The Debs Project

• Hey, nice photo of a train wreck from the 1888 Burlington strike, eh? I actually bumped into this on Wikimedia Commons, it was an image originating in a book that I had been working with to write the WP article on that extremely important Debs-related event. Twenty minutes of Photoshop editing it starts to look pretty compelling, does it not? The image is of the aftermath of a collision which took place on Feb. 27, 1888 (the day of the start of the strike) at the crossing of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad’s line. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy was subject to a labor stoppage on that day by its engineers and firemen who wanted to be paid a flat rate by the mile like other competing lines running out of Chicago instead of according to a complex company rate book that factored in difficulty of each route, trip length, cargo, and tenure of the employee.

I must be getting old because I’m starting to prefer toned coins like this instead of those that are dipped to be “bright white.”

Not accidentally, under the Burlington pay system the employees of the CB&Q wound up being paid significantly less than did equivalent employees on rival lines. Also not accidentally, the CB&Q was an extremely profitable business concern in this period and was in no hurry to change their economically advantageous pay system.

Just about every single engineer and fireman joined the stoppage — more than 97% of the road’s 2,100-some-odd cab employees took part. With the key running employees off the job, the company pressed everybody and their dog into service, putting pencil-pushers and maintenance workers and conductors and foremen behind the throttle and at the shovel in an attempt to keep the line running. Some trains went BOOM as a result, because not every pencil-pusher can run a train safely. BOOM!!!

The strike was extremely bitter and lasted until early January 1889. It ended with the railroad achieving retention of its established pay system, but the privilege cost them an estimated $5 million in lost business. Some of the striking employees were rehired, many others were replaced. Everybody lost out. So it goes.

• I found a pretty nice example of the vilification that Debs had to face in the press during the height of the 1894 Pullman boycott, when he was for a time Public Enemy No. 1. The cartoon, from the front page of the right wing Los Angeles Times of July 11, 1894, reprints a bogus “Associated Press dispatch” that reads: “Dr. B.T. Robertson, the New York specialist, knows Eugene V. Debs and treated him in past for a serious case of dipsomania [alcoholism]. His system broke down completely under constant alcoholic excess, and he became a mental and physical wreck. Dr. Robertson sent a telegram to Debs on Thursday night, warning him that he was in no condition to enter upon such an undertaking as the managing of the great ARU strike. ‘I consider him to be almost, if not fully, irresponsible,’ said Dr. Robertson, ‘and I told him so in my telegram. He will break down physically and mentally as soon as the strain is over, if not before, and will probably relapse into his former dissipated habits.’”

The drawing depicts a drunken Debs knocking over his ink pot and trashing his office amidst a maniacal fluttering array of strike orders. You should be able to make out the cartoon’s caption pretty clearly. “Fake News” and bogus pictorial memes are no recent invention…

• I spent one of my three book-work days reading and working a bit on the American Labor Union page on Wikipedia, uploading convention proceedings for the ALU, the IWW, and the Western Federation of Miners to Archive.org, and compiling scanned pages of the New York Call, a Socialist Party daily newspaper, into pdf files. This stuff actually does relate to the Debs project, but only to later volumes. I have to watch myself so that I don’t get sidetracked — which is an old time railroading term, by the way. I learned a lot about Western miner radicalism, but this isn’t the time to fully debrief on it…

I will, however, share one key insight I have gained. During the 1890s for the first few years of the 20th Century, Denver was the second city of the American West. It was not Seattle (42,800 population in 1890) or Los Angeles (50,400) or Portland (46,400) but Denver (106,700) that was the second largest industrial hub of the region.

Denver was center of metal mining — including companies which manufactured heavy industrial equipment for that burgeoning industry. Denver was the locus of the wealth extracted by that hard rock mining and the site of conflict between the owning class and the working class.

Denver was to San Francisco as Chicago was to New York City. So it makes perfect sense that it would emerge as  the headquarters city of the organizational center of western trade union radicalism, the Western Federation of Miners and the trade union federation it launched, the American Labor Union.

• 10 more Saturdays to go until we hit the July 1 target for the end of production of of Debs-written editable text. There are still 195 article pdfs remaining to be processed (or rejected at second reading)…

• We’ve started cutting the 1877-1885 material. I did a physical printout of articles and got my sharpie marking… We’re looking at something in the range of 75 to 100 pages out of 700 or so dedicated to the early “conservative labor editor” stuff. David pulled one back from the burn barrel but we’re still sitting north of 100 pages and need to sharpen our knives.

