The Debs Project

• I was going to write a little bit about the bloody 1892 Homestead strike this week since I’m moving into 1892 with the Debs Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine material and have been reading an 1893 account of the conflict written by a close observer. However, those words still aren’t ready to be written quite yet. Instead, another question came up this week — one about which I have observations but no deep or profound answers.

The 1892 Homestead strike wasn’t the first at the Carnegie steel works in that city. In 1889 the same mill was the site of another lockout, a bitter affair which moved the Pittsburgh Press to categorize some of the strikers as semi-civilized “Hungarians, who look savagely at all strangers.”†

That sort of nativist thinking has had a long tradition in America — starting with immigrants from England talking smack about immigrants from Germany and indentured whites slamming black slaves, for all I know, a malevolent impulse running through the generations all the way to the Republican Party of today.

The organized labor movement that emerged during the second half of the 19th Century was particularly culpable for promulgating this ideology, leading the cheers and helping to push the legislative agenda for Chinese exclusion in an effort to restrict mass immigration from that overpopulated nation and a consequent lowering of wage scales. Unions have always been, first and foremost, about getting as much money as possible for their members from employers, after all, and the introduction of foreign workers on en masse represented a threat to American wage levels — which were historically high in comparison to the prevailing situation in Europe.

Although a trade unionist to his core by the 1890s, I honestly didn’t expect Gene Debs to exhibit such thinking.  He was, after all, very good on the race issue throughout his life, viewing the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) as one of his particular role models, stepping up for black workers within the Socialist Party when it was unpopular to do so, taking an enlightened view of the women’s movement, and so on. Debs was nothing if not a radical Christian during the first half of his life (the number of biblical references that are going to show up in the index of Volume 1 of the Debs Selected Works will be something that turns a few academic heads). Debs and nativism? Fat chance.

As it turns out, Debs the railway brotherhood magazine editor comes back several times to rather simplistic nativism with respect to foreign workers, with four particular immigrant worker bogeys: Chinese, Poles, Hungarians, and Italians. While I have yet to come across Debs using derogatory epithets for the former two nationalities, he did call Hungarians “Huns” and fairly shamelessly employed the phrase “Dagoes” for Italians — with a sneer, as for example he does in this quote from “Fair Wages” (Jan. 1891):

When wages go down the “labor market” is referred to as being overstocked — the supply of labor being greater than the demand. Labor is referred to as a “commodity,” to take its chances like hides or hair, guano or jute, or any other article of trade. Take the “labor market” and supply it with Poles, Huns, and Dagoes, and wages go down to a level which would not furnish subsistence to a millionaire’s poodle or parrot. In such an event, the American workingman has one hope, and only one, and that is to organize and federate, and say to employers that the standard of wages is thus and so, and all the Huns and Poles and Dagoes on top of the ground, backed by the American scab, cannot lower the standard.

That’s pretty hard to miss, eh? Nor does EVD get any sort of  free pass for potentially having used the term “Dago” in a softer archaic context than the term has today, exemplified by his calling a certain Bonzano, right hand man of railroad mogul Austin Corbin, a “Dago lickspittle” (“The Policy of This Magazine,” Feb. 1891). It was a racial insult then, and he knowingly spewed it. Obviously any serious scholarly accounting of Debs in the 19th Century, during the first half of his life, needs to at least make mention of the fact.

• This brings us to another topic which David Walters and I have discussed a bit this week: “What the heck is a ‘Hun’?”

David pointed out the original archaic use of the term, in which a “Hun” was basically a term bandied to demonize “culturally different outsiders” with obviously violent and uncivilized overtones. I replied with my own observation of a familiar 20th Century usage, when “Hun” was made a primary epithet by the Allies in a systematic attempt to demonize Imperial Germany for purported barbarism during World War I.

But what did Gene Debs mean by the term when he spoke of “Poles, Huns, and Dagoes”?

I am convinced that this essentially undocumented 1890s racial epithet was short for those savage “Hungarians” mentioned by the Pittsburgh Press — and that these were actually not Magyars (ethnic Hungarians) in the precise sense, but rather this was a name attached to a general category of poor Central European agrarian immigrant to the United States. The Austro-Hungarian empire included not just Austrians and Hungarians, after all, but also Bohemians (Czechs), Slovaks, Croatians, Slovenes, Ruthenians, and the odd Serb or Italian. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was, in short, a multinational state as was the Russian Empire, and there was little effort by outsiders like Debs to understand the exact constituent nationalities. To him they were all Hungarians — “Huns” — I argue.

To further illustrate this, see Debs’s July 1894 article “The Fourth of July,” in which he rails against “all of these imported Huns, Dagoes, Slavs, and Poles.” Can there be any doubt that “Hun” is an insulting shortcut phrase for uneducated newcomers from Central Europe, rather than a term reserved for Magyars only — the immigration of whom was numerically modest?

Note as well: the Austro-Hungarian Empire was Imperial Germany’s main ally in the First World War. Isn’t it interesting how that 1890s term of Debs and his peers evolved and was repurposed for war propaganda two decades later?

The title of this April 1916 article in The Survey drew an inquiry several years later from a dictionary trying to determine the etymology of the ethnic slur “Bohunk.” 

• Related interesting etymological note: the early 20th Century racial epithet “Bohunk” — an uneducated Lithuanian or Central European manual worker — seems to have been derived from BOhemian + HUNgarian, according to some authorities. And the related epithet “Hunkies,” again, has HUNgarian written all over it…

• I ran into a small speed bump this week in my file conversion process using optical character recognition, which I had pretty well perfected. It turns out the Google scan of the 1892 volume of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine was pretty defective, with slanted lines and garbled and crooked text on the binding side edges caused by a failure to either flatten the volume or to use a proper book scanning device.

