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Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
To set the stage for her protagonist, in whose struggles she saw acted out all of the conflicted forces that shaped industrial America, to trace the roots of the American labor & socialist movements, the author opens up a sweep of history & presents an epic cast of characters.. "All these threads come together in the life & personality of Eugene Debs. His childhood was spent in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the pastoral America that faded into a distant golden memory after the Civil War, when the town became a center of transportation for industrial expansion. We see Debs finding employment in the railroad yards, becoming caught up in the plight of his fellow workers, editing the union paper, traveling across the country, gathering the knowledge & acquiring the consciousness that inspired him to espouse collective action on behalf of labor, to found the Industrial Workers of the World, & to run as the Socialist candidate for president of the United States five times--three times from prison.
624 pages, Hardcover
First published September 14, 1999
7 people are currently reading
227 people want to read
About the author
Marguerite Young
16 books77 followersMarguerite Vivian Young was an American author of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Her work evinced an interest in the American identity, social issues, and environmentalism.
Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two former utopian communities, where her mother and stepfather resided. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities.
Angel in the Forest was published in 1945 to universal acclaim, winning the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York's Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and wrote articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She was also renowned as a teacher of writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.
Marguerite Young's epic novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, was informed by her concept of history and pluralistic psychology, as well as her poetic prose style with its many layers of images and languages.
Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two former utopian communities, where her mother and stepfather resided. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities.
Angel in the Forest was published in 1945 to universal acclaim, winning the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York's Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and wrote articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She was also renowned as a teacher of writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.
Marguerite Young's epic novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, was informed by her concept of history and pluralistic psychology, as well as her poetic prose style with its many layers of images and languages.
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May 20, 2017Marguerite Young wrote a massive, unread novel published in 1965, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. She spent seventeen years in its writing. Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, published in 1999, is her final work, twenty-five years in the writing. Her work also includes a study in american utopia, Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias; a collection of poetry, The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young; and a collection of miscellany, Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews. She is, in our parlance, a BURIED author.
“Sing, sweet muse, of the unsung, the BURIED, the jailed; sing of habitual war called ‘civil’ and its profits, its profiteers and the american tradition of wage-slavery; sing of the gatling’d workers and their champion. Sing Dear Marguerite of Eugene Victor Debs.”
There is no deception, this book is a harp song. It would fit snuggly next to Vollmann’s Seven Dreams project, clocking in at number Eight because after the Red Man was exterminated our great forebears turned their weapons upon the wage-slave, the cog in the great capitalist locomotive who had no crust of bread for the mouths of his wife and his children if he was lucky enough to have survived long enough to have either. Once the profits of the american civil war had been made war had to be made upon the working class. There is no deception, this is a BIASED book, cut along the bias like cloth, following the narrative threads of history and taking sides as only a person of conscience can do. It is wrong to take profits off the backs and labors of the sweating wheel-wiper, fireman, engineer, conductor and not provide but a penny for his grave when the wheels of history slice him in twain. Biased because she has chosen the side of the righteous, the down-trodden, in the greatest of biblical traditions. The accumulation of profits at the cost of untold human life is evil. This tradition of justice is lost in our world of realpolitik=war.
Harp Song is not a biography of Eugene Victor Debs, may his name forever resound in the ear of the worker. This is not a novel about Eugene Victor Debs although it may be read as a novel for those of us who read novels. This is not a cultural history of the nineteenth century and its utopian and millennial hopes, even though it is that and a history of the function of war, its role in providing profits for those who need them most, the wealthy, the class who has more and to whom more will be given as it is taken from those who have less and who have nothing. This is a harp song. It is written for us who have been taught by war to again and again forget that we have not realized any kind of american dream but only an american nightmare, even if we ship most of our miserable wage-slavery off-shore and even if we make war at the doorsteps of homes in other countries from behind a video screen and even if citizens make the sound ‘freedom’ frequently. This harp song is that part of history-telling which the victors do not tell because the cause of Eugene Victor Debs has been defeated, the working class of the american continent has been duly constrained, spied upon under the rubric of ‘security’ in the parking lots of Target stores less the workers there might organize to further the cause of democracy in our great but failed american experiment. But the experiment is over and we have been convinced that our masters, our owners, our one percent, the capitalists are the virtuous. Some of us don’t believe that and will tell the story of our presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, who ran for the presidency in the name of the workers of america (the only one, nearly, to have ever done so) and for that was jailed, his cell being his campaign headquarters. MLK gets a national holiday, but not Eugene Victor Debs, which means that much which MLK has done and said is by necessity forgotten. Our history writing overlords have not assimilated Eugene Victor Debs to their story because in his ancient american history still resides a possibility for our future.