• My new library acquisitions this week included what has proven to be one of the most zany Debs items out there. The Story of Eugene Debs is a book by Henry T. Schnittkind, published in 1929, just a few years after EVD’s death. I’ve known of it for a while but hadn’t made getting a copy a priority, as it was said to be a children’s book — which is true. It was my understanding that it was published by the Workman’s Circle, a Jewish-Socialist fraternal benefit society based in New York City that was very closely tied to the Socialist Party of America. Which is to say: No big whoop. This turned out to be rather less true, as the book was actually published by the Independent Workmen’s Circle, not the Workmen’s Circle — a Communist-sponsored factional split-group that was transformed into the International Workers Order in 1930. In other words, this is a Communist book for kiddies rather than a Socialist book for kiddies, which makes it way, way, way more interesting from where I’m sitting.

Here’s where the story gets fascinating. This was book 1 of a projected 4 volume set of biographies called “Heroes of Peace and Liberty.” The other biographical subjects were to include Tolstoy, Socrates, and Lenin. What a peculiar set of four! But that’s not the good part. Here it is: virtually every single word of The Story of Eugene V. Debs is flat-out, unflinching, completely unapologetic fiction! Dialogs and incidents that are completely unmentioned in the literature are created from whole cloth — here and there a name, a factual date, and an odd quote plucked from the historical record, buried beneath wheelbarrow-loads of imagined events and contrived dialog worthy of the worst of Based On A True Story™ Hollywood screenwriting.

Take this exposition on the inner thoughts of little Gene, for instance:

“The Civil War was over at last, and people once more came to their senses. The North and the South shook hands, they apologized for having killed so many of the strongest and the most beautiful of the young men of the country, and everything was all right again. Everybody was happy, except the young fellows that had been killed in the war….

“Gene thought it very silly for old people to send young people to their death, and to make up a great speech about them afterwards. But, then, Gene was only nine years old, and so he kept his thoughts to himself. It wouldn’t do to tell grown-ups what you thought of them. They were so much bigger and stronger than you. They might get angry and give you a good spanking.

“But he kept his eyes open, and every day he learned more and more about the world….”

And so on and so forth. Just one after another after another made up incident designed to teach the children to whom the book was read or who read the book about the exciting life of pacifist-boy-genius-youth-orator Gene Debs and his adventures, teaching valuable lessons about war and capitalism all the while, culminating in “old Mr. Wilson” being “stubborn, as usual” and keeping the aging Gene locked in prison.

It’s an absolutely fascinating piece of Debsiana and I’ve simply gotta find that Lenin for American Tykes book…

[P.S.: I think I found the Lenin for Tykes book. Alas, it looks like I’m gonna have to learn Yiddish… Here’s the info: לענין װײזט דעם װעג /מױשע שעפריס. ]

[P.P.S.: Comrade John, who reads Yiddish, says the title is Lenin Shows The Way, by Moishe Shefris.]

• “The Future of the Order of Railway Conductors” — Feb. 1889 article — 1,125 words

• “The Strength of All for the Good of All” — Feb. 1889 article — 1,400 words

• “Labor as a ‘Commodity’” —  March 1889 — 2,210 words

• “The Church and the Workingman” — April 1889 — 1,800 words

• “Unmasking Hypocrisy” — April 1889 — 2,550 words

• “Labor Organizations” — May 1889 article — 1,700 words

• “The Political Control of Railways” — June 1889 article — 1,825 words

• “Truth and Fiction” — June 1889 article — 1,560 words

• “Federation Inaugurated” — July 1889 article — 1,190 words

• “Supreme Council of United Orders of Railway Employees Formed” — July 1889 article — 2,710 words

….Word count = 389,680 words in the can + 18,070 this week = 407,750 words

….Plus another one that I’m putting on account for Volume Four:

• “Wendell Phillips: Orator and Abolitionist” — May 1917 article — 3,760 words

• Volume I of the Debs Selected Works project will include the most years of any of the four books — two full decades, 1877 to 1896. The other three volumes will encompass just three decades of Debs’s activity, 1897 until his death in 1926. This means for one thing a faster spin through the garden of his writings, which were dominated by the affairs of his beloved Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, of which he was a leading functionary (Grand Secretary and Treasurer) as well as magazine editor.

Of necessity, the axe will be wielded more severely against the early railway unionist material than it will be during the later socialist material. I’m sure that something like 95% of contemporary readers will feel this to be good and natural, but to me it is an error of omission of sorts.