This meant either a huge “error rate” that would have slowed me down or else a return to hand-typing documents. Either way, it wasn’t going to be a highly productive week in terms of file conversion. I opted for manually typing everything. This reduced my tempo quite a little, but I’ve nevertheless managed to take a pretty good chunk out of the problematic Volume 16 of Firemen’s Magazine and still am on pace the finish on schedule on July 1, with just under 100 files to go and five weeks to take care of them.

• Nothing directly Debs-related arrived this week, but this new gem for my collection of political pamphlets really makes it clear how Debs fit it chronologically with the American socialist and labor movement. This 1887 Socialist Labor Party pamphlet by Laurence Gronlund (1846-1899) — one of the socialist authors that Debs is known to have read while he was incarcerated in Woodstock Jail in 1894 — was published in Year 10 of that organization. The SLP was the first real socialist organization in America that existed on a national scale. This publication is early, early stuff, particularly given that the pioneer SLP was more than half comprised of German immigrants and published many or most of their publications in the German language in this period.

Debs was editing Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine at the time, and had been doing the same for half a decade, and had been around the fledgling Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen for another half a decade before that.

Debs was born in 1855. Georgii Plekhanov, regarded as the “Father of Russian Marxism,” was born in 1856. V.I. Lenin, the father of Soviet Communism, was born in 1870. This little Gronlund pamphlet has helped bring into focus for me just how early in the history of American radicalism that Gene Debs made his appearance.

You can find the articles mentioned here in the Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive of MIA, which is maintained by David Walters. He puts up my stuff a couple times a month in big batches, so there may be a slight delay before you can see the specific files mentioned this week…

• “Liberating Convicts” — Jan. 1892 article — 1,195 words

• “Is It Possible?” — Feb. 1892 article — 1,210 words

• “Strikes” — March 1892 article — 950 words

• “Arbitration” — May 1892 article — 1,750 words

• “Rest” — May 1892 article — 1,000 words

• “Labor Representatives in Legislative Bodies” — July 1892 article — 1,300 words

• “The Pinkertons at Homestead” — Aug. 1892 article — 2,980 words

• “Public Opinion” — Aug. 1892 article — 1,130 words

• “H.C. Frick and Alexander Berkman” — Sept. 1892 article — 685 words

….Word count = 484,205 words in the can + 12,200 this week = 496,405 words

• 5 more Saturdays to go until the July 1 target for the end of output of editable text. There are still 99 article pdfs remaining to be processed (or rejected at second reading).

• ALSO NEW: one for background: J.R.T. Auston, “The ARU Strike,” up at Archive.org.

_____________________

† – Pittsburgh Press, July 15, 1889; cited in Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), pg. 319.

• I was a pretty terrible student in high school. I got good grades in most of my classes but didn’t exert myself in the least, didn’t know how to properly study, and didn’t really know how to read a nonfiction book properly. College was a rude awakening for a year before I found my academic legs and I still never really got up to speed as a history student until my upper class years.

Bill Williams as he appeared in the early 1980s when I was skipping his dull lectures. 

My first US history professor was William Appleman Williams (1921-1990), a really famous left wing historian who had been a hugely influential figure at the University of Wisconsin during the 1960s. He remains an icon of the historical profession, the godfather of 1960s revisionism in American diplomatic history.

I not only knew who Williams was at the time I took his History 201 class, I had even owned and read his latest (and last) book, Empire as a Way of Life (1980), and had alertly followed his series of historical musings in the pages of the Salem Statesman-Journal a few years before.

Williams was a smart guy but very loose about attendance and far less interesting a speaker than I had anticipated. Dull even. I cut his classes like crazy and bullshitted him for an A with a hokey pokey neo-Marxist term paper on the mode of production of pre-Columbian Americans, which was something like 90% of the course grade, I recall. I’m still embarrassed about that garbage I wrote.

Williams, a man with a background in the US Navy, had moved from the Big League history department at Madison to little Waldport, Oregon, a village with a whole ocean next door. He drove the hour each way a few times each week to give his lectures at OSU in Corvallis. He seemed to me to just be going through the motions, regurgitating colonial history to a bunch of kids who didn’t know who he was and who didn’t give a shit about the subject. It was frustrating that he wasn’t a riveting and challenging professor as I had hoped he would be, although I do think if it was later in my academic life when I went through his class I would have liked him more as an instructor.

I knew I needed to beef up my very deficient US history knowledge and got my butt from the tutelage of the great historian and into the mundane classes of a far more conventional history teacher for the second and third parts of the one year sequence. I don’t regret doing that in the least, because there I was held accountable for getting to lectures and actually learned my shit.

Bill Williams used to come in the shoe store and buy shoes for years afterwards. He always had liquor on his breath in the middle of the afternoon, contributing to my assessment that he had just been mailing it in until his official retirement.

Gilded Age Mark Twain, 1872.

• Anyway, I had never really heard of the “Gilded Age” of US history until the second part of that introductory college sequence. The Gilded Age is the universally accepted name among historians for the period starting with the end of Reconstruction in 1877 (when the Republican Party sold out black America once and for all) until the advent of the Progressive Era midway through the 1890s. It was a time of political malfeasance, shady railway expansion, greedy grabbing capitalists turning fast bucks, recurring economic crises, debate over monetary policy and tariffs, and was marked by the sputtering, stunted birth of the trade union movement.

One fun fact that I never knew: the name “Gilded Age” comes from an 1872 book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner about political corruption. That’s cool. And so another title is added to the acquisitions list…

My own historical interests began with the USSR in the 1930s, from which I switched gears to American radicalism in the 1910s and 1920s due to my pathetic Russian language skills. Now here I am, spending my days with Eugene Debs smack dab in the middle of the Gilded Age, learning the landscape as I go. At least it is intellectually stimulating, I’m having a good time.

