Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist

The Working Class in American History

by Nick Salvatore

Indiana born and raised, Eugene Debs (1855-1926) is regarded by many as America's premier labor advocate. He was the leader of the Socialist party, five-time Socialist candidate for president, outspoken on the rights of all workers, and a persistent defender of America's democratic traditions.

Using new manuscript materials, Nick Salvatore offers a major reevaluation of Debs, the movements he launched, and his belief in American Socialism as an extension of the nation's democratic traditions. He also shows the relationship between Debs's public image and his private life as child, sibling, husband, and lover. Salvatore's Debs--weaknesses intact--emerges as a complex man, frustrated and angered by the glaring inequities of a new economic order, and willing to risk his freedom to preserve the essence of democratic society.

Genres: History, Biography, Politics, Nonfiction, Labor, American History, The United States Of America

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Nick Salvatore is Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a long-time member of the Socialist Party. One of the reasons was familial. Father and his father had both belonged. Another was because two of my heroes, Norman M. Thomas and Eugene V. Debs, had belonged. When I was young, Thomas was still around. I recall reading about his death one day while in our high school's in-school suspension lock-up where I had been spending a week's sentence for political crimes. As I got older Debs gradually came to supercede Thomas. I still, even after having read several books about him and the movements he helped lead, esteem Eugene Victor Debs as the greatest personality in the political history of the United States of America.

Salvatore's biography of Debs is scholarly, not as emotional as Ginger's The Bending Cross. It also has a great deal more material about the personal life of its subject: his family, his marriage, his friendships.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the first two decades of the twentieth century the Socialist Party appeared to be a growing force in American politics. As Socialist agitators and newspaper editors denounced the evils of the expanding capitalist system, organizers mobilized laborers into unions and Socialist candidates throughout the country won offices at the city, state, and even federal level. Yet by the early 1920s the Socialist Party was in a decline even swifter than their rise, with its membership riven by infighting and marginalized by the increasingly conservative mood of the nation.

No figure better personified the trajectory of the Socialist Party’s fortunes during this era than Eugene Victor Debs. As the party’s five-time nominee for the presidency of the United States, Debs was buoyed by rapidly increasing voter numbers during his first four campaigns for the office. When he ran for the final time in 1920, however, he did so from a federal penitentiary in Atlanta thanks to a wartime conviction for sedition. It was a testament to Debs’s appeal that even while incarcerated he received over 900,000 votes, though as a percentage of the vote it was little more than half of the total he had received in his prior bid for the office. No subsequent Socialist party candidate was ever able to improve upon that result, however.

In his account of Debs’s life, Nick Salvatore makes it clear that a major reason why none of Debs’s successors could duplicate his achievement was because none brought what he did to the party. As a longtime labor leader, Debs possessed an unmatched credibility with working-class Americans, his sacrifices on behalf of whom was part of his appeal. Yet as Salvatore explains, the basis of Debs’s approach to socialism was far more complex than that. The son of French immigrants, Debs left school at an early age to work for one of the local railroad companies. In 1875 he joined the Brotherhood of Local Firemen, and quickly distinguished himself with his tireless activism on the organization’s behalf. It was as a union leader that Debs became nationally famous, as he worked to establish an industrial union in response to the growing centralization and corporatization of the railroad business in Gilded Age America.

The demise of the American Railway Union (ARU) in the aftermath of the Pullman Strike in 1894 convinced Debs of the inadequacy of unionization as a response to business concentration. While in jail for violating a federal injunction, Debs began reading texts advancing socialist ideas. Upon his release, Debs pushed the remnants of the ARU to join with others to create a new political party advocating for socialist policies. Debs’s prominence as a labor activist made him a natural choice as their presidential candidate in 1900, a task he accepted reluctantly but threw himself into with determination. Salvatore devotes as much attention to history of the Socialist Party during this period as he does to Debs himself, detailing the infighting that shaped its development. As he had as a labor leader Debs stayed clear of factional disputes, preserving his appeal within the fractious party but at the cost of allowing the personal and ideological disagreements to fester.

Though Salvatore describes the issues that divided Socialist Party leaders, he emphasizes that these were of secondary concern to Debs. Unlike the doctrinaire approach of many of its members, Debs grounded his Socialist advocacy in the Protestant theology and republican ideology he had imbibed since his youth. By positing socialism as the path towards realizing the nation’s democratic and egalitarian ideas, he made it far more appealing to American voters than it ever had been as an abstract theory. Coupled with Debs’s bona fides as a labor leader and his earnest and effective style of speechmaking, he became the party’s greatest asset for advancing its vision for a better tomorrow.