• Following the historical consensus, I completely accept that there were two concrete phases of Debs as an editor — an early “conservative labor editor” phase (borrowing David Shannon’s term) which lasted until about 1886, and a later “progressive unionist” phase which culminated in Debs’s leadership of the American Railway Union.

The exact proportion of documents between these two phases remains to be determined. A 20/80 split is plausible, something of that general magnitude. The final division might prove to be greater than that — Debs actually produced much, much more material after 1886 than he did before that date. He was himself a city clerk and a state legislator through 1885. There is probably a connection to giving up as a politician and committing himself to a career as a union functionary in terms of his radicalization, but it was also a product of the times, as the gilded age of the robber barons gave way to the progressive era.

• I also see the second progressive phase of Editor Debs as actually consisting of at least two sub-phases — an initial period in which Debs repeatedly and insistently advocated and worked for the federation of the existing craft-oriented railway brotherhoods, culminating in formation of an organization of which he was part, the Supreme Council of the United Orders of Railway Employes. This group finally collapsed due to a really ugly instance of jurisdictional dirty pool involving two of the constituent organizations, the Switchmen’s Mutual Aid Association (SMAA) and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen (BRT, which was until the year before known as the Brotherhood of Railroad Brakemen). It was a brutal episode, in which BRT officials got together with a piqued railroad and were party to the summary dismissal of 400 SMAA members and their replacement by 400 BRT members. The root of the incident was apparently a couple antagonistic personalities in one major Chicago switchyard and the greed and grand designs of union officials. The BRT really showed that antagonistic SMAA guy, didn’t they?

The collapse of Supreme Council that attempted to unite the existing mutually jealous and sometimes duplicitous railway brotherhoods pushed Debs to another discrete phase, in which he was instrumental in launching the American Railway Union. The level of antagonism between each of the brotherhoods and between the brotherhoods and the ARU is not commonly appreciated. If one wishes to understand both the motivation behind the ARU and the reason for its precipitous collapse, the internal politics have to be understood. It’s my goal to explain this, if nothing else, with volume 1.

One could make a case for one more short phase after Debs’s release from prison, when the ARU was bankrupt and its members blacklisted into underground non-existence, when Debs turned to political action in a big way through the agency of the People’s Party (the “Populists”). Still pondering this.

• We are sliding towards the next aspect of the Debs Project, cutting down a projected 560,000 words to fit a 260,000 word content “hole” for volume 1. I have been working through the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine material chronologically, beginning the week towards the end of 1888 and starting to take a big bite out of 1889. Everything is being ported over to Marxists Internet Archive as individual files, which follow my traditional 6 x 9 inch pages size, use of the Adobe Garamond font family, and use of true footnotes rather than endnotes, compiled with the Apple Pages word processor program and outputted as pdfs.

The manuscript we submit will need to have different different parameters: 8.5 by 11 inches, Times New Roman font, endnotes not footnotes, and Microsoft Word. That means there will need to be a fairly significant conversion made.

I’ve decided to make half the switch at this point, keeping my preferred page size and word processor program, but switching up fonts and converting footnotes into endnotes. I’m also heavily tweaking the typography, greatly reducing header size and moving publication info from the top to the bottom in the style used by Bob Constantine in his published three volume edition of Debs letters.

This will keep things comfortable for David and me to read and review as part of the selection process while expediting the creation of a final manuscript.

• Kind of a slow week in the file-creation department as I spent considerable time converting files and writing a Wikipedia article on the 1888 Burlington strike. I figured on spending half a day on the article, wound up getting half done at the cost of one of my three days off — there was a lot of reading involved. Hopefully I will get the time back this summer when I’m writing the book introduction for real. I’m looking at it as an investment. I need to spend another day in the coming week finishing up the Burlington piece, I’ll link here when I’m through.

• LIBRARY ACQUISITIONS: I don’t usually make the rookie mistake of missing out on rare items that I need in my field of interest that come up for sale under market-value, but I really screwed the pooch on a nice copy of Pearson’s magazine’s 1919 pamphlet of Debs articles, Pastels of Men. I was holding off on my ABE order for two days for my credit card to “cut” for the month and wound up being one day too slow. Grrrr. Fortunately I found a scan of a beat-shit copy from the University of Michigan library via Google Books, so I now know what the content of that lesser-known pamphlet is for sure — and as a new owner of a decently-complete run of Pearson’s from the period in question, it turns out I wouldn’t have been using the reprint pamphlet version anyway, instead working from first edition magazines. Still, it doesn’t happen too often that I miss something that I really want because I failed to pull the trigger decisively. It is, like I say, a rookie mistake and it sort of sucks.

