The Debs Project

• Debs has the reputation of being the most American of Americans — a Midwesterner cut from the old national cloth, Indiana Hoosier to the core, smooth yet rustic. This stands in marked contrast to the accented mutterings of the Hillquits and Bergers of the Socialist Party and the legions of foreign-born Communists — those somewhat unseemly Euros, un-Americans all.

Aside from the fact that the American working class of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was largely an immigrant population, the supposed “difference” of Debs was essentially a myth. In actual fact, EVD was the son of newcomers to the United States. Both his father Jean Daniel “Dandy” Debs and his mother Marguerite “Daisy” Debs were French nationals who arrived in the USA from the Alsace Lorraine region only a few years before his birth. French was the second language in the house.

Interestingly, in daily life EVD and his siblings seem to have been English-speakers through and through. The number of times Debs used French words  in his speeches can be counted on one hand. This is not to say that the French upbringing didn’t matter… The French revolutionary tradition of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was very strong with this one. He was a true believing adherent to that revolutionary ethic.

• These days microfilm is the “8-track tape” of the intellectual world. Not very many people have the players to make use of the format and those that do tend to have moved on to the digital replacement. Microfilm is a dinosaur and libraries are now starting to unburden themselves of their film holdings — a trickle that promises to become a flood.

Over the past few weeks I have been able to acquire — for pennies on the dollar — Current Opinion (1888-1925), McClure’s (1893-1929), Gunton’s (1891-1904), The American Mercury (1924-1961), Newsweek (1933-1962), and one of the five or so black daily papers of record, the Norfolk Journal and Guide (1917-1943). It’s a buyers’ market for us geeks that actually own 8-track tape decks… ProQuest might charge $225 a reel and get away with it once in a while, but it’s more like $2 a reel on eBay… Less than that sometimes…

In defense of analog: film is permanent, volumes out of one’s collection are easy to locate and queue up (just trying finding a specific volume via Google Books, I dare ya), and skimming the general content of multiple pages is a more pleasant experience with film than on a typical laptop screen.

As for Debs: without a microfilm reader and access to film, this project would be impossible. That’s a true statement — as of this moment, at least…

• I am doing my part for the digital revolution, I’ve sent out my extensive (and costly) holding of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker film for digitization to a fellow whose mission in life is digitizing the newspapers of New York state. My whole cost, unless the film goes missing, will be the price of shipping both ways — which beats the hell out of paying a digitization shop $50 a reel, eh?

I’m not aware of anything Debs ever wrote for the Daily Worker (the relationship between Debs and the Communists was complex and not very friendly). However, I will soon be able to search the entire run of the paper during his lifetime and confirm that. Score one for digital over film…

• I’m feeling joy and relief over the effective completion of my massive database of articles, editorials, public statements, interviews, and speeches by Eugene V. Debs. The previous definitive listing presented in the guide to the Debs papers on microfilm has been left in the dust, with the database currently sitting at 3,852 items. While a handful of these are duplicate listings that will be deleted, based on an early tiptoe through the tulips it seems there will be another 300 to 500 (or more) items emerging from the Debs microfilm and through exploration of digital newspaper records, so if I were to say “there are more than four thousand Debs items” it would be absolutely correct.

I’m relieved to be done with the very tedious job of listing this stuff up and now have a tool on my computer that is enormously useful. Whenever I bump into a Debs item I can tell if it is “previously reported” or “previously unlisted” within about three seconds. The new finds can be carefully perused, the previously known things can be safely set aside, they will emerge again at the appropriate juncture. My database is also invaluable in helping to plan and chronologically organize actual volume content and to keep track of the word count. I’m pretty happy at having finished this preparatory marathon…

• “William H. Vanderbilt” — March 1886 editorial snippet — 125 words

• “ARU Purposes and Procedures” — May 1894 magazine article — 760 words

• “Brothers and Friends: The ARU Asks the Helping Hand” — July 1894 fund-raising appeal — 225 words