Yet Debs was far from the only critic of industrial capitalism in these years. As Salvatore notes, other presidential candidates were also denouncing its excesses and offering political solutions in an effort to win voters. While each election seemed to bring the Socialist Party closer to a breakthrough, the 1912 presidential election proved a high-water mark for their fortunes. As Progressive era reforms and the outbreak of war in Europe shifted the public discourse to other matters. Debs’s criticisms of the Wilson administration eventually resulted in his arrest and conviction, while his subsequent prison term proved detrimental to his frail health. Released after President Warren Harding commuting his sentence, Debs spent his final years as a shadow of his former self, trying to navigate a fractured socialist movement that struggled for relevance in the Roaring Twenties.

By situating Debs’s life within the context of the developing capitalist economy, Salvatore conveys insightfully the factors in his subject’s own transformation from a respected trade unionist and promising Democratic politician into the leading Socialist figure of his age. As a result, Debs goes from being a marginal political figure in the nation’s history to one at the heart of the choices faced by millions of Americans as values and social structures evolved in response to industrialism and the changes it brought. It makes for a book that is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in learning about Debs, and one that is unlikely ever to be bettered as a study of his life and times.

[Cool_guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick Salvatore's biography of Debs does what any good historical biography should: it shatters myth and grounds the subject in reality.

Debs was vacillating, and often more concerned with being loved than leading. His political positions were shaped more by feeling than analysis. He was more a preacher than a politician, touring the nation giving stirring sermons about the gospel of Socialism.

Despite his many flaws, Debs remains for me a hero. With his shaky grasp of socialist theory, again and again he was guided almost purely be intuition, by a genuine love for humanity, to the vanguard of socialist politics in America

[Steve]

After reading of the harsh judicial treatment directed at Eugene Debs in American Midnight, I figured I should learn more of this American Socialist leader. Because this book grew from an academic thesis, it presents Debs through the lens of labor relations, the author’s professional field of study. As a consequence, we experience less of the personal zest than we might from a biographer like Robert Caro or David McCullough. Nevertheless, Professor Salvatore offers a comprehensive, solid review of Debs’s life.

While Eugene Debs came to socialism via organized labor, he shared little with European Socialists. Professor Salvatore focuses on the influence of Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs’s hometown, an environment that instilled a sense of American manliness along with a Protestant ethic. While Debs was not a practicing Christian, religious thought heavily influenced his public delivery. Debs also understood the American individual, the weight of personal obligation and duty. He saw the principal contest being between labor and capital, where voters exercised their civic rights and responsibilities, rather than a class-based revolution. His mind was far from the refined theoretical deliberations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. Debs, therefore, may be of greatest interest to those researching his influence on the early development of American labor unions.

I imagine Eugene Debs was endowed with a conflicted soul. He believed passionately about the confrontation between labor and capital, but he lacked the pragmatic abilities to translate his aspirations into a national embrace beyond a corner of organized labor – he was forever at odds with Samuel Gompers, for one. His political ambitions were dampened because he confined his later efforts to the Socialist party. He ran for president of the United States five times, but his best result, in 1912, was a mere 6% of the vote. In his personal life, he maintained a forty-one-year loveless marriage to his wife, Kate, until his death in 1926. His conduct otherwise could be described as mildly libertine. His national commitments and later incarceration – the first time a federal convict ran as a presidential candidate – took a weighty toll on his health and spirit.

In the end, I’m left to ask if it was all worthwhile. Wouldn’t Eugene Victor Debs have lived a better life without all the self-imposed suffering? Some may see him as a role model; I’m inclined to see a tragic figure, a man who missed the impossibility of his purpose, and who left behind a nation as resistant to confronting the owners of capital as when he began his political trek.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been interested in Debs for a long time, especially since moving to Indiana and learning that he was a native son. Indiana in general would rather claim Hoagy Carmicheal, Michael Jackson, Benjamin Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln than a socialist labor organizer like Debs, but we should be very proud of him. Salvatore writes as a historian, not a partisan, and tries to show Debs in his weak moments as well as his glorious ones, and evaluates his strengths as a leader, organizer, and speaker, but also his inconsistencies, vanities, and flaws. Occasionally the details become a bit mind-numbing, especially in the earlier chapters--the ins and outs of union organizing and in-fighting are not that fascinating to a non-specialist. (And I am very interested in labor history, but anything can become tedious.) The narrative pace picks up, however, in key moments, and especially as Debs becomes a presidential candidate and peacefully resists the US government during World War I. For whatever reasons, US voters will not turn to a third-party candidate or a socialist, even in the worst economic times and when the major parties screw them again and again. But Debs was more successful as a candidate than almost any other third-party representative, and his speeches are stirring and relevant even today. You won't learn as much about the presidential election campaigns here as in other books. The focus is on Debs and the Socialist Party.