On the other hand, there are a few things that I did manage to snarf up. The most exciting is a “new” Debs biography that wasn’t even on my radar — That Man Debs, by Floy Ruth Painter, a history professor from Indiana University. It runs just 200 pages, so it is far from comprehensive, but being published in 1929 this stands as the first posthumous Debs bio and it includes snippets from direct personal interviews. It’s not bad. Not quite sure how I missed it — it just goes to show there is always something else out there waiting to be discovered. When I get a chance I will pore through the extensive bibliography in the back of the book, I have a hunch that will move me towards my next targets.

I also picked up a couple Lovestoneite pamphlets that I didn’t own yet (!!!) and a swell semi-official pamphlet on the function of trade unions published by the American Federation of Labor in 1899. I’ve got something like 5,000 pamphlets, maybe more than that, so there is a lot of filling in around the edges that takes place. Which is to say: there are a lot of edges to fill in.

• “The Aristocracy of Labor” — Nov. 1888 article —  1,725 words

• “B of LF Convention Endorses Federation” — Nov. 1888 article — 1,425 words

• “The CB&Q” — Nov. 1888 article — 1,700 words

• “Fatal Fallacies” — Dec. 1888 article — 1,900 words

• “Strikes” — Dec. 1888 article — 1,000 words

• “Speech to the Brotherhood of Railroad Brakemen” — Dec. 1888 speech — 2,075 words

• “Triumph Through Federation” — Jan. 1889 article — 2,260 words

• “The Knights of Labor” — Jan. 1889 article — 1,250 words

• “The Progress of Federation” — Jan. 1889 article — 1,950 words

• “The Brotherhood of Railway Conductors” — Feb. 1889 article — 750 words

• “The Termination of the Burlington Strike” — Feb. 1889 article — 1,675 words

• “Letter to E.E. Clark” — Jan. 1892 unpublished letter — 1,825 words

============================================================================

….Word count = 370,145 words in the can + 19,535 this week = 389,680 words

….Plus another one that I’m putting on account for Volume Four:

• “Recollections of Ingersoll” — April 1917 article — 4,375 words

• I am already finished reading microfilm for the first volume of the Debs Selected Works. That strikes me as being way ahead of the curve, I’m sure the feat won’t be repeated as rapidly for volumes 2, 3, and 4.

The thing is, a large part of Debs’s (gotta get used to that Haymarket House Style!) early writing happened in the pages of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, the official journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, of which he was the paid editor for a dozen years. All those issues have been scanned by Google for their Google Books project, which means that material can be handled without leaving the laptop computer environment. Issues can be perused, articles selected and segregated, files prepared for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), output gathered, proofreading done, finished files assembled — no paper issues or microfilm necessary.

I have every known Debs article databased, which took me a long, long time — you’ve already heard me moaning about that. Now, fortunately, the dirty work is done and the benefits begin to accrue. During the tedious process of building the cumbersome database file I was spinning through Firemen’s Magazine and simultaneously skimming through and preserving individual pdf files of every potentially relevant article.

With several hundred potentially includable pieces neatly stored away, I launched an all out attack on everything else. I spun film frenetically, both the Papers of Eugene V. Debs microfilm and the runs I own of Railway Times, The Coming Nation, and Appeal to Reason. This is the phase that is now completed. Check that box.

•  Next comes the OCR phase of the exercise. As this week began I had 259 remaining Firemen’s Magazine Debs article files to run through Optical Character Recognition. Since I’ve got 13 weeks until I turn into a pumpkin on July 1, this means that I need to make 20 files per week go away — about 3 files per day.

This was a pretty average week, pace-wise. I put in my 20 hours, something like that, and as I am typing this on Friday morning I have 22 articles in the can for 27,800 words. Another 11 files were rejected during the second reading, and the inventory of articles sits at 226. Assuming the file size and rejection rate I experienced this week are reasonable random samples of the remaining population, this means that there are something like 192,000 more words to come, for a grand total of 560,000 for Volume One’s 1877-1896 interval.

Simple math: the article “hole” for the book is 260,000, so there will be something like 300,000 extra words of text generated for volume 1. Keeping things in round figures, that means there will be about 750 bonus pages of edited Debs material generated.

