Getting a Leftist Right

...Defining socialism as a "cooperative commonwealth" where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship would be broadly shared, he sounded much like Mario Cuomo or Bill Clinton, urging "an equalizing of burdens and benefits throughout the whole society...

...And, in his own way, he was also the most effective...

...For the rest of his life, he would say that he was "baptized in socialism" in his prison cell...

...He soon became a founder and the most prominent leader of the fledgling Socialist party...

...Within his Socialist party, he worked with German, Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants whom the rural Populists and middle class Progressives were unwilling or unable to embrace...

...Still, of all the leaders who have appealed to Americans threatened by social and economic change, Debs was far and away the most decent...

...These campaigns were essentially speaking tours, and Debs was a great speaker...

...He found himself up against the combined power of the nation's corporate giants and the conservative Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland, who called out federal troops and won a court injunction against strike activity...

...In immigrant communities, Socialists built mutual aid societies from the Jewish Workmen's Circle to the Slovenian Benefit Society...

...At the turn of this century, it was still possible to believe that social problems in this country were entirely rooted in poverty and exploitation...

...Disobeying the injunction, Debs was sent to federal prison...

...To be fair, there are flashes of vivid writing and even brilliant insight...

...Unlike many radicals from his time to our own, Debs was steeped in traditional values—from Jeffersonian democracy to evangelical Christianity...

...Debs's twin legacies—radical protest and pragmatic reform—have rarely been explored...

...In fact, its motto was "Benevolence, Sobriety, and Industry...

...Yet, if Debs is remembered at all today, it is more as a battler against social injustice than a builder of social institutions...

...And, even in Debs's Curiously, it was in the arena he knew best—unionism—that Debs proved his most dogmatic and least pragmatic...

...Like many other leaders of successful social movements, Debs was a middle American through and through...

...His lasting impact was the development of institutions, from the industrial unions to social insurance programs for wage-earners and their families...

...In a historical irony, both architects of this "treaty of Detroit" had been youthful supporters of the American Socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs...

...time, Socialists helped build some of the first industrial unions of coal miners, garment workers, and auto workers...

...Debs's own high-water marks as a presidential candidate were the 6 percent of the national total he received in 1912 and the almost one million votes he garnered in 1920...

...Perhaps because the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor reminded him of the exclusive and ineffective railway brotherhoods of his youth, the mature Debs, until the final years of his life, refused to work with the AFL, which, for all its faults, represented the mainstream of the union movement...

...But his greatest contribution was the growth of industrial unions, one decade after his death, and the inclusive America they helped to build...

...Curiously, it was in the arena he knew best—unionism—that Debs was most dogmatic and least pragmatic...

...Radicalized only when the emerging urban, industrial society fell short of the standards he had learned growing up in small-town America, Debs was remarkably effective at communicating with others who shared his disillusionment with economic injustices, social breakdown, and political corruption...

...In return, the United Auto Workers accepted GM's authority over production standards, work schedules, and job assignments...

...From the Know-Nothings of the 1850s to Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan today, many leaders who have harvested the discontents generated by economic transformations and social dislocations have peddled conspiracy theories or pilloried scapegoats...

...Written shortly after the New Deal, at a time when labor liberals had every reason to be hopeful, Ray Ginger's The Bending ^^oss: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs implicitly presented him as a forerunner of a growing labor movement and an expanding welfare state...

...From those who oppose trade agreements that ignore workers' rights to those who build trade unions that defend them, today's organizers could choose worse heroes than the railroad fireman from Indiana who spent the last thirty years of his life in a lover's quarrel with America...

...A gifted organizer and orator, Debs worked his way up, from secretary of the Terre Haute lodge to secretary-treasurer (in effect, the chief operating officer) of the national union...

...General Motors agreed to substantial wage increases, plus cost-of-living adjustments and improved health and pension benefits for its blue-collar workers...

...While she, like Debs, was an Indiana native, she spent most of her years in New York, where her world revolved around the literati of Washington Square, not the leftists and laborites of Union Square...

...In 1900—and again in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920—he campaigned for president, running his final race from the prison cell to which another Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, had sent him...

...Returning to the pragmatism of his youth, Debs joined with the craft unionists of the American Federation of Labor in supporting the Progressive party's presidential candidate, Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette, in 1924...

...But in recent months, almost a hundred years after his first presidential campaign, the man who should be an American icon has become the subject of a bizarre biography that threatens to move him from the mainstream to the margins...

...This mistakes the meaning of Debs's life—for his greatest strengths were his roots in mainstream America...

...Her friend, the author and translator Charles Ruas, edited the manuscript into a 599-page work...

...Instead, he offered an uplifting radicalism that loved justice and hated nobody...