• “The Solidarity of Labor” — May 1895 article — 1,300 words

• “New and Old” — May 1895 article — 1,125 words

• “Success and Failure” — July 1895 article — 2,450 words

• “Letter to William C. Endicott, Jr.” — July 1895 letter — 240 words

• “Cultural Changes: Bicycles, Bloomers, and the New Woman” — Sept. 1895 article — 1,075 words

• “Centralization and the Role of the Courts” — Jan. 1896 speech — 10,870 words

• “The American University and the Labor Problem” — Feb. 1896 article — 1,775 words

• “For Bryan” — Oct. 1896 speech — 2,525 words

….Word count = 259,500 + 22,680 =  282,180 words

• The revelatory thing about Debs that has been percolating in my mind lately is this: he celebrated his 40th birthday in November 1895 sitting in Woodstock jail. Many people tend to think of Debs before Woodstock as something of a caterpillar, Woodstock as the chrysalis, and Debs after Woodstock as a butterfly. Even though his pre-Socialist material will be one volume in four, it’s important to remember that his life was more than half-way done by the time he got out of the pokey for the first time. He was not a youngster trying to figure out where he was going, but a grown man trying to figure out how to get there.

Throughout his entire life Debs shifted gears. He was not an opportunist, there was a consistency to his line of thought, but neither was he was a stable and predictable thinker in the way that Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Trotsky or Luxemburg or Berger or DeLeon or Hillquit or Galbraith or Harrington were. This doesn’t make him any less important, only more erratic — and in some ways more interesting.

During his life Debs made a number of important leaps in orientation and emphasis. He began as a young kid on the make trying to find a career path, before going on to become a paternalistic and conservative magazine editor, a multi-brotherhood federationist, an industrial union activist trying to figure out the best way to herd cats (which was what the task of getting the disparate railway workers to unite was like). After that he became a cooperative commonwealth colony buff, a political action socialist, an IWW founder, a flamethrowing radical publicist, a political prisoner, a proto-communist, and ultimately, a rather tired and tame social democrat. Something for every factionalist to love and hate, in the final analysis.

• One might wonder how I produce editable Debs text for the press, which is extracted from hardcopy physical publications like leaflets and pamphlets, from digital scans, and from microfilm. There’s actually not one answer to that question, but two. Good old-fashioned typing is one means of getting things done. I’ve been typing documents ever since I launched my Early American Marxism website in 2004.  That site I’ve always conceived as my reading notes in very, very long form for my magnum opus — Father Time permitting — a multivolume history of American radicalism from the preparedness hysteria of 1915-1916 to the collapse of the Farmer-Labor Party movement and “bolshevization” of the Communist Party in 1924-25. So type, type, type, type, type has been part of my life for a long time — with me moving my main effort from the website to Wikipedia from 2009. I probably have typed something like 1.5 million to 2 million words for my website, believe it or not.

The other means of creation of editable documents, which I became familiar with queuing documents up for my coeditor on my previous book project, is through optical character recognition (OCR). Basically one must start with a scan of a document and then run that through computer software, which generates a string of editable text that must be painstakingly worked over to eliminate bad line breaks, spacing errors, and misread characters. It is a quicker process once the scanned material exists, probably 3 or 4 times as fast as typing, but much more boring — and one must start from a good, clean, straight scan, which is impossible to generate for some things. The long graphic to the right is what one of my cleaned-and-linearized pre-OCR files looks like — the strip I uploaded was actually twice that long.

One thing that I like about typing is that I really seem to learn the material when I have to read it and put it through my fingers. With OCR, it is more mechanical, repetitiously eliminating 1,000 bad line breaks, fixing 200 hyphenated words, cleaning up 500 typos and squirrelly spacing errors, and so forth. The content being fixed could be a Debs article or an exposition on canning dill pickles — at the end of the hour you wouldn’t really know or care which it was, nor would you either know much about either dill pickles or Debs, whichever it was that you were buffing up.

