded so far as they have without passionate expressions of social anger, without a willingness to violate rules and disrupt routines...
...27.50 The 1970s have a bad name—the "me decade," a narcissistic time in which authority declined...
...At one level, for example, "large numbers of citizens acquired the habit of dissent or at least exercised it with increasing frequency...
...Draper wants to bring both historical perspective and careful documentation from primary sources to bear upon "subjects of the greatest urgency and controversy while they [are] still urgent and controversial...
...As with other Victorian men, women stood for Debs on a pedestal of beauty, moral virtue, and compassion, at once inspiring and intimidating...
...Greeman is engaged in writing a full-scale biography of Serge, translating Serge's books into English, and trying to revive those previously translated...
...Surely, a more subtle explanation of ideological and personal development is called for here...
...the movements of those years "made a difference...
...yet that sober bureaucracy apparently never wanted such a zany character on its regular staff...
...The strike," Debs proclaimed in 1888, "is the weapon of the oppressed...
...As historical styles and research methods changed, Ginger's Debs inevitably came to appear a bit old-fashioned...
...Together, Debs's physical ailments, difficulties in establishing or maintaining intimate relationships, and seeming need to escape from inner turmoil seem to add up to more of a personal crisis than Salvatore admits or is willing to pursue...
...watching those blue-green tracers of I 2.7s hover toward you...
...Few professors would have had the gumption to tackle his diversity of subjects...
...He is entirely right when he says that the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, and the women's movement served the interests of justice and "the democratization of personhood...
...Uniting these diverse populations, which also include "joggers, health food enthusiasts, human potential advocates, and...
...It's rock and roll, you know...
...I wrote "despite" his methods, but I might as well have said "because of them, for Draper's opinions are always grounded in analysis of the facts and this rather than cocksureness accounts for the confidence with which he expresses them...
...Midnight is addressed — To the memory of Kurt Landau, Andres Nin, Erwin Wolf, who disappeared in Barcelona and whose very death was stolen from us, to Joaquin Maurin, in a Spanish prison, to Juan Andrade, Julian Gorkin, Katia Landau, Olga Nin, and through them to all whose valor they incarnate, I dedicate these messages from their brothers in Russia...
...America has an orgy of emotional reckoning still to come over its involvement in Vietnam...
...On the other hand, Clecak has hold of at least one significant point that other critics have ignored, and it makes his work necessary reading...
...life for many Americans within each disadvantaged category, from blacks and women to gays and handicapped, was more various, more full of possibility at the end of the seventies than it had been in the quieter, more stable middle fifties...
...Other clues, however, appear in the narrative as isolated insights or mere ephemera...
...Was then expelled for Trotskyism...
...Bell, for example, deploring the state of religion in America, emphasizes the antimodernist, politically reactionary components of Christian fundamentalism and "fails utterly to take account of the rich religious character of the experience of salvation reported in countless formal and informal sources...
...The Spanish Civil War spoke to him, above all as a partisan of the POUM (the anti-Stalinist left socialists, many of whom were killed by the Stalinists...
...To be sure, the religious dimension is not always apparent...
...Increasingly, a "concentric circle of suffering and redemption...
...There, according to the introduction by William Shawcross, he quickly established himself as one of the most productive and successful free-lancers, and certainly one of the most reckless...
...Clecak is at great pains to note the "extremes" that the quest for salvation can take...
...I mean, it was like an itch, and this was the only way to scratch it...
...But for most Americans the past was not a time of greater justice or greater opportunities for selffulfillment...
...His later books have dealt with ideologically freighted issues: the Cuban Revolution, the ideology of Castroism, the "abuse of power" that involved the United States in the Vietnam War, the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, U.S...
...Rodion makes his way upriver, to a town on the river bank, where he finds a job as a "free" laborer, a mason building...
...Clecak agrees with Lasch that in many respects American culture today is lacking, compared to its past...
...Salvatore's Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, (winner of the 1983 Bancroft Prize in American History) takes advantage both of new evidence and new perspectives to present a more complicated historical figure than we had previously known...
...But the critics "have tended to overstress and frequently to exaggerate what strikes me as side-effects of the quest...
...While, from his cell, Debs wrote of his "sacred melancholy," only one picture hung on his wall—of the crucified Christ...
...He also did a lot of "unpaid research" for the producers of Reds...
...It is interesting, for example, that after briefly alluding to the likely "emotional" base of Debs's "multiple illnesses," this social biography only dispatches the reader in a footnote to Haller and Haller's The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America for the "social meaning" of these diseases...
...Bewildered, but not yet willing to surrender all belief in the party, the characters choose to believe, arguing, anyway, that the party must know what it's doing...
...The heroic dimensions of the career of the conservative locomotive firemen's leader, who later took on the U.S...
...Such aspects of Debs's private character undoubtedly influenced his public career...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...Grayness pervades the novel...
...This book—basically a selection of riveting, journalistic war photos, strung together with brief commentary by the photographer—brings us no closer to this reckoning...
