Review, Marguerite Young, Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Debs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2000

Novelist Marguerite Young devoted the last three decades of her life to composing a sprawling, epic biography of Eugene Debs and the social and intellectual context that produced him. Upon her death in 1995, her friend Charles Ruas undertook the task of pulling together her copious notes, research and writings and forming them into a coherent whole that tries to make sense both of one of the towering figures of American radicalism and the movement he led. Though one must admit Ruas’s task was unenviable and admire his willingness to undertake it, the end result does little to justify the amount of work expended. Young’s book ultimately emerges as an overblown, self-indulgent mess.

Most historians write with the verve of one composing assembly instructions for a piece of furniture, so usually when I comment that the author writes like a novelist it is meant as a compliment. But not in this case. Young uses novelistic techniques ill-suited to the subject. She relies on long-winded sentences that quickly grow aggravating and displays a fondness for puns and word-play that becomes cloying. The style may be Faulknerian, but to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, she’s no William Faulkner.

Moreover, she approaches subjects indirectly, digressing frequently on peripheral topics and only slowly coming to the point. For instance, a discussion of Debs will lead to a comparison to Abraham Lincoln, which then segues into a twenty-page description of the widowhood of Mary Todd Lincoln, which will end by mentioning that the Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, served as attorney for the Pullman Company in its case against Debs, thus bringing the reader back to the topic at hand. Similar tangents cover such subjects as Heinrich Heine, Allan Pinkerton, John Wilkes Booth and Benjamin Harrison. Many of these asides are interesting, but what they have to do with “the life and times” of Debs remains unclear. The adage “Don’t speak ill of the dead” has apparently been reinterpreted here as “Don’t edit the dead.”

The longest digression, covering most of the first 150 pages, focuses on German radical Wilhelm Weitling and his exploration of various utopian experiments, both in Europe and the United States. Young labels America the “millennial continent” and discusses at great length the attempts by different groups to build heaven on earth. In particular, she spends an inordinate amount of time detailing the experiences of the Mormons, never making clear what connection they have to American socialism.

The major problem is that Young completely ignores most of the salient facets of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century life that are much more central in establishing Debs’s context. No mention is made of populism, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Knights of Labor (two passing references) or Edward Bellamy and his numerous imitators (very strange for a book whose unifying theme is the “millennial continent”). In short, in presenting a large descriptive tapestry of nineteenth-century Americans (the book does not cover the period after 1900, thus leaving out the absolutely crucial final quarter-century of Debs’s life), Young explains nothing.

Perhaps most fundamentally, Young fails to place Debs in a regional context that helps explain his radicalism. An Indiana native, Young describes her fascination with Debs as a result of his status as a fellow Hoosier. But her book fails to explain Debs as a specifically midwestern radical. As yet, then, there is no synthesis of midwestern radicalism on the level of James Green’s study of socialists in Oklahoma and Texas¹, which traces the complex relationship between populism, labor unionism, socialism, religion and small-town and rural values into an indigenous movement culture.

Several specific studies provide a starting point for such a synthesis, emphasizing a vision of midwestern radicalism that, in a non-doctrinaire fashion, blended European and American ideologies with traditional American culture. Nick Salvatore’s vastly superior biography, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist,² shows how Debs drew on such influences as republicanism, evangelical Protestantism and small-town midwestern values to fashion an authentically American socialism that resonated with his audiences. Elliot Shore’s outstanding study of J.A. Wayland, publisher of the major socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason, portrays radical grass-roots journalism as mixing in equal measures such political ideologies as republicanism, populism and Marxism with good, old-fashioned small-town boosterism.³ In his study of the era’s major socialist publisher, the Chicago-based Charles H. Kerr Company, Allen Ruff portrays Kerr’s efforts to present a wide-ranging, eclectic radicalism that could be conveyed to working people in terms they would understand.⁴

Such works portray the processes by which socialism, as it was translated into a mass movement throughout the Middle West in the early twentieth century, drew on a variety of influences to create an often contradictory, indigenously American radicalism. Though such midwestern radicals frequently felt themselves at odds with the more doctrinaire socialists on the East coast, their ideology struck a responsive chord with large numbers of farmers, workers, small-town residents and self-educated organic intellectuals throughout the Midwest. And it was because Debs was a product of this culture that he spoke for so many Americans. He contradicted himself; he contained multitudes.

1James Green, Grass-roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

2Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University or Illinois Press, 1982).

3Elliot Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas), 1988.

4Allen Ruff, “We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).