On the current project I find myself typing about 70% of the material, vs. 30% OCR. I am finding OCR works very well for the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine material and a couple pamphlets — material which has already been digitized by Google for their Google Books project or elsewhere. This stuff just needs a little bit of Photoshop finessing (and not much time) to make it straight, clean, and linear. Then I use Archive.org’s OCR software instead of a copy of the software on my own laptop — they have an option for running up “test files” that automatically vanish after 30 days that makes this possible without impacting their article database.

All the microfilm material is hand-typed. I find that I can type up something like 10,000 words a day if I have long pieces to work and keep right after it. All in all, I could probably jam out a 650 page documents book every three months if I had to — which I don’t.

• The manuscript deadline for Railway Populist is October 15. The word budget is 275,000 words for that tome, from which must be deducted about 10,000 words for an extensive introduction and another 5,000 for supplemental biographies and such. That means there is a hard cap of 260,000 words for the body of the book. As of this writing late in the evening of Tuesday, March 7, my database indicates that I have 259,895 words typed up and ready to roll for the 1877-1896 period. In other words, if David and I kept every word typed up so far, we’d be already completely done with the Debs content proper.

However, we are not finished assembling the key material for publication — not even close! Things actually remain in a fairly early “discovery” stage. My hope and expectation is to ultimately produce something like 500,000 words of editable text for the volume 1 period, which David and I can then sift down to the most important 260,000 words. We’ll figure out what to do with the material which doesn’t make the cut — maybe we can churn out a supplemental ebook or something through Marxists Internet Archive.

I’m just about ready to battle a published 12,000 (!!!) word speech to victorious conclusion, which will put me over the top in the word count. Hurrah for hitting the landmark.

• I spend something like 3 or 4 hours a week cruising eBay. If a person is a collection-builder, as I am, there is no better resource. You just have to keep your eyes open, know the market, and be ready to jump fast when you need to jump fast. Ebay is also very useful as a mechanism to steer a person to books. You search for “Debs” and all of the sudden here come a slew of titles in the result that you never would have thought applicable. Most aren’t. Some are. Anyway, this week two of the books that I was steered towards were Railroad Labor, the 5th annual report of US Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright [1889] and A Momentous Question: The Respective Attitudes of Labor and Capital by John Swinton [1895]. On a whim I punched them up to check for them on my computerized book card catalog and — can you believe it?!? — I had them both already! (You know you’ve got too many damned books when you can’t remember what you own and already possess two esoteric titles like that!) The Swinton is a a real gem, essentially a book about the Pullman strike, with a whole slew of photos of the aftermath of the Chicago July 1894 rioting and a Debs-written article in the appendix and an article lionizing Debs by the AF of L’s Sam Gompers, who later became a bitter foe. The photo above from the Swinton is a picture of the remains of burned up boxcars — something like 600 box and coal cars were burned during the July Pullman riots.

• The big news this week is the Papers of Eugene V. Debs microfilm arrived. Let’s just say I’m a super happy and a super busy guy right now… A three day typing frenzy commenced, resulting in something in the ballpark of 30,000 words. Bear in mind that the entire word budget is 275,000 per volume — so that’s a ton. Most interesting new find was an 1888 campaign speech FOR Grover Cleveland against Indiana Republican General Ben Harrison (who won). Professional stenogram — about 6,000 words just there. It’s fascinating as Debs biographical material, but is it worthy of inclusion? Those are the kind of questions we’ll be dealing with down the road. Here’s the link if you wanna take a look: https://archive.org/details/881027DebsSpeechonharrison