...Founding the American Railway Union, he won a strike against Great Northern Railroad in 1894, but was drawn into a futile struggle against the mighty Pullman Company in 1895...

...It concludes before Debs's leadership of the Pullman Strike of 1895 and his five presidential campaigns—in short, everything that earned him his reputation...

...Such actions underscore how conventional a civic leader Debs still was...

...Getting a Leftist Right The Life and Times of Eugene Debs BY DAVID KUSNET Back in 1950, the nation's largest corporation and the leading industrial union signed a contract that set the pattern for labor peace and widespread prosperity in postwar America...

...And, properly understood, Debs should rank as a national hero similar to Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, belonging to Americans of every viewpoint...

...Railway workers were responsible for the passengers' safety, and railway brotherhoods like the Firemen made sure their members learned their crafts and behaved responsibly...

...While he relished dialect humor as a young man, the mature Debs, more than any other national leader of his time, espoused an inclusive concept of American citizenship...

...Just as remarkable was what Debs didn't say...

...Shortly after 1920, the Socialists dwindled and divided over issues ranging from American prosperity to the Russian revolution...

...The book ends not with Debs's imprisonment in Illinois but with Dos-toyevsky's incarceration in Siberia...

...And it was impossible to imagine that, in other countries, movements opposed to the inequities of capitalism would eventually produce even more monstrous injustices of their own...

...Speaking out against an impersonal industrial system that turned workers into "hands" and a plutocratic political system that robbed them of their citizenship, he urged audiences to assert their "manhood" by organizing in their workplaces and communities...

...Most sentences resemble this one, which announces Debs's birth on page 184: The date when Eugene Debs was born in the backroom of the little grocery store, which had a scale upon which to weigh him was November 5, 1855— and who could have foreseen that this newly arrived son who had been a long time coming would become the founder of many locomotive railroad unions and other unions and ultimately a founder of the Socialist Party of America, as he would also be the perpetual presidential candidate for that which was presumably the highest office in the United States and running slowly with no expectation of winning even so much as by a majority of one...

...He supported women's suffrage as well, and many women held leading positions in his party...

...Like many other small-town Americans, Debs was a joiner, so he signed up in his co-workers' craft union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen...

...In industrial cities such as Bridgeport and Milwaukee, Socialist mayors pioneered a style of municipal government that served working people and the poor while remaining honest and efficient...

...Terre Haute's city fathers foresaw a bright future for Debs—mayor, congressman, or even president...

...The movement Debs led was also more innocent than ensuing generations of labor liberals, including Reuther and Randolph, could afford to be...

...Had Debs lived longer, he might well have helped build a broader coalition of liberals and labor than the Socialists ever mustered...

...Written in the early 1980s, Salvatore's book explains why a radical from the early industrial age still speaks to Americans in the information age...

...Always, Debs stressed that his movement must make "its appeal to the American people as the defender and preserver of the idea of liberty and self-government, in which the nation was born...

...Not surprisingly, Young, the radical bohemian, ignores the union's social conservatism, and, in a brief reference to the union Debs served for almost twenty years, she writes that its motto was "Benevolence, Society, and Industry...

...Though it distorts Debs, Harp Song's merit may be that it leads a new generation of readers to the best biographies of Debs, both of which show how utterly American he was...

...It was at one of these marches, she told Ruas, that she decided to write a book about Debs, presenting him as a link between the Utopian Socialists of the early nineteenth century and the peace movement and counterculture of the 1960s...

...The son of a grocery-store owner, Debs took a job as a railroad fireman, a sensible decision since, as Salvatore writes, "Skilled railroad workers—the engineers, firemen, and conductors who went over the road and the carpenters, mechanics, and painters who remained in the railroad shops—were among the most respected and highly paid workers in America during the 1870s and 1880s...

...Debs virtually invented industrial unions like the UAW, which represent wage-earners in most jobs throughout a company...

...But he didn't edit it enough...

...Ever more powerful, the railway companies kept cutting workers' wages and jobs, including the skilled craftsmen who once were well paid and well regarded...

...His moral compass accurate as ever, Debs shunned the Communists, declaring: "Having no Vatican in Moscow to guide me, I must follow the light I have...

...But his historic contributions exemplify what's best about American democracy: its unique capacity to adapt ideas and assimilate institutions that originate in worthy and widespread discontents...

...But, in a less enlightened era than our own, Debs refused to join the demagogues who denounced Jewish bankers, black strikebreakers, Chinese immigrants, Irish saloonkeepers, or disloyal German-Americans...

...And, to this day, he offers a model of radicalism without rancor that addresses Americans in eras of social and economic dislocation by appealing to their beliefs, not their bitterness...

