Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs - Hardcover

Young, Marguerite

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679427570 ISBN 13: 9780679427575

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

An extraordinary literary accomplishment, thirty-five years in the making, from the greatly admired author of Miss Macintosh, My Darling ("A work of stunning magnitude and beauty" --New York Times Book Review): a  biography of Eugene Victor Debs, the country's first great labor leader.
        
To set the stage for her protagonist, in whose struggles she saw acted out all of the conflicted forces that shaped industrial America, and to trace the roots of the American labor and socialist movements, the author opens up a sweep of history and an epic cast of characters. Here are Generals Sheridan and Custer, heroes of the Civil War, fighting the Indians in the West and the workers in the mines, the factories, and on the railroads . . . Alan Pinkerton, the radical weaver from Scotland who came to the New World and created an agency dedicated to destroying labor organizations. Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, and Wilson appear. We see the dreamers, the reformers, the crusaders, among them Susan B. Anthony and  Sojourner Truth. Here are Henry James Sr., who educated his children according to the tenets of Fourier;  James Whitcomb Riley, author of "Little Orphan Annie"; James McNeill Whistler, whose father built a railroad for the czar of Russia; Samuel Gompers, head of the Federation of Labor; the governor of Illinois . . . who refused to call in the army to break the Pullman Strike, or the "Debs Strike" as it came to be called. Men and women, high and low, are caught by the author in the struggle to maintain ideals, in the fight for the rights and dignity of the individual that forged the American identity and ever afterward characterized the American culture.
        
Marguerite Young takes us into the world of the men who led the American multitudes west before the Civil War--and shows how these pioneers were influenced by the French Revolution's Saint-Simon and Fourier, and then by the German idealists Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and Wilhelm Weitling who visited secular and religious settlements across the United States.
        
All these threads come together in the life and personality of Eugene Debs: his childhood 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 and acquiring the consciousness that inspired him to espouse collective action on behalf of labor, to found the Industrial Workers of the World, and to run as the Socialist candidate for president of the United States five times--three times from prison.

We see the fierce struggle between the classes--and Debs in the thick of the fight--as the American promise opens up for the men and women in the factories, in the mills, in the stockyards. We see Debs the worker becoming a political leader, becoming a reformer, becoming the voice of the workingman, becoming the founder of American Socialism. Debs, reviled and loved, Debs with the look of a plain man, an austere country doctor, becoming a mythic hero of the age.

A mesmerizing dual portrait of a man and a century.

About this title

Review:

Don't pick up this fascinating, deeply eccentric book expecting to find a conventional biography of Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926). The fiery American labor leader who founded the Socialist Party of America is not so much the subject as the central figure in a group portrait of utopian dreamers--including Karl Marx, Brigham Young, abolitionist Wendell Phillips, poet James Whitcomb Riley, and detective-agency founder Allan Pinkerton--from the time of the French Revolution through the dawn of the 20th century. Author Marguerite Young is a legendary Greenwich Village bohemian who died in 1995. She devoted the last 25 years of her life to this volume, which was intended as a recapitulation of the issues that had engaged Debs--justice for workers, peace for everyone, racial equality--and continued to galvanize America in the 1960s and beyond. Young doesn't provide a lot of straight factual information about Debs's life, but takes instead a snapshot of his soul as it was formed by reading and experience. The narrative closes (sort of) with the national railroad strike of 1877, a bitter defeat for labor that turned railroad worker and union activist Debs toward greater radicalism. Though not a work for the traditionally minded, Young's genre-bending book will thrill students of American social and socialist history. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Marguerite Young was the author of one novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling; two books of poetry, Prismatic Ground and Moderate Fable; and the nonfiction epic Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias. She taught creative writing at Indiana, Columbia, Fairleigh Dickinson, and Fordham Universities, the University of Iowa, and the New School for Social Research. She was born in 1908 in Indiana, lived in New York City for forty-seven years, and, during the last two years of her life, returned to Indianapolis. Harp Song for a Radical began as an essay on Debs and Indiana, and became for Marguerite Young a life-long work. She died before finishing her final editing of the book--a task completed by her friend of many years, Charles Ruas.

Charles Ruas was born in China, was educated at Princeton University and the Sorbonne and was the recipient of  both a Fulbright and a Danforth Fellowship. From 1974 to 1977, he was arts director of the New York radio station, WBAI, where he conducted a program interviewing writers, among them Marguerite Young. Charles Ruas is currently a guest professor of American Literature and Civilization at Stendhal University in Grenoble, France.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679427570
• ISBN 13: 9780679427575
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 624