A Reformer Through Idiosyncratic Eyes
TYLER, GUS
A Reformer Through Idiosyncratic Eyes Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs By Marguerite Young Knopf. 624 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Gus Tyler Former national...
...Is Young serious, or is she just having fun with words...
...But for ordinary mortals the style can be a stumper...
...According to Ruas, she would often indulge conversationally in punning pranks and then burst out in a roar of lighfhearted laughter...
...When a child was born to the Debs family, the father chose a name in line with his view of life...
...She is determined to remind us of what her somewhat preachy song of protest and promise is about over and over again, lest we not "get it...
...By sheer coincidence, Indiana plays a pivotal role in the story of the Utopians, of Debs and of Young...
...As a young doctor, Berman went to Africa to work with Doctor Albert Schweitzer, who was a sort of medical Mother Teresa...
...To begin with, it had plenty of cheap land...
...syndicated columnist, radio commentator Despite the promise of its subtitle, Marguerite Young's posthumous book is not a full-length portrait of Eugene Victor Debs...
...All are full of irmuendos, implications and insinuations that have to be tasted, tested and slowly savored, not quickly swallowed...
...He died on October 20, 1926, just 17 days before his 71 st birthday...
...Nevertheless, the spiritual community he gathered and held together, even after his death, was in her eyes part of the wide-winged movement in America toward a millennial social order...
...A sentence that runs for more than 100 words is common, and every now and then there is one that runs for 200 words...
...In describing her literary self (she is the author of two volumes of poetry and the best-selling novel Miss Macintosh, My Darling) she wrote: "I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopia, and the structure of all my works is the search for Utopias lost and rediscovered...
...Make believe Harp Song for a Radical is a collection of poetic puzzles...
...Perhaps it was his intimate contact with other jailbirds that caused Debs to declare proudly, "Years ago I began to recognize my kinship with all living beings...
...Consequently, the book is less about a person than a problem the author wrestles with—namely, the role of the Utopian as one whose dreams help shape the contours of "reality," and whose exposure to reality invariably shatters his dreams...
...He has also written an illuminating Introduction to this most unusual, inimitable and intimidating book...
...the second is entitled "Harp Song for a Radical...
...Her query reminded me of a story I heard many years ago from Doctor Edgar Berman, the personal physician of Hubert H. Humphrey...
...There are no simple declarative sentences here...
...Young was seriously ill for several years prior to her death...
...Just two sentences that are entries in a two-page "Chronology" mention his role as a founder of the Socialist Party and of the Industrial Workers of the World...
...They were generally men of some means who had not forgotten that the true purpose of the French Revolution was embodied in three crucial words, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternit...
...After a few minutes, the sculptor said, "I remember...
...When it went kaput, it was taken over by the British millennial manufacturer Robert Owen and called New Harmony...
...But that is not Young's style...
...In fact, at one point she maintains "this continent had been swept over by so many wild waves of cooperative communal spiritualism that for a time it had almost become a communal nation...
...En passant, Young strongly suggests that Joseph Smith was a fraud who never found the golden plates the Book of Mormon was supposedly inscribed on, and never spoke with the Angel Moroni...
...Debs is, in these pages, a prominent and potent prop...
...This will not be a problem for those who read Herman Melville's Moby Dick or James Joyce's Ulysses with ease...
...he simply invented the tall tale to set himself up as God's preferred prophet on earth...
...The German millennialist George Rapp founded his colony, the Harmony Society, in the state...
...The deeds that made Debs famous are not part of the unfinished manuscript this diligent, daring author left behind after some 25 years of research and writing...
...Schweitzer replied, "I'm not surprised...
...He's my cousin...
...For she counted among her Utopians Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church...
...Although the details of the Pullman strike and Debs' time in jail are absent, as noted earlier, the incidents are mentioned by Young as turning points in Debs' life...
...While most historians might consider her assessment a happy-minded hyperbole, Young may have a piece of the truth by the tail...
...Daniel Debs came from Alsace...
...It ends when, at age 30, he married Kate Metzel after having edited the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine, served as City Clerk of Terre Haute, Indiana, and done a two-year stint as a member of the Indiana Legislature...
...while there is a soul in prison, I am not free...
...On one occasion Schweitzer was posing for a bust, and the sculptor said, "You know, my hands tell me that I have worked on this head before...
...The son was named Eugene in honor of Eugène Sue, author of The Wandering Jew, and Victor in honor of Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables...
...It is about European (and some native-born American) Utopians, especially how their efforts found concrete expression in the United States...
...No sentence is there merely to be read...
...Each dreamer had his own blueprint of the perfect society...
...A phrenologist might say that both Albert Schweitzer and his cousin had the right bumps in the right places...
...participation in World War I. None of this is anyone's oversight...
...The epic events that made him a folk hero, a reborn Lincoln and a living martyr to the cause of all the "wretched of the earth'are scanted as well...