• Art collectors have too much damned money. If it’s art, things get expensive fast. Hell, some suckers will even pay $40 for a double-truck magazine lithograph from 1894. Can you imagine that? Bunch of weirdos, if you ask me…

• The above Dalrymple lithograph, from the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Pullman Strike, shows Debs and controversial liberal Illinois Governor John Altgeld being thrown by Lady Liberty, wearing a “Law and Order” tiara, into a garbage dump already populated by Terence Powderly and Martin Irons of the Knights of Labor (both of whom led unsuccessful railroad strikes), Jacob Coxey of Coxey’s Army fame (a march of unemployed workers across America to Washington, DC),  and a fourth person I didn’t recognize, somebody named “O’Donnell.” Who the hell was O’Donnell? Wikipedia was no help, nor was the answer immediately obvious from a quick search of the interwebs.

I was feeling the need to make a Wikipedia contribution for May so I spent one of my free days this week on the question. It turned out that “O’Donnell” was Hughey O’Donnell, a young skilled operative at the Carnegie Steel Company that emerged as the top leader of the July 1892 Homestead Strike. I wound up spending the whole day reading about Homestead and trying to build his bio from thin air — as there has been precious little scholarly attention paid to him, even though he’s quite clearly “notable” in Wikipedia terms due to extensive coverage of him as a historical actor during the strike.

I felt a little like I was playing hooky from “working” on Debs, but this is all something on which I would have had to spend the same amount of time in August. The story of the Homestead strike is absolutely riveting and I’ve been reading one worker-friendly 1893 book on the conflict ravenously — it’s a real page-turner, like something by Kurt Vonnegut or a really well-written mystery. I’m not quite ready to debrief on it here this week, but suffice it to say for now that there is a HUGE shadow cast over the Pullman strike and the Debs story by the Homestead Strike and the battle our friend Hugh O’Donnell waged two years earlier.

It turns out I didn’t really play hooky after all.

• Marty Goodman passes along this cool little india ink drawing by the great radical cartoonist Art Young (1866-1943) from a cool little 1920 Socialist campaign pamphlet. It is pretty easy to date this drawing just from the content of the description, which mentions that Debs ran four times for President (he actually ran five times: 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920) — which means this was “pre-November 1920” — and quotes Wilson of 1919 saying the same basic thing that put Debs into Federal Prison after he had said it in 1918. There ya go: “late 1919 or early 1920.”

While this particular pamphlet  did have a publication date up front, many times political tracts were printed without press dates and we collectors have to deduce their date of origins based on contextual clues like these. It is surprising how almost everything contains a clue of some sort — be they content, typographical design, precise publisher street addresses, other publications listed for sale in the back, or what have you — that leads to a more or less definitive identification of the exact date of publication.

• I’m starting to get serious about the historical literature on the Gilded Age, beginning with a Vincent P. DeSantis bibliography that was published in 1973. Title is The Gilded Age, 1877-1896 — which observant readers will note is coincidentally the same SAME EXACT periodization that we are using for volume 1 of the Debs — Railway Populist, 1877-1896.

The start and finish dates are significant: from the end of Reconstruction (which closed the Civil War era) to the failure of the Bryan campaign (which marked the effective end of the People’s Party as a real force and the first awakening of the Socialist Party’s antecedents). In Debs’s case the start date is accidental — 1877 just happens to be the date of his first published work, but the parallel is convenient nonetheless.

• Next up is a collection of articles edited by our friend H. Wayne Morgan, he of the unreadably bad Debs biography mentioned here last week. His collection The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal (Syracuse University Press, 1963) is a far better effort. Indeed, it is regarded as an pioneering work that refocused American historical scholarship on an era that had been previously given short shrift — the Gilded Age having little of the drama and excitement of the Civil War and Reconstruction which preceded it or the obvious significance for the modern world represented by the Progressive Era which followed.

Ten scholars contributed articles for the volume, including Morgan’s influential think-piece, “An Age in Need of Reassessment: A View Beforehand,” DeSantis’s work on the evolving Republican Party (the dominant political force of the era), and Herbert Gutman’s labor history salvo, “The Worker’s Search for Power: Labor in the Gilded Age.” Gutman’s argument is interesting: that such a low percentage of American workers were unionized in the 1870s that unions were fairly unimportant institutions and that workers in small towns had a better situation than those in large cities owing to a tighter community and more constrained alternative labor market for employers seeking to impose draconian cuts.

• The number of quality biographies of President Grover Cleveland — arch nemesis of Debs during the 1894 Pullman Strike and after — isn’t great. One of the really decent ones just came rolling in. Published in two volumes in 1923, Robert McElroy’s Grover Cleveland: The Man and the Statesman bills itself as an “Authorized Biography,” which is a good enough red flag as any to the likely sympathetic bias of the writer. Still, it’s a solid account of the meteoric rise of the former Mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York to the highest office in the land and the idiosyncrasies of his own “strong executive” conservatism. I look forward to mining the section on Pullman.

• I also got a nice cheap copy of the standard biography of radical abolitionist and popular orator Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), who along with Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) was one of EVD’s life heroes and primary role models. It was published in 1961, the year of my birth, and was in VG+ condition in a dust jacket — which is how I feel most days. A little general wear and tear, nothing too major.