...But Young was simply the wrong writer to re-introduce Debs to today's Americans...

...But if there is anything "extraordinary" about Harp Song—a rambling treatment of social injustice in nineteenth-century America and the fringe movements that opposed it, with Debs himself appearing only intermittently—^it is that such an incoherent and interminable book was published at all...

...Debs then leaves center stage, while Harp Song returns to the Utopian Socialists, the Mormons, the Dred Scott case, Wendell Phillips, Mary Todd Lincoln, Joseph Pulitzer, and Dostoyevsky before suddenly screeching to a halt...

...Debs's ability to appeal to Americans ranging from Walter Reuther to "Engine Charlie" Wilson testifies to his unique place in history...

...And, while Debs enjoyed a drink as much as the next man, he once filed charges against a fellow member for drunkenness on the job...

...Today, the word "Debsian" describes an earlier, more optimistic, and uniquely American reform movement...

...Most of all, he urged ordinary Americans to believe in themselves, declaring: "I would have you understand that within yourselves, there is all that is necessary to develop a real man...

...Long after he became a national figure, he still came home to his native Terre Haute, which, in Debs's youth, boasted clean government, civic-minded business people, and a vibrant community life...

...After almost a century's encounter with reality at home and abroad, the labor liberals who are Debs's real heirs are almost invariably more restrained in their criticisms of existing society and their advocacy of social reform...

...The image of him that lingers is of an Old Testament prophet—or even the Christ figure some of Debs's followers proclaimed him to be: balding, gaunt, his long arms reaching towards the heavens, as he railed against domestic inequities and foreign wars...

...But two years later, he died at seventy-one, exhausted by years of barnstorming without bed rest (because he continued to boycott the Pullman Company and its sleeper cars...

...These words inspired a wave of civic activism by Debs's followers, many of whom were immigrant workers who were effectively "Americanized" by a radical movement...

...While he dogmatically declared that "There is no 'Negro problem' apart from the general labor problem," he also refused to address segregated audiences, condemned lynching and dis-franchisement, and, late in life, addressed a meeting of black activists convened by A. Philip Randolph, then a young activist in New York City and later the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and an organizer of the civil rights march on Washington in 1963...

...David Kusnet, former chief speechwriter for President Clinton, is a visiting fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of Speaking American: How the Democrats Can Win in the Nineties...

...For Debs, this beloved town remained the model for the society he wanted to create, where every citizen would enjoy a measure of respect and a voice in decisions...

...Thus, Debs's influence was reflected in the institutions his followers built...

...Much more timely is the labor historian Nick Salva-tore's biography, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist...

...Indeed, such unions functioned more as moral stewards than as shop stewards...

...Ever the egalitarian, Debs called for a new industrial union for railway workers that would combine the strength of all the craft unions and counter the power of the railway companies...

...So much of what is in you is latent, undeveloped...

...Young spent the last thirty years of her life researching and writing Harp Song, completing some 2,500 pages before she died in 1995 at the age of eighty-seven...

...Young writes of Debs's wife, Kate: "The time would come when she would almost feel that she was married to a train whistle and not to a man...

...And she speculates about why the liberal Woodrow Wilson, who failed to win American support for the League of Nations, persecuted Debs: "Wilson wanted Debs, with his smashed utopian dreams, to suffer as he suffered in what seemed an increasingly doomed search for his vision of utopia...

...But his secure world of civic leadership, craft unionism, and Democratic politics was swept away by the corporate consolidations and financial panics of the 1880s and 1890s...

...That admission was remarkable, coming from a rock-ribbed Republican who later served as President Eisenhower's secretary of defense...

...The book is Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs by Marguerite Young, and its publicity materials present it as "an extraordinary publishing event...

...And, during his twenties and thirties, he was elected city clerk and state legislator, eventually serving as the Indiana Democratic party's chief spokesman on labor issues...

...Described as a "Greenwich Village eccentric," Young befriended Truman Capote and Carson McCullers and participated in protests against the war in Vietnam...

...As Salva-tore writes, "They took the republican tradition seriously and stressed the individual dignity and power inherent in the concept of citizenship...

...And, from collective bargaining to Social Security, the minimum wage, and workers' compensation, many of the programs that became the pillars of New Deal America were first proposed in the platforms of Debs's Socialist party...

...Few who knew the UAW president, Walter Reuther, would have been surprised that, when he was only eleven, his father had taken him to visit Debs in the federal prison to which he had been sentenced for sedition for opposing World War I. But Reuther's adversary across the bargaining table, GM president Charles Wilson, also bragged that in 1912, as a twenty-two-year-old laborer, he had voted for Debs for president...