•  This begs the question: what the hell is going to happen to the reams of extra editable text that has been created?

My current thought, and don’t hold me to it, is that this material may well be published as an eBook placed into the public domain. Then it is just a matter of nature taking its course with the myriad of “print on demand” goobers on eBay finding the files and making hard copy books out of them and vending them to anyone interested. It’s not like more than a handful of  people are going to want to track down that material in book form anyway, barring a strange and unexpected resurgence in interest in reading Gene Debs esoterica…

There is a certain brilliant simplicity to this idea as far as getting this material into print and distributed, it must be admitted. I’m still pondering things. Another alternative would be for me to become the “print on demand” goober on eBay myself, which would increase my control over the output at the cost of a pain in my backside.  Option 3 would be to turn the production and distribution over to Marxists Internet Archive, who could make a few badly needed bucks at it, with me retaining a certain amount of control of the end product. There are cases to be made for all of these options.

•  New additions to the library this week include huge microfilm runs of two important national news and politics magazines, The Outlook (1894-1935) and The Forum (1886-1940). Total tab for 59 reels of film, postpaid from Alabama: $55 — 93 cents a reel! That’s almost free. Also scored another lot of Pearson’s magazine from 1915, 1916, and the first half of 1917 — nice copies for about $3 an issue, postpaid, which is also stealing.

I also managed to pick up a 100 year old socialist pamphlet from Ohio that doesn’t appear in WorldCat, meaning that for the moment it appears to be the only specimen known. It wasn’t too big of a cash hit as these things go, $25 — which would be less than 25% of the cost of a unique sales tax token or 10% of the cost of a unique socialist political button, just guessing. Collector prices are what they are and “cheap” and “expensive” are relative. Twenty-five bucks for such a thing is really good value.

• “Pullman” — Jan. 1887 article — 1,225 words

• “The Chicago Anarchists” — Jan. 1887 article — 1,550 words

• “Politics”— Jan. 1887 article — 730 words

• “Abolitionists” — Feb. 1887 article — 1,275 words

• “Will Labor Organizations Federate?” — Feb. 1887 article —  1,125 words

• “Land, Labor, and Liberty” — Aug. 1887 article — 975 words

• “The Contemplated Treaty with Russia” — Aug. 1887 article — 2,350 words

• “Child Labor” — Sept. 1887 article — 1,350 words

• “Cooperation and Arbitration” — Oct. 1887 article — 1,025 words

• “Joining Labor Organizations” — March 1888 article — 1,000 words

• “Federation, the Lesson of the Great Strike” — April 1888 — 1,500 words

• “The Policy of the Order of Railway Conductors” — May 1888 — 2,375 words

• “The Great Strike” — May 1888 — 1,950 words

• “Federation of Labor Organizations for Mutual Protection” — June 1888 — 825 words

• “The Record of the CB&Q Strike” — June 1888 — 1,000 words

• “The Situation” — July 1888 — 1,300 words

• “The Common Laborer” — July 1888 — 650 words

• “Invincible Man” — July 1888 — 750 words

• “Home Rule in Ireland” — Aug. 1888 — 1,375 words

• “The Pinkertons” — Aug. 1888 — 1,425 words

• “The CB&Q and Pinkerton Conspiracy” — Aug. 1888 — 2,050 words

• “Equality of Conditions” — Sept. 1888 — 950 words

• “Federation” — Sept. 1888 — 1,160 words

• “Night and Morning” — Sept. 1888 — 1,725 words

….Word count = 338,505 words + 31,640 this week = 370,145 words

• My friend David Walters saw Debs as a project before I did. From about 2004 to 2009 I was focused on what I still consider the main historical project in my life — a three volume work on a very few years of left wing political history, 1916 to 1924. Yeah, those dates have meaning. My vision is to tie together the story of the attenuation of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party’s emergence and growth in the superheated political environment of world war and European revolution. Parts of this story have been narrated  many times; other aspects of the saga have never been told. To my mind it has never really been done right, although the Philip Foner’s 10-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States at least touches most of the bases, no matter how tendentiously.

Anyway I built a website to house my “reading notes in very long form” (Early American Marxism website) so that I could not only organize and rapidly access my work but also share my findings and I started assembling documents. This effort attracted the notice of a volunteer at one of the established Marxist history websites (Marxists Internet Archive), which started to mirror my content in a more visible manner. I became a fully fledged volunteer there, which is how I met David — one of the two or three de facto coordinators of the site.