“Sing, sweet muse, of the unsung, the BURIED, the jailed; sing of habitual war called ‘civil’ and its profits, its profiteers and the american tradition of wage-slavery; sing of the gatling’d workers and their champion. Sing Dear Marguerite of Eugene Victor Debs.”
There is no deception, this book is a harp song. It would fit snuggly next to Vollmann’s Seven Dreams project, clocking in at number Eight because after the Red Man was exterminated our great forebears turned their weapons upon the wage-slave, the cog in the great capitalist locomotive who had no crust of bread for the mouths of his wife and his children if he was lucky enough to have survived long enough to have either. Once the profits of the american civil war had been made war had to be made upon the working class. There is no deception, this is a BIASED book, cut along the bias like cloth, following the narrative threads of history and taking sides as only a person of conscience can do. It is wrong to take profits off the backs and labors of the sweating wheel-wiper, fireman, engineer, conductor and not provide but a penny for his grave when the wheels of history slice him in twain. Biased because she has chosen the side of the righteous, the down-trodden, in the greatest of biblical traditions. The accumulation of profits at the cost of untold human life is evil. This tradition of justice is lost in our world of realpolitik=war.
Harp Song is not a biography of Eugene Victor Debs, may his name forever resound in the ear of the worker. This is not a novel about Eugene Victor Debs although it may be read as a novel for those of us who read novels. This is not a cultural history of the nineteenth century and its utopian and millennial hopes, even though it is that and a history of the function of war, its role in providing profits for those who need them most, the wealthy, the class who has more and to whom more will be given as it is taken from those who have less and who have nothing. This is a harp song. It is written for us who have been taught by war to again and again forget that we have not realized any kind of american dream but only an american nightmare, even if we ship most of our miserable wage-slavery off-shore and even if we make war at the doorsteps of homes in other countries from behind a video screen and even if citizens make the sound ‘freedom’ frequently. This harp song is that part of history-telling which the victors do not tell because the cause of Eugene Victor Debs has been defeated, the working class of the american continent has been duly constrained, spied upon under the rubric of ‘security’ in the parking lots of Target stores less the workers there might organize to further the cause of democracy in our great but failed american experiment. But the experiment is over and we have been convinced that our masters, our owners, our one percent, the capitalists are the virtuous. Some of us don’t believe that and will tell the story of our presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, who ran for the presidency in the name of the workers of america (the only one, nearly, to have ever done so) and for that was jailed, his cell being his campaign headquarters. MLK gets a national holiday, but not Eugene Victor Debs, which means that much which MLK has done and said is by necessity forgotten. Our history writing overlords have not assimilated Eugene Victor Debs to their story because in his ancient american history still resides a possibility for our future.
October 31, 2023
So, this month has been a very difficult month for my family, our friends, and the world at large, what with Israel continuing to bomb the hell out of Gaza, and the news has been nothing but disturbing and horrific. I didn't think that I would be able to read Marguerite Young's Harp Song For A Radical while keeping up with the images of the genocide taking place in Palestine. I was wrong. Injustice is injustice anywhere, and I was strangely comforted by the sentences I was reading. Also, if I'm to read history, Marguerite Young is a very entertaining historian.
I leave you with a few of her sentences:
Those days that drivers of a generally Democratic hue would cry out to their horses not 'Whoa, whoa, whoa' but 'Woe, woe, woe.'
'Woe unto the man by whom the offense cometh! '
There will be a meeting held in the State House Yard on Monday evening
for the purpose of sympathizing and taking action with our starving brothers in the East who are now being trampled under feet of railroad bond holders.
Everybody united that believed in equality and justice to all mankind. Let us have a hand in the breaking of the railroad monopoly.
anti-train Riley used to say to the pro-train Debs, if God had intended for them to have enjoyed such proximity with each other, He would have drawn the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean together and left but a thin strand, probably just enough for a long- limbed bird to stand on
Harrison had given his praise to all nationalities except for the Irish of whom he had said that if it were not for them we would not need half our penitentiaries, for the jails were as almost full of them and they had no intelligence and they were only good to shovel dirt
Undoubtedly, he would rather have gone duck- shooting for a string of wild ducks than have sent an army out for the killing of labor strikers, but the voice of duty was sterner than the voice of conscience or even of consciousness.
Debs and every lover of poor men in Ameica who understood anew now or had always understood that the law which was king was that representing the corporation kings, their power steadily increasing-representing as rational but no more rational- than the law of the talon.
Some were so afraid to spend money that they slept on railroad benches and would eat almost nothing in order that their wives and children would not starve. And that was why there were living skeletons manning the trains and rails owned by the major capitalists.