[Sheila · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most detailed and contextualized biography you'll probably ever read. A heroic feat by the author, about a heroic figure of the Socialist movement in America.

[Jennifer Abdo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gave me a new appreciation for both Debs and the American socialist movement. I did get a little bogged down with labor history because I've read so much less about that. This volume covers a lot of gound - from Debs before he was the icon to his death, flaws and triumphs all.

There have been great politicians and great speakers, but people like Debs (or Bernie Sanders)who live their beliefs and politics so earnestly are a marvel, an inspiration. They don't just tell people to vote or do the work, they are in the trenches and sent to jail, along with their fellow workers.

People from Wilson and Roosevelt to today have called socialism un-American, but Debsian socialism fit as well or better than anything else with American religion and patriotism on the political scene. One funny or disheartening thing is that they in 1920 seemed to have as hard a time as we do now advocating for the rights of workers in a conservative society. We haven't learned too much, sadly. The same divisions between radical and political factions then as now persist.

A quote during one of Debs' more frustrated moment also is fitting today (trump, biden, etc):

"The people can have anything they want. The trouble is they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on election day."

[David Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first came across the name Eugene Debs when reading Kurt Vonnegut. I kept finding Debs referenced in my reading of presidential biographies, as he ran for the office five times (including once when he was in prison). And, again, Debs kept coming up in my reading of the early labor movements.

He was an important figure, and I was curious to learn more about him.

This book fit the bill, but I'll confess that I struggled to work my way through it. Debs was surrounded by a large cast of supporting characters. When reading Russian literature, I often felt that the supporting characters were a bit of an undifferentiated mass - just a list of complicated names. I felt much the same here (although the names aren't so complicated). Many of these people had impacts on Debs' views, but in the end, I couldn't tell you who made large impacts and who had little.

I found this book not completely satisfying, but I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the development of trade unionism, Socialism, and early American Communism.

[Andy Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Debs is an interesting and important American figure about whom I was completely ignorant. The book itself is very honest about the faults in leadership and personality that Debs reflected, while also his great strengths in uniting and promoting the working class. The comparison between Deb's ideology to Terre Haute's development is a interesting academic point, but is given too much time and organization power in the narrative, in my opinion. The time jumps are a little all over the place and confusing, but as a whole a passable introduction to the man.

[Brannon O'Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

At last I have finished this hunk of book. Eugene V. Debs had such a heart for those workers struggling under the brutality of a system designed to profit off them. His impact as a Socialist was legendary. I'm glad to have finally learned more about this person. I learned of him much too late, if you ask me. Odd (but also not surprising, I suppose) that he isn't a more prominent figure in history books. I have no recollection of ever hearing about him when I was in school. I hope to see his movement born anew, until there is not a soul left in prison.

[Jeremy Brind · Rating 3 out of 5]

good history, pretty bad analysis. its hard not to read debs as attempting to redefine the content of an americanism that has that reactionary content for grounded, material reasons; in that sense debs is quixotic. at times pretty shocking to read a history of this period of the american socialist movement or debs’ relationship to someone like Berger without much acknowledgement of the outwardly racialist character of his politics and the implications that might have as regards the supposedly hidden secret progressive content of americanism

[Cooper Archer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect example of what a biography should be and the best to date on Eugene Debs. Salvatore makes great use of all the sources available and contextualizes Debs' life in a way that not only provides a history of the man but also the gilded age, labor movements, and progressive era.

[Drew Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Debs was an interesting man, full of potential and strong convictions. Salvatore does a great job giving real credit to the man's complexities.

[Noah LeFevre · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it has very interesting content, it is very academic and dry

[Libby Morse · Rating 2 out of 5]

BORING !!!! and thorough

[David Bates · Rating 3 out of 5]

