Prologue Prologue On a foggy September morning in 1877, Eugene Victor Debs adjusted his suit collar and set out for the Indiana State House. Just shy of twenty-two years old, he'd been a member of his labor union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, for barely two and a half years. But today he would deliver the opening address to its national convention. Horse-drawn wagons and carriages rolled through the downtown streets of Indianapolis, clacking on the cobblestones and kicking up gravel as paved stretches came to an end. Lavishly ornamented cast-iron buildings mingled with simple brick structures; steam whistles sounded from the railroad tracks bound for the teeming Union Depot, the first in the country to bring all train traffic to a central hub. City leaders were thinking long-term here. Meatpacking was the city's other big industry, Kingan and Company's mammoth plant one of the largest in the world, its state-of-the-art chilling system allowing year-round production in these days before refrigeration. Indianapolis wasn't Chicago or St. Louis, Midwestern metropolises with populations in the hundreds of thousands, but its 75,000 inhabitants painted a smaller-scale picture of a rapidly industrializing America. With all the corresponding possibilities and cruelties. The boom-and-bust of capitalism had gone bust four years before in the so-called Panic of 1873, an economic disaster nearly as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s--and joblessness persisted in Indianapolis, as elsewhere. Workers terrified of being laid off grudgingly accepted wage cuts. Politicians responded to calls for a public jobs program with creative new punishments instead: fines for begging, a proposed workhouse "where all persons incapable of paying fines" would be forced to smash stones to pave more city streets. Soon, Gene Debs would have seen the Indiana State House come into view. A white wooden fence edged the tree-lined lawn--the trunks like matchsticks, branches draped with green leaves holding on despite the imminent change in seasons. The dome of the state capitol rose above, a grand if crumbling structure of blue limestone and gray stuccoed columns patterned on the Greek Parthenon. Debs--amiable and outgoing, a bit over six feet tall, with a slim but solid build--entered the capitol and mounted the stairs to the House of Representatives' chamber on the upper floor, which the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen was borrowing for the convention. He greeted his fellow delegates, who had exchanged their soot-stained work clothes for suits and ties. Theirs was grimy, dangerous work. Firemen shoveled the coal that powered steam engines into the locomotive's firebox, which was prone to explosion. Every month the firemen's magazine carried grim news of widowed wives, orphaned children, maimed railroaders. Train derailments and collisions were ubiquitous. Railroad workers made up the bulk of workplace injuries in Gilded Age America: by one count 56 percent of the broken ribs, 50 percent of broken arms, 41 percent of broken legs, 71 percent of severed arms, and all of the amputated legs. Nearly one in four trainmen could expect to die on the job if he worked for thirty years; only coal mining was as lethal. The work was well paid by the standards of the day, with veteran engineers often able to own their own home, but shifts were long and irregular, running anywhere from twelve to twenty-four hours, or longer. "It is no uncommon thing," one railroader said, "for an engineer to go for nearly a week without sleep except in snatches on the road or waiting on a branch or engine house." Workers lived close to the railyards, knowing that at a moment's notice they could be gone for days or weeks. The imperatives of their employers, rather than their own individual wants or collective needs, governed workers' lives. Not that Debs begrudged the railroad companies. If the work was too dangerous or too demanding, the hours too long or the bosses too harsh, it was up to railroad workers to prove themselves worthy of more respect. If they could do so--if they could renounce strikes and hard-drinking and rebelliousness, if they could live out the brotherhood's motto of "benevolence, sobriety, industry"--then the companies would treat them with the dignity they deserved and pay them a decent wage. He was sure of it. That summer, as far as Debs was concerned, rail workers had done the opposite. Exhausted by four dragging years of economic depression, railroaders had struck by the tens of thousands, from the East Coast to the Corn Belt, inspiring hundreds of thousands of other workers to join them on strike. It was the first walkout of its size in United States history. The government treated it as an insurrection. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in federal troops and militias, who shot down protesters, which triggered violence and widespread destruction of railroad property--torched locomotives, smoldering roundhouses, train tracks turned into twisted hulks of metal. The question at the heart of the Great Upheaval, as it came to be called, was whether the nation's industrial development would benefit the workers who stoked the engines and ran the cotton looms and mined the coal, or whether it would anoint a new class of economic barons who'd monopolize the country's wealth and power. "It is wrong to call this a strike," one newspaper announced. "It is a labor revolution." And that's exactly what Eugene Debs--a fresh-faced twenty-one years old, idealistic and respectable--did not want. After all, those same railroad companies that workers struck against had granted the brotherhood's delegates free transport to their national convention. What better sign of the rail lines' goodwill? What stronger proof of the benefits of currying favor with employers? And so when Debs rose to address his fellow delegates that September morning--nerves surely buzzing, as he'd only just been asked to fill in--out came the words of a young man playing the part of an elder statesman. "I would impress upon the minds of this assemblage of firemen," he said, "the necessity of reflecting with due consideration upon the duties we are about to fulfill." He turned philosophical. "A railroad," he mused, "is the architect of progress, and by its magic power the uncultivated inhabitant is lifted from the shades of ignorance and idleness." Could protest too be an architect of progress? On this, Debs--future labor agitator, future democratic socialist--was unequivocal: The question has often been asked: Does the Brotherhood encourage strikers? To this question we most emphatically answer: No, Brotherhood. To disregard the laws which govern our land? To destroy the last vestige of order? To stain our hands with the crimson blood of our fellow beings? We again say, No, a thousand times No. The story of Eugene V. Debs's life is the story of one man's radicalization--and of the country he helped radicalize in turn. Thirty-five years after that speech in Indianapolis, the socialist movement Debs led would boast strongholds in states from Wisconsin to Washington and put out newspapers from Kansas to New York City whose readership dwarfed that of many mainstream publications. Always on the road, speaking in packed labor halls and auditoriums crammed with men and women still carrying the scent of a twelve-hour day, Debs had transformed into a labor agitator whom workers regarded as one of their own. Oklahoma tenant farmers would load up their wagons and travel hundreds of miles to see his almost religious orations up close; immigrant garment workers in Chicago thrilled at this native son who brandished the red banner with such zeal. He convinced untold numbers of ordinary Americans that by banding together, they could unseat the corporate tycoons who bought elections to create a freer, more democratic society. At one point, some 1,200 Socialists held elected office across the country, including 80 mayors in 36 states, and led several major unions too. When Debs's agitation landed him behind bars, he received a million votes for president while in prison. But Debs's stature cannot be measured by a simple vote tally. For his great contribution to this nation's history was making it feel that to be an American and a Socialist was the most natural thing in the world: that socialism coursed with the American political tradition's most democratic currents, from the revolutionary struggle against the British monarchy to the abolitionist fight against slavery. Yet Debs's prophetic vision was broader still. He was, as he announced, "for socialism because I am for humanity." His democratic socialism saw all forms of unaccountable power--rich over poor, men over women, white over Black, colonizer over colonized--as poisonous to human freedom. By the end of his life, he was clamoring for a popular struggle against Jim Crow and exhorting young men to resist being carted off to war as "cannon fodder" to pad the wallets of profiteers. Here was a man, even his critics had to admit, who seemed Christlike, whose heart beat with the pulse of humanity. How did a man who'd once urged deference to the powers that be transform into this righteous crusader? The answer lies in Gilded Age America: on the overnight shifts and in overpriced company stores, among laborers in ramshackle logging camps and glad-handing politicians in Washington, DC, in well-appointed corporate boardrooms and rambunctious strike meetings. Which is to say, the answer lies in an America not so very different from our own. Playful yet self-conscious, boundlessly compassionate and overly romantic, more Christian agitator than political tactician, Debs would choose a life of principled action over the perks of polite society. He would press his revolutionary cause with a courage and vigor that fueled workers' struggle for freedom yet split those closest to him. He would disregard his health, strain his marriage, and alienate would-be allies. He was not a perfect man. But that is not why we should look back at Eugene V. Debs's life and legacy today, in our new oligarchic age. It is not why democratic socialism is more popular now than at any other point since his death. It is because Debs was one of America's great critics of plutocracy: a man who clambered into capitalism's boiler room, gazed at its machinery, and announced it was despotic to the core. He called his alternative the cooperative commonwealth. A democratic socialist society free of tyrants big and small, where everyone could "enjoy healthily all the good things of the earth." A society that wouldn't exalt status-seeking and money-making and therefore wouldn't be brought into being by the greatness of one man, but instead the solidarity of ordinary people. But all of that was still years away. Excerpted from American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs by Shawn Gude All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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