• “Important Lessons” — Nov. 1889 article — 1,860 words

• “Dishonest Bankers” — April 1891 article — 1,270 words

• “Message to the Federated Orders of Railway Employees” — June 1891 article — 4,410 words

• “An American Aristocracy” — July 1891 article — 1,025 words

• “Remedies for Wrongs” — July 1891 article — 2,660 words

• “The Expulsion of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen” — Aug. 1891 article —  925 words

• “Facts About Federation” — Sept. 1891 article — 900 words

• “The Union Man, the Non-Union Man, and the Scab” — Sept. 1891 article — 1,325 words

• “A Crime Against Humanity” — Dec. 1891 article — 2,625 words

….Word count = 467,405 words in the can + 16,800 this week = 484,205 words

• 6 more Saturdays to go until the July 1 target for the end of output of editable text. There are still 116 article pdfs remaining to be processed (or rejected at second reading).

• I came to the big fork in the road and bailed out on graduate school at the very end of the 1980s. Not sure if that was a good move or a bad move (it actually might shock you the way that History PhDs are treated by universities these days and the USSR and the Know Your Enemy Industry, she ain’t what she used to be), but it was a move.

I ended up taking over the family business, a small shoe store. The job is okay, its greatest benefit is that it allows a large amount of free time — although the three day workweek that we all enjoyed for about 10 years has lamentably given way to a 3-2/3 day workweek (a rotating 3 day week among 3 people) in the aftermath of my divorce.

Why the change? The rate of exploitation had to be ramped up to redeem my ex-wife’s half of the store. It’s a pity, but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do to survive, Rule No. 1 of capitalism… If business ever starts to really crank again (a seemingly unlikely prospect for small bricks-and-mortar retailers in the internet age), a return to the 3 day week will be one of first things that happens. It’s that important.

When the socialist movement eventually recovers That Vision Thing™ that it has misplaced, shortening the work week to four days for all working people — at a true living wage — has to be at the very top of the new agenda. Speaking from first hand experience: chopping off a day from the work week makes a gargantuan difference in one’s mental well-being and the quality of one’s life. Chopping off two days beefs up the effect even more — at that point a person is spending more than half their life living rather than selling their labor-power to some schmuck like me who is making money off it — but baby steps, baby steps.

Debs lived in the era of the six day work week and was involved in the struggle to reduce each of those days to eight hours, from a prevailing ten hours on average. Urban millworkers had it worse. To top it off: on Sundays, the only free day, most people went to church.

It is hard to imagine how crappy life must have been for working people.

• My friend Marty Goodman found this drawing of Debs in the May 1904 issue of The Comrade, an illustrated socialist magazine that he’s getting ready to re-scan. The original scan is by Google from a copy in the Princeton University Library and is of better quality than their usual fare. It’s probably something we can use at the appropriate juncture in Volume 2 but we’ll almost certainly work fresh with a new scan from an original issue if we do use it.

Theoretically use of this scanned image in a book is copyright clear, since precedent has held that  “slavish reproductions” of copyright-clear originals are not themselves copyrightable. (Yeah, Marty paid a lawyer to learn that fact a while back.) Still there’s no doubt additional resolution to be garnered from a clean start on a good scanner. The original issues are very rare, however, so we might not be able to pull that off. Marty is an obsessive bulldog about scanning from originals whenever possible and I’m not gonna bet against him given the 18 months we have before we’d actually need the final image.

• The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine articles continue to be mowed down. I’ve got another 7 weeks in which to finish and probably 5 weeks’ worth of work remaining — which will work out just about right with a planned stay at the Oregon coast that will blow up one of these weeks. I’ll probably spin microfilm of correspondence to fill the other, if the free time actually materializes.

Looks like my earlier projection of 560,000 total words of editable text is also on the low side — a total topping 600,000 words now seems pretty inevitable.

Discussions about what to do with the text not used in the Haymarket book continue.

• My library acquisitions tend to cluster around after the middle of each month. My credit card “cuts” and I greenlight another shopping basket that I’ve been accumulating over the previous four weeks at ABEBooks. Then I wait for the media mail to roll in. To these purchases are added eBay acquisitions, which are sporadic. These all depend on what comes up on the market and whether I’m successful in buying it.

In addition I make a few direct purchases from a few of the radical booksellers in the US and the UK, which are even more irregular in timing. I’m trying to patronize Bolerium Books of San Francisco more regularly since I think they’re the cat’s meow.

In any event new stuff comes in constantly, but with the end of the second week of each month a predictable high water mark.

• Since it doesn’t look like the new stuff will be here ahead of this blog posting, I’ll pull a volume off my stack and will let fly. I’m not sure how long I’ve had H. Wayne Morgan’s Eugene V. Debs: Socialist for President (Syracuse University Press, 1962) — several years at least. I thought it was going to be very solid based on the publisher. It proved to be a lame-o 250 page Introduction for Imbeciles that quickly found a spot in the deep corner of the dank shoe store basement amidst the “mistakes.” I’m sure there were a couple of classes of college students that were taught the book early in the 1960s, but there’s little of use to contemporary scholarship.

Imagine my surprise to learn recently that H. Wayne Morgan is regarded as one of the really important historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in America of his generation. I decided to give it another try and dug the book out of storage…

Nope, it was just as bad as I remembered it was. Cracking it to a random page right now by way of example, we find:

“Debs especially disliked Roosevelt because of the popular President’s influence with the ‘parlor socialists,’ and because he honestly believed that the President was merely trading on the progressive spirit of the times for votes.” (pg. 109) — That’s complete malarky, as if Debs was a run of the mill electoral politician primarily interested in winning votes by discrediting rivals. He and the bellicose militarist and saber-rattling imperialist Roosevelt hated each other mightily as arch ideological foes. Roosevelt famously proclaimed the Socialists to be “undesirable citizens” and considered Debs among the least desirable of all. For their part, the left despised Roosevelt —  from the so-called “parlor socialists” on the right to horny-handed immigrant millworkers on the left and encompassing every shade of radical in between.