As I was typing up full documents for my book project, I paid particular attention to several key individuals whose intellectual trajectory would carry my tale. Always steal from the best: that is how Ted Draper structured his seminal volumes, The Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia — the work I would be following half a century later and effectively replacing. One of these main individuals in my story happened to be Jay Lovestone — whom I ended up spending a year on a while ago as co-pilot of a radical scholar’s book project (eventually published as The “American Exceptionalism” of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, but see the working title below). Another of these key political actors was Gene Debs.

Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) is structured a bit strangely. The basic site is built around the writings of individuals — all of Marx here, all of Lenin there, all of Trotsky on another page, Kautsky on still another, and so forth — all with server access pretty tightly restricted so that only one or two or a very few volunteers have access to any particular index page to keep the works from getting effed up. I was doing my own thing as part of a “US History section” mirroring content of my site but I didn’t want to screw around with MIA’s html pages, which were not a direct replication of my own primitive “frames”-based website but had its own very definite form. David Walters emerged as the adapter of my stuff and my handler of sorts, converting my material to the official MIA site structure.

Along the way he started posting some of my documents in parallel — listing things not only in the largely unvisited “US History section” index pages but also according to the writer of the document in the Preferred MIA Mode. Thus all of the Eugene V. Debs documents that I typed up began to migrate to a single place — an already existing “Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive.” I was churning them out as fast as I came across them for my future History of American Radicalism, 1916-1924 book(s). The rare Debs pieces started to stack up.

Debs is a big figure in the history of American radicalism, respected and revered then and now both by social democrats like myself and small-c communists like David. It’s hard to think of another individual with similar “crossover appeal” between the reformist and revolutionary left. David was interested. I was interested. And it was becoming clear that there was an enormous pool of Debs material out there. It struck him as really weird that nobody had ever done a proper job of putting together Debs’s writings in a coherent way. David started to nudge me a little — why not get serious about gathering everything together and putting out Debs’ Collected Works?

Any Marxist can tell you that there’s a world of difference between “Collected Works” and “Selected Works.” The latter generally means one or two or three volumes of the most important stuff, with tons of lesser material and fluff left behind. The former includes literally everything written or spoken by a person and that gets big fast. Lenin’s Polnoe sobraniie sochineniia (“Complete Collected Works”) ran to 55 thick volumes in Russian, with the slightly truncated English edition tipping in at 45. The Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (“Complete Edition”) runs to 44 volumes in German, some of these in multiple parts, and 50 volumes in English. Russian or English collected works have never even been completed for Leon Trotsky, despite the size and fervor of his political following. The subset of Trotsky’s 1929-1940 material alone that is not included in his three foot shelf of freestanding books runs to 14 volumes in English — that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Bear in mind that all of these Collected Works projects took teams of scholars decades to produce. Moral: Collected Works = BIG.

“It is too much for one person to do a Collected Works of Eugene Debs,” I told David. I had no idea how many Debs writings were out there, but I guesstimated several thousand and further extrapolated that this would require a total of 14 or so thick volumes. That’s turned out to be a pretty good estimate — just north of 4,000 works and more like 18 volumes would be my current, smarter guesses. Maybe three people working hard for a decade could get it done, I speculated. And there the idea sat for several years. I turned my attention to Wikipedia, figuring that it was the best use of my time improving the historical coverage on that ubiquitous website. Nevertheless, I continued to type up Debs material for MIA as I bumped into it. The list of Debs works continued to expand. Over time I gradually began to ponder the idea of a Selected Works of limited size. That might be a plausible goal. David was all for it and became the project’s biggest cheerleader.

In the meantime, I got drafted into working on the Lovestone book mentioned above. The connection was made through my own website, I think, anybody working on Lovestone seriously and running Google searches would have come into contact with my documents at some point, as I had gathered material on the Lovestoneites running into the 1930s. I wound up spending the better part of a year on that project and learned a lot in terms of the publishing process and the dos and don’ts of editing a “documents” book. I can’t emphasize enough that the Lovestone book wasn’t my vision, that I was only the co-pilot. I have finally learned to not hate it, which is a baby step for me, I was pretty discouraged near the end there… I did manage to sneak one chapter into the work that approximated my vision — I’m sure my co-editor Paul LeBlanc hates that particular contribution (it does stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the book), but he’s a prolific guy who is already about half a dozen projects down the road from Lovestone by now. Maybe the Lovestone will come out in paperback this year and more than a dozen will actually see it, who knows? Anyway, I know what I do and don’t want to do this time around. There is no substitute for experience.