...Greeman closes this book with the notation that Serge "is buried as a 'Spanish Republican' in the French section of the Mexico City cemetery...
...And that is your supreme need, to find yourself—to really know yourself and your purpose in life...
...But a peaceful transition to democracy in Spain...
...I n 1949 Ray Ginger published a remarkable book, The Bending Cross, subsequently retitled Eugene V Debs: A Biography (Collier Books, Macmillan, 1962...
...Reading it is an unforgettable introduction to that history—desperate men and women trying to preserve their faith in socialism as the darkness closes in on them...
...458 pp...
...In Mexican exile, he met Trotsky's widow, Natalia, and wrote in his diary — [We] are the sole survivors of the Russian Revolution here and perhaps anywhere in the world...
...The book's illustrations are by Vlady, Serge's son, an artist in Mexico...
...Which brigade were you in...
...Debs's one passionate relationship was, as Salvatore has discovered, with Mabel Curry, a feminist lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit and wife of a Terre Haute professor...
...its disappearance a major crime, with punishment or "kindness" decreed by a fat security agent (who himself will ultimately, one is sure, take his turn in prison and deportation...
...Triumphant Socialism...
...The perfect harmony of men and machines...
...In all these [personal] qualities he [Debs] was more Midwestern than a worn and rotting plowhandle buried deep in the soil of a Kansas farm...
...This makes no sense at all today when the "decisive weapons" in the "war of attrition" with the Soviet Union are "political, economic, social and cultural, not the missiles of the apocalypse...
...was a friend of Russian writers who in the early years were allowed the freedom to experiment...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...The time is the early '30s—those years when prison, a filth-ridden "chaos," and deportation to work camps precede the executions of the great purges—and the crematoria—and Franco's conquest of Spain...
...Debs's own words reveal this thread of continuity in his thinking or, to put it as Salvatore sees it, the ways that traditional values give rise to new political solutions...
...In an afterword, Greeman discusses the meaning of the novel and Serge's work, and he quotes Rosa Luxemburg, "Every revolution is doomed to failure, except the last one...
...Clecak readily concedes the existence of these patterns...
...With support from both workingmen and the town's "best people," Debs, preaching self-help and a social community of interest, twice was elected city clerk before advancing in 1884 to the state legislature...
...Near the end of his life the quest for truth and self-knowledge of this avowedly secular radical took on overtly Christian overtones...
...Page began his career in photojournalism covering smaller wars in Indochina, until he found his main chance in Vietnam...
...All those who fell short of the controlling images began to move against the structure of disadvantage with significant gains being made by, among others, racial and ethnic groups, women, homosexuals, and the physically handicapped...
...Ginger's prose, too, remains superior in its capacity for illustrative detail, and metaphorical power: The gashes across his forehead had deepened...
...In the more recent treatment Debs's bold political initiatives and stirring eloquence are convincingly set off against a backdrop of ideological ambivalence, tactical confusion, and personal self-doubt...
...The decision was taken by older, cultivated men, drawn from the elites of American government and intellectual 139 life...
...Thirty-six years is a long time...
...The altered social relationships accompanying the rise of capitalist industry, particularly the crystallization of a new local business elite, take on a flesh-and-blood vitality...
...Groping for the 60's twin grip and feeding a belt through made me feel more useful...
...What kind of comrade are you to me, you poor half-drowned fool...
...Have you ever thought about it...
...As late as his fateful 1918 antiwar and pro-Bolshevik speech delivered at Canton, Ohio, the "central issue" for Debs, as Salvatore expertly deciphers it, "revolved around the individual...
...Salvatore assimilates these "events" into "the complex change Debs experienced as the force and quickness of industrial capitalism deluged his culture...
...Across the spectrum of Debs's political permutations, Salvatore discovers an irreducible core of concerns with which Debs grappled all his adult life...
...The assumption that the narcissistic personality is the basic contemporary character structure "permits Lasch privileged insight into American minds and offers a way to explain without recourse to mere evidence why they routinely neglect his form of salvation...
...to prove that I can act manly when [I] must be...
...Is this, plus Ronald Reagan, all we have to show for the energies and passions we invested in the movements of the '60s and the '70s...
...All of the essays were first published between 1973 and 1982...
...The theme may be summarized as a quest for personal autonomy befitting citizens of the American republic...
...what is certainly not clear is that they are merely "side-effects" rather than symbolic of the pervasiveness of narcissism...
...helped found the Communist International...
...But without intending to, it does help to show how the deliberate, sustained American role in Vietnam's destruction was possible...
...The first is a sure grasp of recent social history to create what the author labels a "social biography," or the integration of the subject's life with his cultural and social context...
...One of the characters, Rodion—half-educated, a "philosopher" seriously trying to understand Hegel so that he can better understand the dialectics of revolutionary life turned into oppression—escapes from a work camp...
...Is it not rather a tribute to Debs's humanity that he continually sought personal solace in our common future...
...Serge draws on his own experience of 80 days in solitary confinement and his own two years in Siberian deportation after he was expelled from the Communist party as a Left Oppositionist (Trotskyist...