It’s just an absolutely ridiculous line — and remember, that one was just plucked at random from Morgan’s copious stockpile of intellectually challenged propositions.

Morgan’s tome is essentially an introductory level political science tract which treats the SPA as a regular vote-chasing political party and Debs as its ego-driven standard-bearer. It misses both the point of the Socialist electoral efforts and the flavor of Debs and is virtually unreadable disappointment, a vapid failure of a book.

• A couple of nice microfilm runs are en route from my eBay source in Alabama. One of the universities digitized all their film with high speed automated scanners and dumped their film holdings to a local guy who seemingly on a whim bought it in one lot. Thousands and thousands of dollars of university library film was sold for pennies on a penny to a dollar.

From him I have coming a nice 17 reel run of The Century, a mass circulation monthly features magazine (1881-1906); and a 15 reel run of The Dial (1880-1928), which started as a religious philosophical magazine which went political in the 1880s and which Thorstein Veblen wrote for in the years around World War I. Then it was sold and became a modernist literary magazine, which is of interest in and of itself. Total tab for 32 reels of film — $41, postpaid.

That film probably costs about $100 a reel if a person wanted to go buy it from the commercial manufacturer, and it doubtlessly still is for sale. That’s how little anyone cares about microfilm today. I feel like an 8-track tape collector…

• “Locomotive Engineers and Federation” — Nov. 1890 article — 1,950 words

• “William P. Daniels, the ORC, and Locomotive Engineers” — Dec. 1890 article — 2,725 words

• “William D. Robinson” — Dec. 1890 article — 2,975 words

• “Protection” — Jan. 1891 article — 1,075 words

• “Fair Wages” — Jan. 1891 article — 1,350 words

• “The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Supreme Council” — March 1891 article — 575 words

• “‘Hero Worship’” — March 1891 article — 1,410 words

• “Labor Organizations and the Labor Press” — March 1891 article — 1,875 words

• “The Farmers’ Alliance” — March 1891 article — 1,600 words

• “Edward Bellamy Launches The New Nation” — March 1891 article — 460 words

• “Mankind in a Bad Way” — April 1891 article — 1,800 words

• “The Almighty Dollar” — April 1891 article — 2,075 words

• “Labor Leaders” — May 1891 article — 1,660 words

….Word count = 445,875 words in the can + 21,530 this week = 467,405 words

• 7 more Saturdays to go until the July 1 target for the end of output of editable text. There are still 126 article pdfs remaining to be processed (or rejected at second reading).

• My friend Marty Goodman of the Riazanov Digital Library Project just came across this cubist-influenced drawing in charcoal of Debs shortly after his death in the Workers (Communist) Party’s monthly literary-artistic magazine, The New Masses. The artist, Hugo Gellert  (1892-1985), was a Hungarian-American radical who spent his entire life drawing left wing political themes.

Gellert is a museum-famous sort of guy. The original copy of that drawing would probably be worth a couple thousand bucks.

• This Debs Project is a marathon, I don’t see how it can be conceived any other way. Four thick volumes in four years and will take a pattern of constant, steady, protracted work to get finished.

Unfortunately, not every week of “real life” has as much free time as the next. Last week and this are the two most pressing weeks of the year in terms of the Real Life work schedule. Last week I more or less kicked butt, despite it all. This week not so much.

I’m not worried about it. There are times to sprint and times to lay back and conserve energy. I’ve just been laying back this week.

• I think I remember the first time I ever heard of Eugene V. Debs. When I was in third grade or thereabouts my parents subscribed to a set of US history encyclopedias for kids. It was a chronological set with red-white-and-blue bindings and there were a ton of books in the series, like 18 or something. My recollection is that they came by mail every month. Each had color paintings on nearly every page of assassinations and wars and depressions and elections and all kinds of historical crap that was semi-exciting to nerd kids like me.

Anyway, one of the articles was about this man who ran for President in 1920 while he was in prison named Eugene Debs. I remember that he was painted wearing grey prison garb. That had to be my first introduction to him — it certainly wouldn’t have been through my parents, who were barely political Republicans.

I’d really like to find a set of those books, they must have been fairly cheap and mass produced, but damned if I can remember the title or the publisher.

• My first baby steps towards being radicalized myself came in 5th grade.  It must have been 1970-71, middle of the Viet Nam war, and I had a long-haired (!!!) male (!!!) rookie teacher named Robert Conove. His actual old family name was Konokowsky or something like that, he told us; he always wore a little gold star of David on a chain around his neck. There weren’t a lot of Jews in Eureka, California, and he was the Ambassador.

Worthington Elementary closed in 2004.

All the college-track kids were intentionally stuffed in the combined 5th and 6th grade class of mean old Mrs. Schwartz, who taught about prepositions and participles and whose breath smelled like rancid tobacco. The future cheerleader girls and football boys, waitresses and construction dudes, millworkers and housewives, were all channeled into Mr. Conove’s class.

I was a new transfer from a different elementary school across town and that’s where I landed, too. Maybe they flipped a coin.

• Conove was a freethinker, for sure. He played guitar and we sang songs and tapped along with woodblocks and bongos and tamborines. He brought in wood and nails and hammers and helped some of the boys build a big wooden structure right in the middle of the high-ceilinged classroom. We all did our own thing, maaaan. The boys spent a lot of time playing cards in class in small groups. I suppose there was some vague math rationale for the green light on card playing. Who knows, maybe it even proved to be a valuable career skill for one or two of my classmates…

We had learned cursive writing in 4th grade; Conove (never a “Mr.” Conove, he was “Conove” to the boys at least) told us to use whatever was more comfortable to us. I went back to printing and other than my 6th grade year from hell never really used cursive writing again.