Labor historians sometimes go to great lengths to ground their protagonists in American thought and conditions rather than European socialist ideology. This arises both from a desire to dispel the smear that their subjects were ideologically foreign agitators and from the conviction that social thought and actions are the product of economic structure. Grounding perennial Socialist candidate Eugene Debs in American life is the central focus of Nick Salvatore’s 1982 biography Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist. By appropriating the republicanism concept flourishing at the time in the historiography of the American Revolution and early republic, and writing a “social biography” of both Debs and his home town of Terre Haute Indiana, Salvatore weaves his man tightly into the fabric of turn of the century America. The dual track of man and place traces Debs’ career from his beginning as an ambitious young member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen attending business school at night. Yet the small scale enterprises and close community ties of the Terre Haute of Debs’ youth were vanishing. “By the 1870s,” Salvatore writes “an important new emphasis permeated Terre Haute’s business community . . . the convergence of personal success with community-wide progress proved suspect, as the ‘best people’ now presented themselves as a separate group of singular importance.” By the 1885 Debs had risen to prominence within the Firemen and gained a seat in the state legislature, but as “industrial strife increased . . . the lodge meeting assumed a more aggressive stance toward employers” as imported immigrant labor, recession, slashed wages, unemployment, and falling status of skilled labor challenged fundamental assumptions about opportunity and social harmony.

Over the next decade Debs moved away from craft unionism in response to the changing environment around him, and toward an industrial unionism that sought a cooperative arrangement for labor that matched the amalgamation of railroads into integrated enterprises. Founding the American Railway Union in 1893 set Debs on a collision course with the United States government the following year as the Pullman Strike drew federal involvement on the pretext that the strike held up the mail. During a federal prison sentence for contempt of court which followed, with the memory of the shattered American Railway Union tucked deep in his pockets, Debs’ thought struck out in more radical directions. Salvatore carefully qualifies this transformation as an ill-defined, halfway affair that married the values of the citizen producer with socialist observations and rhetoric, writing that quote as Debs “might Marx, Engles, Lassalle, or Kautsky (with little acknowledgment of the differences among them), the roots of his own social thought remained deeply enmeshed in a different tradition.” Indeed, Salvatore marks Debs is more speaker than thinker or politician, observing that a hesitancy to plunge into detail marked both his intellectual life and his ineffectual management of strife within the IWW and Socialist Party. More at home organizing and campaigning, Salvatore evokes associations with an evangelical ministry that struggled with “the meaning of such traditional values as manhood, duty, citizenship, and work,” and mirrored by developments in Terre Haute where by the turn of the century “the city’s workingmen and women found their longtime business and civic leaders pitted against them in an open conflict that transcended the immediate dispute at stake.”

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

As biographies go, Nick Salvatore’s ‘Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist’ is probably one of the most well balanced and in depth books for its length. All aspects of the social and economic environment are addressed just enough to understand the evolution from fraternal benefit and trade union organizer to Socialist leader and Presidential candidate. The book begins with a synopsis of his hometown of Terre Haute, so detailed that I was initially concerned that this writing would be about everything around Debs, and little about the man himself. That concern was addressed soon, and Salvatore, addressed almost every part of Debs life in order, only occasionally trailing back to explain how he had developed to get to that point. Debs is neither painted as a sinner or a saint, but a man in constantly transforming and growing. Overall an informative read.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched, very detailed -- but also presumes a strong knowledge of the time and the people involved. I would have enjoyed more background on some of the supporting characters (Berger, Hilquist, Haywood, McKeen etc.) and some reference help such as charts of the hierarchy in various unions and the Socialist party of the time. Also a bit dry at times. This is not a narrative history and Salvatore sometimes skips around a bit chronologically which for me caused a bit of confusion. Still, I feel quite familiar with both Debs the man and Debs the historical figure after reading this book. Time for something lighter now. : )

[Aino Offhaus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very solid book that really goes into Eugene Debs' personal life and ideological development. Salvatore mentions the various ideological battles that Debs got caught up in between Berger, Hillquit, and de Leon, but doesn't go into them at all. He just mentions they happened and leaves them at that. In my opinion, this is the only flaw with the book.

[Donna Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Debs is one of my favorite historical figures. The fifth star is withheld because the only thing better than reading ABOUT Debs, is reading his actual speeches, which are also available. But hey...owning both (and one more biography, too) can't hurt.

[Mark Bowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs; Citizen and Socialist (1982)
1. Discusses the triumph and tragedy of the socialist leaders personal and public life
2. Explores the first generation of American radicals who had to grapple with the emergence of modern corporate capitalism

[Bap · Rating 3 out of 5]

The man from Terre Haute who was a succesful lawyer drawn into the trade union movement and socialism. Resolute, uncomprimising, stern amn of principle.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent biography of Debs

[Danielle Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

his progression from passionate to reformer was amazing. i hope to be that person one day.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A life-changing read for me.

[Thomas Baughman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best historical biograpies written in the last 30 years.

[Joshua Lawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written biography that gives unique insight into the person and work of Eugene Debs, one of the most influential leaders in the early American Socialist movement.

[John Hively · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a brilliant book. Salvatore paints a wonderful, detailed picture of Debs and his times.