Although the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen was for the protection of the Protestant, the Catholic,the Greek,the Mohammed and thus had believed itself in perfect accord with American institutions as well as an observer of the Golden Rule-
Starving workers on a canvas in his Nocturne had not been starving workers to him but only arrangements in blobs of dark blue and gold.
It would be said of Whistler that when he had attained fame as a portrait painter he had sacrificed the floating gold of his canvases to gold in metallic form by painting Vanderbilts and other tycoons of railroads
The song was one which Debs knew and heard sung by the white minstrels painted black before coming to the understanding of this injustice.
The government should not permit the concentration of homeless and immoral people, easily attracted to any movement aiming at the destruction of the public and private tranquility- the governor of Moscow had advised from the city of golden onion domes.
And all that Belinsky had proposed to take the place of the suffering Christ weeping tears of pearls had been an upright man in a rational state guided only by reason and the power of the idea of man's essential good.
Some worthy fools believe that love of mankind is the pleasure and duty of every man.They do not understand what has happened when the wheel of existence with all the well-established privileges crushed & pulverized their flesh and bones.That is the tragedy! What characters!
What a wealth of young manhood lies here buried to no purpose! What a wealth of vigor lies annulled within these walls. Yet truly it may be said that these same convicts were splendid men- perhaps the best, the most virile, the most gifted of all we possess.Whereas their powers and faculties lie ruined abnormally, irrevocably, and illegally.
"From the very first tyranny has flourished, freedom has failed, the few have ruled, the many have served, the parasite has worn the purple of power."
Eugene Victor Debs
For more #Myoung23 #HarpSongForARadical 📚🐦
This has been my third Marguerite Young read.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King, Jr
I leave you with a few of her sentences:
Those days that drivers of a generally Democratic hue would cry out to their horses not 'Whoa, whoa, whoa' but 'Woe, woe, woe.'
'Woe unto the man by whom the offense cometh! '
There will be a meeting held in the State House Yard on Monday evening
for the purpose of sympathizing and taking action with our starving brothers in the East who are now being trampled under feet of railroad bond holders.
Everybody united that believed in equality and justice to all mankind. Let us have a hand in the breaking of the railroad monopoly.
anti-train Riley used to say to the pro-train Debs, if God had intended for them to have enjoyed such proximity with each other, He would have drawn the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean together and left but a thin strand, probably just enough for a long- limbed bird to stand on
Harrison had given his praise to all nationalities except for the Irish of whom he had said that if it were not for them we would not need half our penitentiaries, for the jails were as almost full of them and they had no intelligence and they were only good to shovel dirt
Undoubtedly, he would rather have gone duck- shooting for a string of wild ducks than have sent an army out for the killing of labor strikers, but the voice of duty was sterner than the voice of conscience or even of consciousness.
Debs and every lover of poor men in Ameica who understood anew now or had always understood that the law which was king was that representing the corporation kings, their power steadily increasing-representing as rational but no more rational- than the law of the talon.
Some were so afraid to spend money that they slept on railroad benches and would eat almost nothing in order that their wives and children would not starve. And that was why there were living skeletons manning the trains and rails owned by the major capitalists.
Although the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen was for the protection of the Protestant, the Catholic,the Greek,the Mohammed and thus had believed itself in perfect accord with American institutions as well as an observer of the Golden Rule-
Starving workers on a canvas in his Nocturne had not been starving workers to him but only arrangements in blobs of dark blue and gold.
It would be said of Whistler that when he had attained fame as a portrait painter he had sacrificed the floating gold of his canvases to gold in metallic form by painting Vanderbilts and other tycoons of railroads
The song was one which Debs knew and heard sung by the white minstrels painted black before coming to the understanding of this injustice.
The government should not permit the concentration of homeless and immoral people, easily attracted to any movement aiming at the destruction of the public and private tranquility- the governor of Moscow had advised from the city of golden onion domes.
And all that Belinsky had proposed to take the place of the suffering Christ weeping tears of pearls had been an upright man in a rational state guided only by reason and the power of the idea of man's essential good.
Some worthy fools believe that love of mankind is the pleasure and duty of every man.They do not understand what has happened when the wheel of existence with all the well-established privileges crushed & pulverized their flesh and bones.That is the tragedy! What characters!
What a wealth of young manhood lies here buried to no purpose! What a wealth of vigor lies annulled within these walls. Yet truly it may be said that these same convicts were splendid men- perhaps the best, the most virile, the most gifted of all we possess.Whereas their powers and faculties lie ruined abnormally, irrevocably, and illegally.