• One thing a person need to know doing a project like this is copyright law. Here are the rules in the USA… Published material, either text or photos, which was put into print before 1923 is automatically in the public domain and can be used without worries. Unpublished material, print or photos, remains the intellectual property of the producer, who is either the writer or the photographer, for a period of their lifetime plus 70 years after their death. This copyright is automatically passed on to heirs after death (although very few survivors are aware of this right and the threat of a lawsuit over use of such material is generally very small). Gene Debs died in 1926, so anything he ever wrote, published or not, became fair game for the world in 1996. Material published between 1923 and 1963 with no “© copyright 19XX” notice exhibited in the first publication of that material is also in the public domain and free to use (due to “no copyright notice in first publication”). If such notice was properly posted, copyright of these materials was initally for a period of 28 years. During year #28 (and only during year #28), copyright could be formally renewed with the Library of Congress, extending the period of protection to 75 years from date of publication — this being later automatically extended by Congressional idiots to 95 years. Most things, understandably, were not re-registered in Year 28. So anything that was not renewed has similarly gone into the public domain, to be used by anyone (owing to “copyright not renewed”). Stuff gets more complicated for post 1963 publications, and reuse of such material more prickly, but those rules are outside the scope of this project. Any questions?

• Which brings me to the litigious fucks at Getty Images, a really gross photo licensing bureau launched by oil company heir Mark Getty. The public-minded defenders of photographers’ rights at Getty Images implicitly pretend to own this image of young Gene Debs (See: < http://www.gettyimages.com/license/3016392 >). Actually, this drawing is scanned from John Swinton’s 1895 book, A Momentous Question, pg. 328. According to their website, Getty Images will graciously allow saps to license a poorly contrasted, muddy photograph of this image for a mere $575 (!!!). Now if you follow my paragraph on copyright law above you will note: this image was published in the USA before 1923 and is therefore in the public domain for free use by anyone. Three words for Getty Images: Greedy. Deceptive. Disgusting. They are the ASCAP of the graphic arts… They deserve the same treatment meted to the greedballs who meritlessly collected royalties on the “Good Morning to You”/”Happy Birthday to You” song for years and years and years.

Busy, busy, busy…

• The new arrival this week is a bound volume of The Illustrated American magazine from the second half of 1894, with a couple issues touching upon the Debs-led Pullman boycott by the American Railway Union. The drawing above “Leaving the Works at Pullman,” is possibly not quite book-worthy, although a cover painting of Grover Cleveland in the uniform of the Commander-in-Chief is possibly worth using as his representative portrait. (Don’t anybody tell Donald Trump that there is such a thing as a Commander-in-Chief’s uniform — with epaulettes and a sash, no less! — otherwise he’ll be living the dream, strutting around like a South American dictator!) There’s another lurid painting “suggested by the strike” of federal troops with sidearms drawn on top of a train being moved through strikers that’s pretty obviously pure fantasy. The jury is still out on using that one… Bottom line is the bourgeois press absolutely torched Debs and the ARU for impeding commerce with their sympathy strike/boycott of trains pulling Pullman cars. I’ve yet to see a news magazine of the period that didn’t take the most hostile tone imaginable. He was a pariah to the ruling class before he ever was a socialist.

• I found a great portrait of Debs from 1897 via his Wikipedia article. The image traces back to the Library of Congress, which is good news… The resolution of the LOC scan is not terrible, but also not the best (it looks great on screen, but preparing for the press requires much higher resolution). With pre-1900 portraits of Debs at a premium, it is good to find a beauty that is free and clear to use. This image will run in volume 2 since the first volume cuts off in 1896, assuming the resolution is up to snuff. It’s borderline… I tried to con the Library of Congress into a “re-do” of the scan with some heavy-duty resolution. They said, “Sure, just pay us fifty bucks plus expenses and we’ll do it for you”… Costs and benefits…

• Ironically, about an hour after I typed the above I just had an eBay purchase roll in, a reprint news glossy by Culver Pictures, seemingly shot by the same photographer but taken about one pace to the left so that Debs’ left ear isn’t showing and with a completely different treatment given to the background. At first I thought it was from the same photo session since Debs was wearing the same shirt and tie. Once you put them side by side, you can see it was shot several years later, since the forehead wrinkles are more pronounced and the bags under the eyes a little deeper. The Culver glossy is a second generation of the original news photo so there is no date on the back, sadly. I’m not an expert on Debs’ receding hairline at this point, but I’d peg the new image as circa 1904. Resolution is no problem on the later image, but since it’s a worn second generation glossy it has been a bit of a bear to clear up dust and artifacts. Nothing that a couple hours of Photoshop can’t fix…