...Their loss would, of course, be a small price to pay to avoid the repetition of such disasters, but the very intelligence they so amply possess remains a major resource in protecting us against such a repetition...
...His jaw had come to resemble a giant bone pendulum, attached as an afterthought to a previously finished face...
...Trans lated from the French by Richard Greeman...
...The spreading confrontations of the national railroad corporations with the railway brotherhoods and the Knights of Labor, highlighted by the Southwest strike of 1886 and the Burlington and Quincy strike of 1888-89, forced Debs and other brotherhood leaders into a position of more militant, if still selective, resistance to the anti-union initiatives from above...
...Sometimes Bell's cultural conservatism, Clecak continues, leads him into conflict with his political liberalism...
...Such early success, however, also set up the union for the kill at the hands of employers united with an itchy U.S...
...Theodore Draper contends that his title, though apparently an oxymoron, is meant to indicate the intermediate status of his essays between journalism, which deals with immediate events, and traditional history, which waits to assess them until they have indisputably acquired an aura of "pastness...
...Those searching for the abundant life demanded an increase in liberty for others as well as themselves...
...it is fundamentally a search for salvation rooted in the society's religious traditions...
...A loaf of bread is a major concern...
...Nor, despite the meticulousness of his research methods, does he shrink from clear-cut judgments out of fear of being thought too "controversial" or enslavement to what C. Wright Mills called "the methodological inhibition...
...I t helps to know something of the history of Russia under Stalin's despotism to appreciate this novel fully...
...So, too, were the small-town gestures, the fun-loving, optimistic mannerisms that made the radicalism of this native son of Terre Haute, Indiana, so much more a part of turn-of-thecentury Americana than the lectures of his more starched comrades...
...Draper recounts in detail de Gaulle's initial challenge to the alliance leading to the present "neo-Gaullism" of Germany as well as France, the structural economic changes resulting from European recovery, and the new strategic balance created by the Soviet arms buildup since the 1960s...
...Now openly aligning himself with the politics of the Knights of Labor and the Populist party—the mainstream of late-19th-century radical republicanism to which Debs was a latecomer—the ARU leader met his first federal injunction with a simple resolve: "The issue is upon us and I am in favor of forcing, not evading, it...
...The quest has "quasi-religious" overtones...
...If you don't want me to chuck your arse back in the water, you better not call me comrade...
...242 pp...
...Bell warns against the dangers of a too passionate politics "that invites violent conflict and even civil war...
...Lasch can convert every "hopeful facet of American culture and politics" into mere "illusion...
...High on an endless cornucopia of drugs and intoxicated with war itself, Page went where other journalists never dared...
...They include debates over nuclear strategy, the condition of the Western alliance (or "mesalfiance," as Draper would have it), the "ghosts of Vietnam," detente and Kissinger's diplomacy, the 134 Arab-Israeli wars, and the recently influential neoconservative views on foreign policy of Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...Against his zest for the war experience, the author's reservations ring hollow and half-hearted: The Navy made sure you felt comfortable, clean, and wanted...
...Page , who is British, was officially a noncombatant and depicts himself as an opponent of the war...
...What resources, personal and political, sustained him against the fury of corporate authority and the tumult within socialist ranks...
...Today's "regrettable changes...
...The story line is simple enough, though it has no "plot" in the ordinary sense...
...But it "fails" only in comparison with Serge's greatest work...
...Following the shakeup of the union after the 1877 railroad strikes, Debs's organizational and persuasive skills were recognized in his appointment as BLF national secretary-treasurer and editor of the brotherhood's magazine...
...Superficially, Debs's symptoms bear striking resemblance to that cluster of complaints that Victorian medicine might have diagnosed as neurasthenia or exhaustion of the nervous system, a kind of psychosomatic reaction, most often affecting "brainworkers" and especially women, to the pressures of modern life...
...IT IS HARD TO DISCERN from inside a social whirlwind what is central and what is peripheral, what is symbolically significant and what of minor importance...
...To be sure, the effectiveness of the book's social-historical dimension fades as Debs moves out at the turn of the century onto a murkier, national social plane, as head of a movement contending with—and generated from—numerous discrete social circumstances...
...The alliance "was, even in its heyday, a unilateral military guarantee more than a true alliance...
...If the first decade of Debs's career describes an ambitious man well adapted to the Gilded Age, the next reveals the radical underside of the smallproducer republicanism to which Debs and many of his fellow citizens had long subscribed...
...and driven by a quota to match the competition of the prisoners' brigade, working on the same project...
...Draper's breadth owes much to the fact that he has not spent most of his life hanging around universities...
...intervention in the Dominican Republic, and the revival of American black nationalism in the 1960s...
...Not until he broke permanently with the BLF and chartered the American Railway Union (ARU) on an industrial unionist model open to all did Debs signal a clear direction...
...There he worked in printshops, wrote, barely survived— and was jailed for a time...
Vol. 31 • January 1984 • No. 1