The grouchy old principal — I don’t recall her name, maybe it was Mrs. Maxon or something like that Mrs. Jordan — absolutely hated this new upstart Conove. It was absolutely transparently obvious to all the kids. And the same thing must have been absolutely transparently uncomfortably obvious to him. Building a structure in class?!? Singing all the time?!? Kids playing cards?!?! Come on… Pure scorn and contempt whenever she was in proximity.

• Standardized testing happened and I must have aced something; all of the sudden I was being pulled out of class for a couple hours a week to participate in the “MGM” program — “Mentally Gifted Minors,” I think was the acronym of the day. It was a crock. Everyone was supposed to take part in self-directed smart kid activities. Purportedly educational games with terrible gameplay, a shelf full of boring books, I can’t even remember the other crap. It was as useless in the big picture of life as playing poker with my friends in Conove’s class would have been. And far less fun.

I do remember one thing that I did though: a special report to the class on marijuana. I chose the topic and it was pretty much the same principle as an independent study class in college or a masters thesis or a four volume set of books compiling the writings of Eugene V. Debs: pick your topic, do your work, meet the deadline, report to the class. My takeaway, derived from whatever books a fifth grade student could get from an elementary school library and a medium-sized blue collar county library circa 1970: marijuana was not a drug that lead to overdose deaths, nor was it physiologically addictive like heroin. Any other deductions I made I don’t recall, I’m sure some were juvenile and stupid, but I know those two were my major conclusions.

“Hey look us over, don’t we look grand? / We are the Falcons, grandest in the land…”

• I think I was the only person in Conove’s class that got pulled out for “MGM” stuff. Maybe there was a girl that went with me, I don’t remember exactly. And then the next year, lo and behold, I was the only one from Conove’s class that got put in with mean old Mrs. Schwartz in her combined 5th and 6th grade class, where I was brutalized for being a year behind where I should have been in English and science and math and for not using cursive writing like I was supposed to.

Think about it: all my friends, every single one, moved in a group together to another fun class en route to becoming the cheerleader girls and football boys, waitresses and construction dudes, millworkers and housewives that the system had already decided they would be; all Mrs. Schwartz’s 5th graders were promoted to her loving care for 6th grade. Plus me. I had an epically lousy time playing catchup on all the academic stuff that we were supposed to be learning in 5th grade when we were singing songs and playing cards instead.

So I had to make an entirely new set of friends — future doctors and lawyers and teachers and scientists, or so the system projected they would be.

Then the next year all the sixth graders from both classes went away to Catherine L. Zane Junior High School and we met a whole new group of kids from the other elementary schools on our side of town. I drew four cards on that 6th grade crew. I might have even thrown them all in and drawn five. Fifth graders aren’t big on the intricacies of bluffing.

I went on to become a shoe salesman like my old man. I sure showed them.

• By the way, I can’t tell you what a participle is today, but I can play poker and I do remember the tune of Donovan’s “Isle of Islay” — a song that Conove taught us that we learned phonetically as “Oh-eh-lay.”

“How high the gulls fly, oh-eh-laaaaaay…”

It’s a pretty tune with idyllic lyrics that are a little bit sad.

• Fifth grade definitely marked the first baby steps in my being radicalized. Once Conove heard me talking about “hippies,” which were a thing in 1971. I was just aping my parents, as children inevitably do, no memory whatsoever in what context I used the term. But young, long-haired Mr. Conove overheard me and got right in my face about it: “What do you mean a ‘hippie’? What’s a ‘hippie’?!?”

“You know, the people with long hair and big shaggy beards who don’t take baths…”

That was inadequate for him. He kept after me and after me and after me: every answer I gave, he had a retort: “Is it just a hair style? Can’t a person with short hair be a hippie, too?”

“I suppose so…”

“So it’s not about hair at all… How about if a person with long hair takes baths and is clean?” And so on and so forth. “Isn’t it more about what people think?”

Maybe it was a five minute interaction, tops, but the effect was really quite profound. Big life lessons: don’t be so quick to judge by outward appearances, a person’s internal thinking is what is important. Don’t be quick to repeat everything you hear at home — think for yourself. Don’t talk about what you don’t take the time to understand — or if you do, get ready to take on somebody who understands better and knows more than you do.

• Another memory from that year: once I mouthed off to Conove about something or other and he cuffed me in the ear pretty hard. My ear rang like a bomb had gone off in it. I couldn’t hear at all from it for a minute or two. I cried.

In retrospect, it could have been a career-ender for him given his political position with the administration if the boss had found out. Years later I figured that out and I was very glad that I never told anyone about the incident. What he did wasn’t right, but my getting him fired for a momentary stumble like that would have been worse.

Robert Conove was my best elementary school teacher, and also my worst. I’m thankful for him.

• Another thing that started to radicalize me was the televised lottery for conscription to Vietnam. The draft was on TV and when my birthday was pulled my mother told me I would have had to go to Vietnam that year.

That made an impression. It was even clear to little kids in conservative mill towns on the North Coast of California that Vietnam was a complete bloodbath and catastrophe. And I would have had to go be part of that, if I were just a few years older.

That’ll make you think, even if you’re just a little kid.

Later on, when it was time for me to register for the draft to reinforce the dubious masculinity of a Baptist Sunday School teacher-slash-small town peanut farmer who was in ten feet over his head as President of the United States, I didn’t. But that’s another story for another week when I’m just laying back.

• Nothing really Debs-related, directly or tangentially, this week. I did get a really nice inscribed and signed copy of an old Communist Party book from 1934, written by Grace Hutchins, the lesbian partner of Anna Rochester. Title is Women Who Work, and it is well-written, red-hot feminist blast from the Depression 1930s, produced under the auspices of the CPUSA’s statistical bureau, the “Labor Research Association.”