• Database entry of Debs works has been the main task of the week, with light at the end of the tunnel being seen at last. The total listing of articles, speeches, and editorials blew right through the 3,500 mark, with only the 1884, 1885, and 1886 volumes of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine remaining to be entered into the master list. Then some cleaning and a little restructuring and it will be done — ready for new additions as we find hem. If Debs was active for about 50 years, a total of 3,900 articles, speeches, and editorials (a reasonable estimate) would work out to 1.5 per week for every single week of his adult life. That’s a bunch. Of all these, fewer than 150 have ever been reprinted in book form before (and these by no means having been selected by relative importance) — which is the very definition of the proverbial “tip of the iceberg.”

• I discovered that the National Archives and Records Administration in Chicago is holding a file containing 10 linear inches of material relating to Debs’ 1918 Canton Speech and his conviction under the grossly misnamed “Espionage Act” for speaking out against the imperialist world war. There are at least three associated photos (one appears above), court records, and probably stenographic reports of several of Debs’ speeches (the DoJ was tracking him with stenographers, set on making an example of him). I’ve made initial queries for this material, which fits chronologically into volume 4, to be published several years down the road. I’m sure it’s gonna cost a shit-ton to photocopy all that stuff if it’s not already scanned up — 10 linear inches probably works out to be 1500 or 2000 pages. What do they get, a buck a page? Oh, well, plenty of time between now and then to fundraise!

I’m not exactly sure which day of the week will be most comfortable for weekly updates, but I suspect Saturday evening or Sunday morning will work fairly well. Here is a recap of the Sturm und Drang of the previous week…

• A revised draft of the book contract is in hand. There’s really not much disagreement at all between Haymarket on the one hand and David and me on the other, it is more or less a tidying process at this point, making sure the working titles are precise (even though they may be changed down the road), and taking care of housekeeping matters. About the most important thing remaining from my perspective is that there needs concrete language that there will be a hardcover version produced at a price that doesn’t bankrupt any library wanting to put such a thing on their shelves. I’ve got some proposed language in that regard and we shall see if it flies.

• On a whim I decided to tally up the number of words already in the can for Debs publications from the 1877-1896 period of the first volume. I was shocked to discover that for a volume with a hard cap of 255,000 words, I had already “spent” 157,500 words on 143 articles with another couple hundred pdfs and countless others on the launch pad. Plus an introduction and a scheduled 33,000 word section of testimony to a special committee (now ready to fly) and fully 77.5% of the book was accounted for. Yikes! Fortunately, we discovered this size problem early enough in the process that we could successfully make the case that another 20,000 words needed to be added to the book’s length. Still, even at 650 pages there will be some serious work with a machete needed to get Debs’ 14 years of journalism and two years of speeches and writings as a union leader hacked down to size.

• I’m a big fan of the Marx-Engels Collected Works in 50 volumes. One of the coolest aspects of that are the graphics of rare pamphlets and the like. I’m definitely very serious about gathering such things for the Debs Selected Works project. This involves tracking down and scanning up news magazines and the like, which invariably covered the massive Pullman Strike of 1894, the central focus of Volume 1. This week’s new arrivals include a couple of July 1894 issues of Life magazine, which was sort of a weak sauce bourgeois news weekly during this period. These ended up netting one really nice graphic, a double truck cartoon, lo res version shown above. The caption reads: “THE DOWNTRODDEN WORKING-MAN: While others are losing money in these hard times, he strikes for higher wages — and with tender solicitude for the property and the rights of others.” Of course, this is a flagrant misrepresentation of what the Pullman Strike of 1894 was actually about, but it does give the reader some sense of what the American Railway Union was up against in the court of public opinion. “Dictator Debs” was very unpopular indeed.