The Letters of Eugene V. Debs edited by J. Robert Constantine

...likewise, it seems quaint in comparison to the sexual emancipation and new womanhood celebrated by the young Village radicals...

...What resulted was a long and discreet liaison, full of ardent professions as well as the tensions inherent in what both described as "the situation...

...All displayed a hearty, unselfconscious, sincere fraternalism that, as various historians have begun to show, lay at the core of nineteenth-century American middle- and working-class culture, in constant and creative tension with the individualism that some scholars have misread as egoistic or bourgeois or otherwise destructive of communal and class sympathies...

...That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man...

...He means it...

...Louis wrote to Debs in the Atlanta Penitentiary, with assurance that "your Worthy Name will go down in History the same as Abraham Lincoln, as a true lover for Freedom and Principal...

...Yet for at least some young rebels, Debs's Americangrained camaraderie, his (to them) surprising combination of political radicalism and an old-fashioned kind of moral rectitude and generosity, was a singular revelation...

...Curry was a warm-hearted, outgoing suffrage campaigner—and she was married...

...Recent historians and biographers—especially feminists interested in the links between the personal and the political— have uncovered all sorts of material about their subjects' private lives that previous scholars either knew nothing about or deemed off-limits...

...Partly, the word is one of the linguistic casualties of the twentieth century, with its links to communism, double-speak and cold-war movies...

...And too many other things have changed for the worse, in the nation's privatized, anomic crabgrass frontiers...

...The heavily compartmentalized character of today's social movements, with separate slots for race, class, and gender, can easily make us forget the connections of another time...

...Yet the feeling lingers that American radicalism has paid a terrible political (not to mention psychological) price for its own cultural alienation, a price that has never truly been reckoned...

...Nor, for all of his inspiring dedication, could Debs overcome the mounting insistence (especially after World War I and the Bolshevik revolution) that true Americanism led not, as he preached it did, toward socialism, but toward the Legionnaires' brand of 100 percent Americanism...

...In the letters, some of his deepest expressions of love are directed at men, not women...

...Regarding women, Debs held to a different kind of sentimental affection, equally in touch with mainstream Victorian American impulses...

...Amid the cacophonies of today's interest and identity politics, it all sadly seems like a very long time ago, incapable of being updated to fit our own sense of social justice...

...Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, MIT Press, 1992...

...You tried to prolong the war so that 1000000's of the US boys would be slaughtered...

...letters to and from (among others) Katherine Richards O'Hare show how deeply Debs affected female agitators and women socialists all across small-town America...

...It was all a far cry from the kinds of erotics that turn up in the Goldman-Reitman letters, with Goldman's paeans to her lover's "Willie" and her talk about her "treasure box...

...He seemed most alive when out on the stump, the central character in his own dramaturgy of manly dissent, basking in the excitement his appearances produced...

...Likewise, too much has changed for the better in the political world, notably in the destruction of formal racial subjugation, to hanker for the days of 1908...

...Comrade Gene Debs: even to those Americans who can identify the name, it sounds antiquated, conjuring up a political culture that died long ago...

...Debs's magnetism comes through in his personal correspondence...

...Debs based his support of women's rights not so much on any claims of women's equality as on his belief in the moralizing force of femininity and on men's fundamental dependence on women...

...Never can I forget your loyalty, your devotion, your love, which to me have been a source of unceasing inspiration...

...In 1885, when he was thirty, Debs married Katherine Menzel, the daughter of middle-class German immigrants who stood well above the Debs family's social station in Terre Haute...

...he had felt the shock of the emerging corporate order as a desecration of everything America was supposed to be...

...by the force of his own decency and oratorical power, he helped others to do so without embarrassment...

...Various collections of Debs's speeches offer the most direct engagement with the political thrust of his sensibility...

...An equally straightforward biographical sketch at the start of the first volume covers the main points of Debs's life...

...But Debs's celebrations of women and motherhood (often couched in soliloquies to his own mother) always stemmed from idealized notions of female purity and virtue...

...The writer had, he said, once been a member of the American Legion, "but after I found out what Socialism is, I dropped my membership . . . and at once became a Socialist and will always be a hard worker for the Socialist Party so long as I live...

...112 • DISSENT Above all, the letters show an essentially nineteenth-century spirit at work building the only socialist movement in American history that even approached viability...

...Mitchell Cohen & Nicole Fermon, editors, Thinking Politically: Classic Readings Since Plato, Free Press, 1993...