And so there you have it. Not every detail of the Eugene V. Debs: Selected Works project has been decided. We do known that there will be four fat volumes produced, and all signs are that there will be enough additional material generated to constitute the equivalent of four more volumes. Beyond that there will be at least that much more material left behind. I have been greatly aided in my task by two scholars who have come before me, Bob Constantine and Gail Malmgreen, who conducted a project to assemble and microfilm the collected writings and letters of Eugene Debs during the early 1980s, which has meshed with my own independent work marvelously, setting me up to do what I do well. The story of their work a third of a century ago and how I blundered into it remains for another day.

The bottom line is that it is indeed possible for one or two people to get a really good Debs Selected Works together in four years — which is absolutely jamming as these sort of projects go.

We’ll see.

• We finally got the contract all squared away. Haymarket promises to do both hardcover and paper, with price of the hardcover capped at $125 (although they expect it to be substantially less). That sounds like an insanely high price, trust me it is not. If they manage to bring this thing in under $100 a volume that will be a big win for libraries and people who take books seriously.

• David and I had a nice conference call with a couple of the comrades at Haymarket who will be working on the project on the publishers’ side and everything is good. They’re stoked about the project, which is all we could ever ask.

• My girlfriend Laura and I had a nice dinner with John and Sue from Bolerium Books of San Francisco, who were passing through Corvallis. I was actually a Debs seller rather than a buyer this time around, sending the five bound volumes I had collected (out of 14) of Debs-edited Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine back into the world. Between Google Books’ pdfs and backup copies of all the editorials on the Debs Papers microfilm, the hardcopy was an unnecessary duplicate to me. Moreover, it was a run that I was clearly never going to finish given the rarity of the title in the marketplace. Individual issues with covers still hold an appeal and I’ll buy a few more of those as they appear on eBay, but the thick bound volumes were just taking up space. (Besides, I needed to pay the piper for the stack of New Masses volumes I obtained last week.)

During dinner I learned that Sue (a historian) had done extensive work on the Martin Luther King papers project, even taking the lead on a couple of those volumes. Small world.

• “Speech to the Indiana Legislature Renominating Daniel W. Voorhees” — Jan. 1885 speech — 1,250 words

• “A Day and Its Duties” — March 1885 article — 1,570 words

• “War Clouds” — June 1885 article — 1,920 words

• “When 100 Years Are Gone” — July 1885 article — 1,750 words

• “Standing Armies” — Aug. 1885 article — 1,360 words

• “Dynamite and Legitimate Warfare” — Oct. 1885 article — 1,375 words

• “Employees the Wards of Employers” — April 1886 article — 1,000 words

• “Reformations” — April 1886 article — 1,075 words

• “Overproduction” — April 1886 article — 1,175 words

• “Current Disagreements Between Employers and Employees” — May 1886 article — 2,025 words

• “T.V. Powderly and the Knights of Labor” — May 1886 article — 3,100 words

• “Boycotting” — June 1886 article — 2,400 words

• “The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen“ — July 1886 article — 5,950 words

• “Why Eight Hours for a Day’s Work” — July 1886 article — 2,700 words

• “More Soldiers” — Aug. 1886 article — 1,100 words

• “The Coming Workingman” — July 1895 article — 1,375 words

• “Labor Omnia Vincit (Labor Conquers Everything)” — Aug. 1895 article — 980 words

• “Term Half Over” — Aug. 1895 interview — 1,475 words

• “Open Letter to Alfred S. Edwards” — June 1896 letter — 650 words

….Word count = 306,475 words + 32,030 this week = 338,505 words

• I am a notorious procrastinator — my academic years were littered with a series of term papers slammed together in the last 10 days or week or 48 hours before deadline, capped, of course, by the inevitable red wine or beer-laced all nighter. One of my less successful efforts was a paper I wrote for a US History class against the clock that ended with the immortal words, “…and the rest is history.” That went over poorly, but I could always write well enough to avoid serious repercussions and I dodged that dumb-dumb bullet, too.

Suffice it to say that no such last minute cramming and slamming will be possible with Mr. Debs. With a hard deadline of October 15 in the distance, I am looking to get finished with the first phase of work — identifying the best stuff and converting it to editable type — by the end of June. That’s a real deadline for me, mentally. And so I blast onward through the galaxy of Debs writings.

