When Eugene Debs Began Moving Left

I’ve been reading lots of Debs’s early writings, trying to pinpoint when he started to move left. Part of that is grasping how conservative he really was as a young man.

Here he is in 1879, at age twenty-three:

The industrious man is invariably the successful man. When we take a glance at those of our businessmen and mechanics who have risen to an elevated place of prominence, morally and financially, we see the impress of industry stamped upon their very brows… Did you ever notice that the greater part of those who cry ‘No work’ and 'Hard time’ are lazy in the extreme?

And here he is later that year:

There has been a labored effort on the part of evil persons… to misrepresent the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen by representing it as a conclave of men who encourage the spirit of communism in the companies employing them. We say there has been such an element abroad of such evil thinkers and workers, but … [t]his is not the rule by which we must be judged.

Keep in mind that the Russian Revolution, much less Stalinism, was decades away. The communist menace Debs was so eager to distance himself from was a mere apparition in the fevered minds of the ruling class. And instead of defending the nascent workers’ movement against the calumny of employers and the corporate press, Debs made it very clear that his union wouldn’t give quarter to loafers or radicals.

Six years later, as Debs took office in the Indiana legislature for his first and only term as a Democratic representative, he had inched slightly leftward, now occupying a moderately pro-worker reform position. In his writings for his union’s magazine, which he edited, Debs lamented the power of the “railroad kings” and the maldistribution of wealth (while still declining to offer solutions beyond the standard Democratic fare, like lower tariffs).

So what happened around that time to nudge Debs left? Unfortunately, most of Debs’s letters from the period were destroyed, but we know that Debs was reading reform tracts like Henry George’s Poverty and Progress, a wildly popular book that sold millions of copies. And we know, as Debs biographer Nick Salvatore points out, that the labor leader’s frequent cross-country organizing trips put him in touch with an increasingly discontented working class.

Yet the supreme irony is that as things stood on the brink of 1886, the year of the Haymarket massacre, Debs — no matter how much his views were changing, no matter how personally popular he remained among railroaders — was still more of a brake on worker militancy than a catalyst.

Images of the Week

Debs as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives (1885-1887). I was really excited to find this, as I hadn’t seen a photo of him before as a legislator.

One of Debs’s bills, lol.

Housekeeping

• If you missed last week’s post, where I dug up a quote from Debs excoriating the US government’s genocidal treatment of American Indians, you can read it here.

• In honor of Presidents’ Day last Monday, Jacobin republished a fascinating Debs essay from 1911 entitled “Why We Have Outgrown the United States Constitution.”

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