"From the very first tyranny has flourished, freedom has failed, the few have ruled, the many have served, the parasite has worn the purple of power."
Eugene Victor Debs
For more #Myoung23 #HarpSongForARadical 📚🐦
This has been my third Marguerite Young read.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King, Jr
February 1, 2017
Wonderful stuff, of course, but kind of made me wish I had read a biography of Debs before reading this "biography" of Debs.
January 22, 2013
This is a passionate, impressionistic overview of political protest and idealism in the nineteenth century focused on the person of the man who embodied native American radicalism at the beginning of the twentieth, the very soul of the American dream, the secular saint: Eugene Victor Debs.
March 24, 2016
I've been reading this book for about 6 months now, and I never want it to end. THIS IS THE BOOK for the 2008 election, if you really want to get serious about America, and what America means (or used to mean, or can mean once again,) to the world.
Eight Years Later...it's 2016, another election year. Everybody's talking about "making America Great Again" but nobody I know has heard of this book or Eugene V. Debs. Bernie Sanders--an avowed Socialist--just won 79.3% of Utah Democrats. Maybe now Americans are ready to acknowledge their own history? As Abraham Lincoln said in 1862: "We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”
Eight Years Later...it's 2016, another election year. Everybody's talking about "making America Great Again" but nobody I know has heard of this book or Eugene V. Debs. Bernie Sanders--an avowed Socialist--just won 79.3% of Utah Democrats. Maybe now Americans are ready to acknowledge their own history? As Abraham Lincoln said in 1862: "We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”
December 3, 2016
Young supposedly spent 35 yeas writing this impressionistic biography of Eugene Debs, the Socialist who ran for the United States presidency five times, the last from prison where he had been incarcerated for opposition to American involvement in World War I. But if a reader wants a chronological approach to Debs' life, this book is not the place to find it.
The emphasis in this book is on the "times" of Debs, not factual details of his life. He floats like a ghostly presence through the book which is full of people and events that influenced Debs, although it's often not clear just how those influences worked on him. Debs was born in l855 and had only a childhood memories of the Civil War. But as he matured he became acutely aware of its aftermath, the westward expansion of America, and the booming speculation and corruption that came both with, and after the war.
Immense wealth was created during the half century that followed the war, most of it ending up in the pockets of a relatively few men. It was a period that Mark Twain satirically savaged in his THE GILDED AGE. Along with that wealth came immense poverty, and the exploitation of unorganized workers. Debs was always on the side of these workers, especially in the mines and in the fledgling railroad industry with its shoddy safety standards which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of individuals. He organized unions and urged their only method of fighting employers, the strike, of which there were many, usually violent. Two of the most memorable were the railroad strikes of l877 and the Pullman strike of 1894. He was the voice of the working man and the founder of American socialism.
Debs was named after Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo, two European champions of the underclasses that his father, an French immigrant, admired. Along with them are mentioned various European utopians of the time, Fourier, Owens, Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Wilhelm Weibling, Dostoevsky, whose ideas were in the air and effected Debs who read extensively. Still alive when he was a young man were Wendell Phillips George Beecher, and other abolitionists, all of whom were radically opposed to slavery, and had deep reservations about reconstruction in the south. Another victimized group is stressed - American Indians who had few supporters in the American government.
The book is full of names and places, , most of which are now forgotten, or at best dim recollections, but in Debs' times were larger-than-life figures. George Parry, Jay Gould, Susan Anthony, the Molly McGuires, the Pinkerton men, the Reno and James gangs, Sam Gompers, John Hay, Robert Todd Lincoln and Fred Grant (sons of the presidents and opposed to Debs' efforts), and of course the reactionary presidents that were in office during the waning years of the 19th century - Grant, Hays, Garfield, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley.
It's an overwhelming book, and unless you're already fairly familiar with this period, all of these names and places and ideas tend to blur. "Song" is a good word to include in the title as the book has a musical quality about it, full of almost-random moods and allusions, and the impact is emotional (Young never hesitates to express her pro-Debs opinion) rather than being logically organized. I suspect this is what Young intended, though - history as it felt at the time, not sorted out and cleaned up in retrospect. It would be a good book to have on hand and refer to if a reader were looking at more conventional biographies and histories of the period.
The emphasis in this book is on the "times" of Debs, not factual details of his life. He floats like a ghostly presence through the book which is full of people and events that influenced Debs, although it's often not clear just how those influences worked on him. Debs was born in l855 and had only a childhood memories of the Civil War. But as he matured he became acutely aware of its aftermath, the westward expansion of America, and the booming speculation and corruption that came both with, and after the war.