My target is to commit 500,000 words to editable type for Volume 1 — a book with a 260,000 word “hole.” That gives me essentially 14 Saturdays after this one to get another 200,000 or so words in the can. Then David and I can slice and dice the material to fit, snipping material that duplicates and honing the explanatory footnotes on the stuff that makes the cut. Material not making the book will be available through another channel, be it digital files or a pdf ebook.

August will be the month to write, with a 10,000 word “hole” set aside for an introductory essay. The tough task will be condensing so much biographical and historical material to fit — one could quite literally fill an entire thick volume with the story of Debs’ life and the history of his activities through 1896. Remember, he would have been 41 years old in that year, more than half his life was over. It will prove a challenge, for sure.

If everything goes super smoothly, I’d like to send in the first manuscript on September 1 and to start turning my attention to the next volume before I have to start reading proof on the first.

           The best laid schemes o’mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley….

• I found a batch of Pearson’s Magazine on eBay with dates running from 1917 to 1924. The magazine was social democratic in orientation, vaguely like The Liberator (minus the fantastic art), with novelist Frank Harris playing Max Eastman’s role as editor-in-chief. Price was beautiful, like two bucks a copy for a stack of 40 different — compare and contrast to The Liberator of the same vintage, which can bring $75 to $100 or more per copy. Suffice it to say I was tickled to make the buy. More so when one of the first articles I saw was a piece by EVD called “Susan B. Anthony: Pioneer of Freedom.” Ah, I’ve seen that before, I sighed, but I was still stoked to have hardcopy that I could scan up and run through OCR — beats the hell out of typing.

Upon further review — much to my surprise — I found that this was an entirely different article than the piece I thought it was, a 1909 bit written for Socialist Woman and republished in the 1916 collection, Labor and Freedom. Very cool, very cool. I spent some time and got a good clean scan of he rotten, brown paper — feel free to download the piece and have a read: “Susan B. Anthony: Pioneer of Freedom”

• More microfilm rolling in includes North American Review (1885-1936) and the first iteration of Life magazine (1885-1924-1936). Missing a couple reels but I’ve got the key dates in hand.

• Biggest addition to my library this month are some very well-preserved bound copies of The New Masses, the CPUSA’s literary-artistic-political weekly, for the years 1937, 1938, and the first half of 1939. Not really what I was intending to spend money on, but the guy who SHOULD have pulled the trigger wussed out and somebody had to step up or risk that stuff going lost. There’s an ongoing project to scan the magazine, which has never been properly microfilmed and which was printed on ultra-crappy high acid paper.

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do sometimes…

• “Railroad Managers and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen” — Sept. 1884 article — 1,300 words

• “Employer and Employed” — Oct. 1884 article — 1,325 words

• “Tramps and Tramping” — Oct. 1884 article — 865 words

• “What is Success” — Oct. 1884 article — 750 words

• “Labor and Law” — Nov. 1884 article — 1,100 words

• “Enthusism” — Dec. 1884 article — 440 words

• “Capital and Labor” — Feb. 1885 article — 800 words

• “The Lessons of Elections” — Feb. 1885 article — 1,325 words

• “Progress and Poverty” — Feb. 1885 article — 670 words

• “The Attempted Blacklist Degradation of Employees” — March 1885 article — 875 words

• “Education” — March 1885 article — 850 words

• “Robert G. Ingersoll” — Feb. 1893 article — 1,675 words

• Fix to “Keynote Address to 1st Convention of ARU” — June 1894 speech — (+200 words)

• Fix to “Proclamation to the ARU” — June 1895 article — (+75 words)

• “Cooperation Not Competition” — June 1895 interview — 1,325 words

• “Let Labor Be Organized” — Oct. 1895 article — 800 words

• “The Mind’s Workshop” — Oct. 1895 article — 1,425 words

• “Statement to the AP on the Great Northern Situation” — Nov. 1895 statement — 625 words

• “Shall the Standing Army of the United States Be Increased?” — Dec. 1895 statement — 2,025 words

• “Consolidation” — Jan. 1896 article — 1,175 words

• “The Coming Election” — Sept. 1896 article — 1,725 words

• “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” — Sept. 1896 article — 1,075 words

• “An Uprising of the People” — Oct. 1896 speech — 2,870 words

….Word count =  282,180 words + 24,295 this week = 306,475 words

And one that I’m banking for Volume 4:

• “Susan B. Anthony: Pioneer of Freedom” — July 1917 article — 4,000 words