Really pretty paper-over-hardcover boards and as clean and square a copy of this uncommon 80+ year old title as one is ever going to find.

While this book comes almost a generation after him and them, Debs and the Socialists were very good on women’s issues during the Suffrage era and there were female party leaders even before women had the right to vote in the country. They aren’t often given the credit they deserve for being out front on a key issue of the era and helping in some small measure to lead the way.

I notice now that Grace Hutchins doesn’t have a Wikipedia page yet. I’ve got the 2013 biography by Julia Allen, Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, I should take it upon myself to get that done.

• “Is a Wrong Done to One the Concern of All?” — July 1890 article — 1,550 words

• “Agitation and Agitators” — August 1890 article —  1,175 words

• “Strike” — August 1890 article — 1,100 words

• “Supreme Council Declines Aid to NY Central Strike” — August 1890 interview — 750 words

• “Strike on the New York Central” — September 1890 article — 3,050 words

• “Promiscuous Striking” — September 1890 article — 1,060 words

• “The Reason Why” — September 1890 article — 1,210 words

• “The Machine and the Man” — October 1890 article — 1,200 words

….Word count = 434,780 words in the can + 11,095 this week = 445,875 words

• 8 more Saturdays to go until the July 1 target for the end of output of editable text. There are still 148 article pdfs remaining to be processed (or rejected at second reading).

• Individuals change over time. Some remain consistent in their thinking and behavior for longer periods than others, but everybody evolves as life marches on. To lefty types concerned with the biography or the written output of historical actors or political commentators, this evolution of the thought of those they study is known as “intellectual trajectory.”

Exercise: Count the greyhairs in this picture…

That young people tend to be more left wing than their elders is a common platitude. With less of a stake in the economic status quo, a more vivid imagination and greater willingness to “think outside the box,” a lower level of cynicism, and bright eyes viewing a broader expanse of life with its myriad possibilities ahead of them, political radicalism and youth seem at times to go hand-in-hand. See, for example, the 2016 demographics of the supporters of Bernie Sanders versus the crowds and cliques swirling around more staid or reactionary flavors of capitalist politicians. The young have less of a stake in what is and more of a willingness to take a chance to achieve what should be.

As time passes, so the common thinking goes, the institutional pressures of life — job, bills, home, family, hedonistic pleasures — tend to temper or blinker the enthusiastic and optimistic visions of youth. People grow more safe and stable and stodgy, it is said, less willing to take a risk in what could be in favor of building themselves the most comfortable iteration of what actually is. Old biases and prejudices and the cynical conclusions of disappointments and broken dreams come to the fore; the individual grows more conservative.

Max Eastman (1883-1969): Radical magazine editor and translator of Leon Trotsky in the 1920s, Readers’ Digest editor in the 1940s…

The intellectual trajectory of a fairly enormous number of intellectuals and political radicals of the early 20th Century moved inexorably from left to right. Big names like Max Eastman, Max Shachtman, James Burnham, Bert Wolfe, and Jay Lovestone; lesser known lights such as William Bross Lloyd, John Spargo, Eugene Lyons, Joseph Zack, Oliver Carlson, on and on — it was always the same: left-to-right, left-to-right, left-to-right, left-to-right, left-to-right…

Obviously, the degeneration of the hope and promise of the Russian revolution into its negation — a particularly ugly, anti-libertarian, militarized, nationalistic police state — was a prime factor in this transformation of the radicals of the 1920s and 1930s into the conservatives of the 1940s and 1950s. But it is worthy of note that the same process may be observed again on a smaller scale a generation later when a certain number of 1960s anti-capitalist and black power radicals gradually mutated into their antithesis by the 1980s — David Horowitz, Eldridge Cleaver, and others less known. “Oh, how foolish we were…”

That there was in the 20th Century such a broad general tendency for intellectual trajectories to move from left-to-right, that such a tendency has been seen by many commentators as an inherent “law” (to use an archaic, 19th Century-flavored phrasing), strikes me as axiomatic. As for the veracity of the underlying theory itself — well, perhaps there are elements of truth to the notion that people tend to become more conservative as they age, perhaps not. I’ll profess agnosticism on the matter and note anecdotally that it doesn’t seem to have applied to me.

Here is what is interesting about Gene Debs though: he moved the other direction hard as he grew older, right-to-left, at least from 1877 until 1922, when he started to soften up again as the Russian Revolution began its downslide. That particular intellectual trajectory is downright rare.

Historian David A. Shannon was born in 1920 in Terre Haute and was an alumnus of Indiana State University.

• I haven’t studied the question closely enough to figure out whether he was the first to identify the phenomenon, but historian David A. Shannon deserves points for being the first Debsologist to state assertively that The Great Socialist Debs started on the right side of the political spectrum. In December 1951 Shannon published an article in the Indiana Journal of History called “Eugene V. Debs: Conservative Labor Editor,” and with a memorable hook like that, I don’t think that any serious biographer after 1951 has missed at least acknowledging that fact. None come to mind anyway.

It’s pretty obvious really to anyone taking 20 minutes to read early magazine articles edited by Debs. For example, here’s a short list of pre-1885 Debs articles in Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine that will probably make the cut for Volume 1: “Benevolence,” “Temperance,” “The Square Man,” “Masterful Men,” “Man’s Power and God’s Power,” “Honesty,” “True Benevolence,” “The Mission of Our Brotherhood,” “Charity vs. Malice” — and so forth, you get the point.

Shannon indicates that Debs was conservative in the “early 1880s,” when he was filled with “adulation of the self-made man.” That’s correct and well put. By the end of the decade he was something else. That is also fairly obvious. It is a matter of debate as to exactly when Debs made the first big leap in his leftward evolution, from an early belief that “strikes are knives with which laborers cut their own throat” (1883) to his scornful assertion that it was a long-running “error” for another brotherhood to have attempted to “secure justice to its members by a mistaken conception of obligation and duty” (1890) and elsewhere his mocking observation that even in 1890 there remained “men who deprecate agitation, and who have a holy horror for strikes.”

