The Brother Behind Eugene Debs

As I start writing my book, one of the things I’m trying to keep in mind is the need to humanize Eugene Debs rather than deify him. However extraordinary his courage or inspiring his rhetoric, Debs was a human being, corporeal just like you and me. He turned to others when in need and quite literally couldn’t keep up his harried work schedule without the aid of friends, comrades, and family.

Chief among those was his brother, Theodore. Nine years younger than Eugene, not yet a teenager when his older brother got involved in union politics, Theodore idolized Gene. By the late 1890s, after a stint directing a pickle and mustard processing factory, Theo had decided to devote his life to assisting his increasingly famous brother. He answered Eugene’s mail, scheduled his events, dictated his letters, and sent out booklets and flyers to those who requested them. Eugene believed in responding to every missive he received, and it usually fell to Theo to make good on that credo.

“Debs succeeded as a party leader because he had the rank and file support of the faithful dues-paying ‘Jimmy Higgenses’ in the movement,” Debs biographer Bernard Brommel writes. “Theodore did a great deal to keep those supporters informed and recognized.”

Theo had a hand in many of his brother’s most memorable moments. He planned the enormous gathering in Chicago after Debs’s post-Pullman release from prison, where Eugene delivered his famed “Liberty” speech, reprinted for years in the Socialist press. He managed Debs’s speaking schedule on the 1908 “Red Special,” the train stop tour for Eugene’s third presidential campaign, where, after Debs’s marathon orations of gesticulations and pronouncements, Theo would be waiting with a towel to dry off his brother and give him a clean shirt. From time to time, Theo even filled in for Eugene when his strength faltered. Later, during the socialist leader’s time in prison for speaking against Wilson’s “war for democracy,” Theodore was the one who answered his brother’s correspondence — including on sensitive subjects like the Russian Revolution and the bitter intra-left jousting that ensued. Often, Socialist Party officers would reach out directly to Theodore, knowing he could faithfully articulate his older brother’s views on a given subject.

“Theodore never sought the limelight,” Brommel writes, “but notice the newspaper pictures of Debs and observe how frequently Theodore appeared in the background.”

When they weren’t talking business, Theo and Gene’s letters were by turns playful and resplendent with affection. “My dear old Pal,” Eugene opened a May 1924 message to Theo, ending:

With a tweak,

Of the beak,

And a plug

in the mug

Your old pal

Gene

Love to Gertrude & a biff in the diaphragm to her lank husband.

A letter later that year, dated August 8, was of the impassioned variety.

“My dear beloved,” Theo wrote, “The feelings that well up within me as I hold in my hands your tender and loving letter, fervid with the love of your own great, generous heart, and sweet as the very soul of you, cannot be depicted in words or characters decipherable to another.”

He ended: “Yours, old pard, until the last sunset — the last!”

If you want a sense of how much Theo revered his brother, just look at this photo from Eugene’s funeral. The assorted dignitaries (Debs’s 1920 running mate Seymour Stedman third from left, New York socialist Morris Hillquit and Germany’s Zony Zender in the middle, Victor Berger on the far right) are all putting on a brave face. But Theodore, second from left, arms crossed and head down, isn’t bothering to conceal his despair.

Photo of the Week

Theodore and Eugene Debs after the latter’s release from the Atlanta penitentiary on Christmas Day 1921.

Housekeeping

• If you missed my last post, “Eugene Debs Supported Women's Suffrage Before It Was Cool,” you can read it here.

• Today at Jacobin, we published an excellent essay by Ed Quish, a political philosopher, entitled “The Cold War Is Over. It’s Time to Appreciate That Eugene Debs Was a Marxist.” Check it out here.