...Debs kept up appearances, and continued to treat his wife with warmth and respect...

...Griffith's Birth of a Nation: "Of all the millions of white men in the country, you are the only one I know that has had the courage to speak out against this diabolical production as it deserves...

...Debs's mission failed, and his own shortcomings contributed to its defeat...

...One of the narrative lines that run through Constantine's collection, about Debs' own difficult love life, illuminates this side of his character...

...His incessant urge to spread the word of the "good time coming" sent him on frenzied speaking tours that were punctuated by physical breakdowns and (especially during his years of imprisonment in Atlanta) severe depressions...

...Debs was an open-minded man, with a freethinking streak of his own—but he came from a universe far different from Goldman's or the Masses crowd's...

...Debs reminds us of what it was like to have a conviction of comradeship in tune with much of what of the rest of the country believed were the basic universal rights and responsibilities of humankind...

...On the left, Debs's style of comradeship would soon be displaced by the "hard," even cynical, pseudoproletarianism of the communists and a long line of socialist sects...

...In recent times, only one figure on the left, Martin Luther King, Jr., has been able to project a similar magic, drawing on the cadences of an enduring black prophetic Christianity...

...those expressions usually were reciprocated...

...You aren't a toiler...

...And that's not the funniest part of it...

...His letters typically include uncomplicated discussions of political events and personal affairs, void of arresting anecdotes, philosophical speculation, or shapely turns of phrase...

...Ginger's admiring The Bending Cross: The Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (1949) is a narrative life-and-times in the grand tradition, full of colorful detail: Salvatore's followup, no less grand and admiring, brings to bear a greater psychological astuteness about the connection between Debs's private and public life, while avoiding the temptation to engage in smug debunking...

...Between them (and the other authors who have been drawn to Debs over the years), Ginger and Salvatore seem to have left no important bit of information unexamined...

...Likewise, the balkanization of historical studies into subspecialties (each with its own career track) defeats any comprehensive view of the lyrical, pre-1917 left...

...He sometimes wrote to her as "Juno" and signed his letters "Ura" (the reversed acronym for the American Railway Union...

...Debs was convincing because he had grown up on these verities, just as his listeners had...

...But "comrade" also sounds strange in an American political world that lacks much sense of enduring, universal affection...

...Unwilling to abandon his protectiveness toward his own wife (or to risk his public reputation), Debs squashed any ideas about divorce and remarriage...

...Constantine's collection presents ample allusions to Debs's support for women's suffrage and birth control...

...So can organizations based in churches, synagogues, and mosques, as well as black organizations generally...

...Debs not only spoke of comradeship...

...Others spoke of Debs's heroism, exuberance, and purity of purpose...

...Too much had changed for the better, in freeing women from the old double standards, in transforming sexual mores, in cutting through the evasiveness of Victorian culture, for us to feel entirely comfortable in Debs's presence...

...After Debs—and after radical criticism became the preserve of a self-consciously alienated intelligentsia—such talk would always run the risk of earning snickers...

...114 • DISSENT of bohemian styles—made it more difficult for mainstream Americans to sense much of a cultural connection between themselves and the country's radical critics...

...The cultural crackup of the Victorian world and its unending fall-out--in modernism, feminism, and a succession It is Dissent's policy not to review books by its editors...

...Max Eastman, the preeminent Village radical intellectual, later remarked with abiding astonishment that Debs was "the sweetest strong man I ever saw," an uncompromising yet thoroughly amiable man whose "genius was for love, the ancient real love, the miracle love that really identifies itself with the wishes and needs of others...

...Tellingly, however, its most conspicuous current manifestation, in our therapeutic culture, has been the muchpublicized men's movement, with its "Iron John" seminars inspired by the likes of Robert Bly —the latest in the pitiful search for meaningful lifestyles...

...He could, to be sure, play hardball when he had to...

...Soon after the wedding, the couple's relations cooled, as Kate's emotional reserve and her desire for a respectable, well-ordered home life clashed with her fiery husband's frenetic schedule and passionate needs for intimacy and approval...

...Although badly frayed by years of bickering and posturing, "sisterhood" is still cherished in corners of the feminist movement...

...There is, admittedly, a regretful nostalgia in some parts of suburban America for a half-imagined older style of rugged masculinity...

...Mitchell Cohen, editor, Rebels and Reactionaries: An Anthology of Great Political Stories, Dell Books, 1992...

...The notes, which identify thousands of now-obscure persons, newspapers, and pamphlets, are briskly informative without ever lapsing into pedantry...

...Current studies of figures on the left have deepened our understanding of how, at about the turn of the century, left-wing politics became intertwined with the revolt against Victorianism and a new erotic frankness...

...Although full of warmth and good humor, his prose is unreflective, ungossipy, and businesslike...

...Mother Jones & 6 others spoke in morning & afternoon & I wound up last night with a corking speech to a tremendous audience which was swept from its feet with enthusiasm...

...It is difficult today for anyone (including, and maybe especially, anyone on the left) to utter "comrade" without a touch of irony...

...Such personalities are rare enough in politics...

...The discovery of Emma Goldman's torrid letters to her lover, the self-styled hobo radical Ben Reitman, has redirected attention to the great anarchist's sexual radicalism...

...The battered trade union movement can still address its members as "brothers and sisters...

...Not that Debs adhered to the constricting doctrines about women's rights and duties associated with the Victorian cult of domesticity...

...Some of the chattiest pieces in his entire correspondence show Debs at his most playful, but always very much the gentleman, placing Mrs...

...Signing himself "A...

...Rather quickly, the marriage WINTER • 1993 • 113 began to travel along straight and formal channels, with Kate tending to the house and to Gene's official correspondence and her husband finding release in his political work and (while on the road) in occasional visits to local bordellos...

...Although far from complete—thousands more letters appear in a microfilm edition of Debs's papers, released by the Microfilming Corporation of America in 1983—it is (along with the continuing editorial projects on Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King) among the most authoritative works of its kind about an American radical...

...He was less comfortable as a party manager and infighter, a job he preferred to leave to others...

...Maurice Halbwach, On Collective Memory, edited, translated and introduced by Lewis Coser, the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992...

...Robert Heilbroner, Twenty-first Century Capitalism, W. W. Norton, 1993...

...As long as he's around I believe it myself...

...To hundreds of thousands of others, Debs and the party whose best spirit he amplified had a heartfelt, converting effect that can only be likened to an evangelical revival...

...A catalytic force, he was less capable when it came to the nuts-and-bolts tasks of transforming the Socialist party from a growing political movement into a mass political party...

...But in Debs's case, it would seem that his passing marked a larger cultural shift...

...He was unfailingly thoughtful and generous in his letters to his family and political supporters, effusing love and appreciation and comradeship...

...Nor has Constantine discovered in Comrade Gene the kind of epistolary genius that would lead most modern readers to want to wade through all nineteen-hundred-odd pages...

...For all you have been to me through all these days & nights of trial I thank you with all my heart...

...When his demons got the better of him, as they did during the long stay in the Atlanta Penitentiary, Debs withdrew into himself to fight what he viewed as private battles...

...You never produced anything...

...Curry on a pedestal: No, I don't see our love through glasses "any less rosy...

...At times, his correspondence reads less like that of a conventional political hero and more like that of a religious figure...

...However, from time to time we will publish lists of new and forthcoming works by members of our editorial board...

...Ens...

...WINTER • 1993 • 111 Yet Debs's temperament was more suited to the party pulpits than to the back rooms...

...Curry, who was more receptive to the possibility, gave way to his wishes, as well as to her own sense of propriety...

...The idea of recreating the Debsian appeal in quite the same way as Debs created it is, on its face, preposterous...

...A political leader like Debs comes along maybe once a generation...

...Men, according to this view, were the makers of the world, the active giants, the builders...

...Yet such usages usually connote a designated American subgroup and mark the continuing fragmentation of the old, bold culture of comradeship...

...With scholarly restraint and a minimum of intrusive markings, Constantine and his publisher have presented a work that (except for the price) is as accessible to a general audience as Debs would have wanted it to be...

...Jeremy Lamer, "Rack's Rules," in the anthology Sex, Death and God, edited by David Reid, Pantheon, 1992...

...he had come to believe, truly, that the mass of Americans still had the power and the will to make the world all over again...

...Only once in recent years have I heard the word spoken with complete sincerity, when an émigré intellectual told me how much he enjoyed attending editorial meetings where he could meet with the "combraids...

...And the feeling was mutual, even among those he had never met...

...Yet in Constantine's collection, even more than in the biographies, there are some glimpses of those connections —in letters from and about Margaret Sanger and her crusade for birth control, in the continuing correspondence between Debs and numerous literary notables (including his Indiana friend, the local colorist James Whitcomb Riley), in a note from the civil rights pioneer Ida Wells-Barnet, congratulating Debs in 1916 for his denunciation of D.W...

...Gene's life changed in 1916, when he fell deeply in love with another Terre Haute woman, Mabel Dunlap Curry, and the two began an affair that would last the rest of Debs's life...

...The letters, despite Debs's veil of dogged optimism, illuminate the more private and emotional dimensions of that sensibility and suggest how it shaped his public persona...

...Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel, Columbia University Press, 1992...

...In receipt of a volume of the poet's conversations with Horace Traubel, Whitman's Boswell, Debs wrote appreciatively to Traubel that the work seemed like "Old Walt" himself, rugged, reverent, unrestrained, his own living, breathing being, quickened in every mental, moral and spiritual fibre and whetted to his keenest edge by your magnetic touch and under the influence of your loyal and loving comradeship...

...We hope you'll never come out of the jug alive...

...David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking, Yale University Press, 1992...

...On the contrary it grows sweeter, diviner with the passing days...

...These are the writings of a man on the run, who always tried to project the optimism that sometimes overly guided his political thinking and whose conception of manliness forced him to hold his inner torments in check...

...But whenever he left Terre Haute on one of his speaking tours, he would silently tip his hat as the train chugged past the Curry residence...

...In 1921, an anonymous "Brother Socialist" from St...

...Dear Gene," one letter from Portland in 1921 cordially began: We working people of Oregon hope that the guards throw the whip into you every day...

...How sweet, how odd, I thought—but then, I reminded myself, he is an Englishman...

...Unlike the editors of the King papers (who have had to grapple with the delicate matter of the plagiarisms in King's doctoral dissertation), Constantine delivers no large documentary revelations...

...In his superb biography, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, Nick Salvatore quotes a skeptic who detested the "sentimental flummery" of the left, but who found an exception in Comrade Gene: [T]he funny part of it is that when Debs says "comrades," it is all right...

...When provoked, he could rise to spectacular heights of ironic anger that belied his saintly public image...

...Still, leafing through the letters brings some interesting reminders of the richness of the dissenting milieu in Debs's time...

...Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel, Columbia University Press, 1992...

...Paul Berman, editor, Debating P. C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on Campus, Dell, 1992...

...The rest of the correspondence is filled with "affectionate hugs," "loving remembrances," and "fraternal joy," from "your loving comrade...

...Nicolaus Mills, Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America, Ivan R. Dee, 1992...

...But it is hard to imagine a reinvented sense of comradeship upon which some future Debs might build...

...Producer," the writer added a postscript, indicative of how, by the 1920s, Americans had begun to turn Debs's own socialist vocabulary against him and the entire socialist ideal: "You are a Parasyte...

...At his most high-flown, Debs linked this fraternal love to Walt Whitman, whom he idolized—not in the homosexual sense that some recent Whitman critics think they detect, but as a different kind of electric, tactile adhesiveness that is hard for the late twentieth century to comprehend...

...Debs's genius lay in his ability to take age-old American verities about independence, responsible citizenship, and democratic self-reliance, and turn them into a supple, nonsectarian socialist appeal...

...I• Robert Constantine has done a fine job of selecting and annotating these and roughly 1,500 other pieces of Debs's correspondence, covering his career from his coming-of-age in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the 1870s to his death in 1926...

...Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, editors, The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, "A Laborer" 1747-1814, Harvard University Press, 1993...

...Todd Gitlin, The Murder of Albert Einstein, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992...

...The kind of fraternalism that nourished his own instincts was, even in his own lifetime, going to seed in large parts of the country and leaving behind Jaycee-style Babbitry...

...In part, this testifies to the excellent work of Salvatore and his major predecessor as Debs's biographer, Ray Ginger...

...And continuing studies of the younger generation of pre-1917 dissident writers and artists, notably those grouped around the Masses, have captured how much of their "new" radicalism centered on re-imagining relations between men and women...

...Reading Debs is not like reading Thomas Jefferson or the brothers Goncourt...

...We had a grand meeting in this mining centre," runs a typical letter, written from Kansas in 1908, "big picnic all day yesterday—big delegation came down from Girard...

...women were the soft civilizers of the world, guardians of the home fires, cultured beautifiers of what men had built...