...The initial section makes no pretense of being about Debs...
...The first, roughly a quarter of the book, is entitled "Prelude in a Golden Key...
...The most immediate influence on Debs the Socialist, however, was his father...
...most are complex and long...
...Apparently a faker could also be the father of a new faith...
...In French, the name of the city stood for "high ground," based on the fact that the plateau it occupied was somewhat elevated...
...And there is nothing more than a transient reference to the history-making ARU strike against the Pullman Car Company that earned Debs six months in jail...
...In her view, this communitarian wave of the future had been blocked by an uncivil Civil War...
...Thus the book's first section deals with the dreamers and doers who held a "golden key" to unlock the doors to a present "paradise...
...I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class I am in it...
...The nation "still might have reacted favorably to Marx' most mystifying dialectical materialism," she adds with a twinkle in her eye, "if only it had been called dialectic spiritualism...
...Simon and Etienne Cabet...
...Many of these Utopians were French, with names like François Marie Charles Fourier, Claude de St...
...He was well read, a deep thinker, and passionately dedicated to raising a son in his own image...
...But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking toward utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side...
...They believed in freedom, in the essential equality of human beings, and—a most decisive and necessary ingredient—fraternity, the relationship of individuals to one another as if they were brothers or sisters...
...Be that as it may, a joint conspiracy between nature and nurture does appear to have made Debs the deeply caring man he proved to be...
...That he chose Terre Haute as his home seemed natural...
...Debs was born and lived in Terre Haute...
...Daniel wanted a son who would fight for the oppressed...
...Readers should be cautioned, though, that what took Marguerite Young two and a half decades to write cannot be properly read in two and half hours or even 10...
...Repeatedly, Young refers to the United States and Canada as the "millennial continent," the great magnet drawing the dreamers to its shores...
...His chosen people, like those in the Shaker and similar communities, were "spiritually" inspired...
...The answer, I think, is provided by her title...
...Why did Young go this route...
...Cleverly, Ruas divides the volume into two parts...
...They recruited followers and set out for America to establish the "promised land" they envisioned...
...But in the Debsian years there must have been some mystics who felt it was spiritually a place where folk could live on a high ground...
...Another writer might describe the era in academic lingo, or might simply take it for granted and concentrate on Debs' activities...
...As a result, much of the book revolves around Indiana, whose denizens included the antimillennial Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President of the United States and grandson of the ninth President, William Henry Harrison ("Tippecanoe...
...In addition, the United States was a young nation, not yet so set in its hierarchical ways as to inhibit or prohibit the growth of a community run along egalitarian and communitarian (communist) lines...
...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Former national board member, Americans for Democratic Action...
...Why America...
...In her ever contemplative and questioning way, Young wonders: Did Debs need the prison experience and the exposure to Socialist literature to turn him into the kind of man he became, or was he by nature disposed to be an altruistic humanitarian...
...This isnot Young's first painstaking examination of Utopias and Utopians...
...For instance: There is only a casual allusion to his formation of the American Railway Union (ARU), a brave and bold attempt to form One Big Union out of several separate railway "brotherhoods...
...Young was born and raised in Indiana, too, and in her last years returned there from New York...
...Nor does Young's odd opus pretend to be the full story of his life...
...Certain phrases, and even full sentences, are repeated and repeated and repeated, In a song, one needs to remember, there are refrains, and the repetition of phrases like "the czars of coal, iron, steel, and rails" are part of Young's refrain...
...Both men knew that could not be the case...
...Her close friend and collaborator, Charles Ruas, a faculty member at Columbia University, has skillfully assembled and edited whatever material she got done...
...his language was French and his attitudes were French Revolutionary...
...Such recurrent witticisms often leave the reader baffled...
...All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality...
...while there is a criminal element, I am of it...
...The larger section, putatively devoted to Debs, really uses him as a peg on which to hang the author's wise and worried words about Utopians and Utopias in the 19th and 20th centuries...
...Her style is highly idiosyncratic...
...It was the head of Eugene Victor Debs...
...So are his four Presidential races as the Socialist Party candidate, and his lengthy imprisonment for opposing U.S...
...Or is our good humored author sharing still another ironic joke with her readers...
...She prefers to explore the social forces at work, as evidenced in the beliefs and behavior of individuals...
...Finally Debs' drinking buddy, the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley, while hardly a radical, endeared himself to Debs with a one-liner that ran, "There's nothing 'at's pathetiker than jes' a' a bein' rich...
...The golden keys were not all shaped identically...
...Solving them will soon become fun, and in the end you will be wiser in the ways of the prosaic world...
...The book is a"harp song," a long, mellow piece of poetry written in free verse, where each sound echoes in the subsequent sounds and each thought gives birth to a brood of other relevant thoughts...
...Here, therefore, she focuses on Debs as the embodiment of the Zeitgeist—in this case the millennial mood—that was prevalent during his lifetime...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 10