Historian of American socialism Shannon asserted that Debs was “jolted” into a “slow revision of his views” only by the Burlington strike of February 1888. I don’t think a close reading of Debs’s editorializing in the middle 1880s bears this out. My own belief is that Debs’s views started to change in 1886, when he cut himself loose once and for all from a promising career as a Democratic Party politician and dedicated himself wholeheartedly to life as a labor brotherhood organizer and magazine editor. There is a real difference in the length, content, and tone of his writing in the Magazine that took place during the interval from 1885 and 1887, to be sure.

Certainly the Burlington strike was pivotal in moving Debs to advocacy of labor federation, but that is something quite different than his underlying worldview — which had already fundamentally changed even before the Burlington strike.

• This week’s new additions include a think piece that attempts to systematize the utopian collectivist movement of the 19th Century, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860-1914, by Robert S. Fogarty (University of Chicago Press, 1990). This actually relates tangentially to Debs in “Volume 2,” when he was briefly associated with the Social Democracy of America in its initial planning phases for what would eventually become the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth in Washington state.

Utopian socialism — efforts to build model communities that attempted to demonstrate the superiority of collectivism in the midst of capitalist society — is mocked in the literature of International Socialism as inevitably doomed due to the financial pressure exerted by the capitalist economic system. Debs came to share such a viewpoint within about a year and a half or so of his new self-identification as a socialist in 1897 — but the Utopian millennialism of the era, which drew energy and broad inspiration from a 1888 novel by Edward Bellamy, was briefly an instrumental part of his world.

I mention this book and these facts now only because Bellamy has reared his head in Debs’s writings for the first time this week in a February 1890 review of the Boston novelist’s masterpiece of political fiction, Looking Backward, 2000-1887. In his summary for Firemen’s Magazine readers, Debs mentions his copy was the printing including the 154,000th copy, which means he wasn’t an early purchaser of the book. The degree that Bellamy influenced his thought is an interesting question of intellectual history, a matter that must be addressed no later than Vol. 2 of this project.

• I blundered into the perfect Grover Cleveland biography for me. Fattypants Cleveland was, of course, the President that sent out the troops to crush the 1894 ARU strike led by Debs and a biographical subject of great importance to me. Over the last 100 years there have been Cleveland biographies strewn all over the map, ranging from the hagiographic to the bitterly antagonistic. Was Cleveland an under appreciated, earnest, and honest chief executive and forerunner of progressivism with measures like the Interstate Commerce law? An arch-reactionary “Bourbon Democrat” defender of big capital and corporate interest? Piles of metal shavings from the finely whetted political axes of historians have been heaped high arguing the matter. It takes a while to figure these things out just randomly falling into a shelf of books and there could be a lot of time wasted in the process. I’m not a historian of the 1880s by inclination, but rather a historian of the 1910s and 1920s, one full generation later.

Fortunately for me, Robert E. Welch, Jr.’s The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (University Press of Kansas, 1988) is just what the doctor ordered: a scholarly survey of the literature along with the author’s compelling personal take on Cleveland’s ideology and policies. Welch rejects the “Bourbon” label for Cleveland and the tendency of some to cast him as a corporation-worshipping arch-reactionary, instead arguing for a rather unintellectual, practically-driven, assertive conservative who believed in individualism and free trade while — with some contradiction — at the same time expanding the executive powers of the Presidency. From Mayor of Buffalo for one year to Governor of New York to the White House (twice) through the magic of “Cleveland luck”…

I’ve really been diving into the book. It is steering me towards additional background material about the era I will be writing about this summer in the way that only a really good scholarly book can do.

• I also managed to pick up up two more long runs of newsy publications on microfilm — Puck  (1878-1918) a Republican weekly modeled on the British Tory publication Punch; and The Arena (1889-1909), a liberal monthly essay magazine. Debs actually wrote for the latter publication twice, “The Significance of Labor Day” in October 1895 and “Socialist Ideals” in November 1908.

That computerized database of every known Debs article is pretty slick, huh?

• “Open Letter to P.M. Arthur of the B of LF” — Dec. 1889 open letter — 2,325 words

• “The Knights of Labor and the Farmers” — Jan. 1890 article — 770 words

• “Andrew Carnegie on “Best Fields for Philanthropy’” — Feb. 1890 article — 2,230 words

• “Austin Corbin — Russianizer” — Feb. 1890 article — 2,725 words

• “Looking Backward, 2000-1887” — Feb. 1890 article — 2,620 words

• “Do We Want Industrial Peace?” — March 1890 article — 1,700 words

• “Knights of Labor to Shape Own Destiny” — March 1890 article — 310 words

• “Mrs. Lenora M. Barry: General Instructor and Director of Woman’s Work, Knights of Labor” — May 1890 article — 3,150 words

• “The Eight-Hour Movement” — May 1890 article — 3,050 words

• “The Improvement in Railway Management” — June 1890 article — 2,400 words

• “The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Federation” — June 1890 article — 975 words

• “Conductors Overwhelmingly Endorse Protection” — June 1890 article — 800 words

• “Eight-Hour Day a Righteous Demand” — July 1890 article — 1,975 words

• “The Higher Education of Women vs. Marriage” — July 1890 article — 2,000 words

….Word count = 407,750 words in the can + 27,030 this week = 434,780 words

• 9 more Saturdays to go until the July 1 target for the end of output of editable text. There are still 163 article pdfs remaining to be processed (or rejected at second reading).