Immense wealth was created during the half century that followed the war, most of it ending up in the pockets of a relatively few men. It was a period that Mark Twain satirically savaged in his THE GILDED AGE. Along with that wealth came immense poverty, and the exploitation of unorganized workers. Debs was always on the side of these workers, especially in the mines and in the fledgling railroad industry with its shoddy safety standards which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of individuals. He organized unions and urged their only method of fighting employers, the strike, of which there were many, usually violent. Two of the most memorable were the railroad strikes of l877 and the Pullman strike of 1894. He was the voice of the working man and the founder of American socialism.
Debs was named after Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo, two European champions of the underclasses that his father, an French immigrant, admired. Along with them are mentioned various European utopians of the time, Fourier, Owens, Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Wilhelm Weibling, Dostoevsky, whose ideas were in the air and effected Debs who read extensively. Still alive when he was a young man were Wendell Phillips George Beecher, and other abolitionists, all of whom were radically opposed to slavery, and had deep reservations about reconstruction in the south. Another victimized group is stressed - American Indians who had few supporters in the American government.
The book is full of names and places, , most of which are now forgotten, or at best dim recollections, but in Debs' times were larger-than-life figures. George Parry, Jay Gould, Susan Anthony, the Molly McGuires, the Pinkerton men, the Reno and James gangs, Sam Gompers, John Hay, Robert Todd Lincoln and Fred Grant (sons of the presidents and opposed to Debs' efforts), and of course the reactionary presidents that were in office during the waning years of the 19th century - Grant, Hays, Garfield, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley.
It's an overwhelming book, and unless you're already fairly familiar with this period, all of these names and places and ideas tend to blur. "Song" is a good word to include in the title as the book has a musical quality about it, full of almost-random moods and allusions, and the impact is emotional (Young never hesitates to express her pro-Debs opinion) rather than being logically organized. I suspect this is what Young intended, though - history as it felt at the time, not sorted out and cleaned up in retrospect. It would be a good book to have on hand and refer to if a reader were looking at more conventional biographies and histories of the period.
August 29, 2025
3+
Read while traveling and on loan from a friend, so my main thoughts are with that and them.
I think this is closest described as a manifesto, and it's Young's, not Debs'. That's fine -- but this certainly isn't really a biography nor history, while also being a bit of those.
The prose is thick and relentless and Young is a true believer in who Debs was, in her mind. Young intrigues me as well, and there's a lot of her in this book, vivid between the lines. She'd have made a superb Salon Guest. I make note she's someone else I'd like to know more about in a more concrete fashion.
Debs himself is a heroic figure, and I'm a staunch supporter of workers' rights; we wouldn't be where we are today (even with the continuing attacks and erosion) without him. I looked forward to reading this to learn about him, and I didn't really, although there's plenty "about him" in it.
Not what I'd read if you wanted a biography of the man and a historical survey of his activism. But it made for a good last-minute trip takealong read, in part because it was easy to put down and not worry about for awhile, and then dive back in hours or a day later.
Read while traveling and on loan from a friend, so my main thoughts are with that and them.
I think this is closest described as a manifesto, and it's Young's, not Debs'. That's fine -- but this certainly isn't really a biography nor history, while also being a bit of those.
The prose is thick and relentless and Young is a true believer in who Debs was, in her mind. Young intrigues me as well, and there's a lot of her in this book, vivid between the lines. She'd have made a superb Salon Guest. I make note she's someone else I'd like to know more about in a more concrete fashion.
Debs himself is a heroic figure, and I'm a staunch supporter of workers' rights; we wouldn't be where we are today (even with the continuing attacks and erosion) without him. I looked forward to reading this to learn about him, and I didn't really, although there's plenty "about him" in it.
Not what I'd read if you wanted a biography of the man and a historical survey of his activism. But it made for a good last-minute trip takealong read, in part because it was easy to put down and not worry about for awhile, and then dive back in hours or a day later.
July 21, 2018
This had very little in it actually about Eugene Debs. I was very disappointed.
March 15, 2023
This wonderful book covers the life and times of Eugene Debs with rigor and vigor! It reads like poetry, and explores many interesting nooks and crannies of utopian thought.
I love Marguerite Young.
I love Marguerite Young.
June 6, 2014
A surreal, artistic, impressionistic view of the of the growth of the US social consciousness in the context of raw capitalism as we entered the last century. If you know the story, this is a nice piece of art; if you don't, this provokes you to learn. Try wikipedia. Debs appears as a uniformly kind man drawn into a great battle. "His sympathies would always lie with the pursued, not with the pursuer."
December 16, 2010
Very creative weaving of historical subject matter into a lyrical prose tribute to labor and social action.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews