I Am For Socialism Because I Am For Humanity

Speaker 1: Major funds for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.
Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: And, I’m Nathan Connolly. If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week, along with our colleagues, Joanne Freeman and Ed Ayers, we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

Brian Balogh: We’re going to start today’s show just outside of Chicago in the town of Pullman. Founded in 1880 by George Pullman, owner of the Pullman Car Company, the town was developed exclusively for laborers. It was an experiment in social reform providing workers a community free from poverty and crime. But, according to historian Nicholas Salvatore, Pullman’s motivations were, in reality, much less altruistic.

Nicholas S.: That model town was actually a way of controlling the workforce, because if the worker … Let’s say a family is there with a husband, wife, and two kids, and if the husband was the one who was working on the line, if he raised any issues about conditions, wages, dissent concerning the way the company was run, et cetera, et cetera, they get thrown out. And, it happened all the time.

Brian Balogh: In 1893, the railroad industry was hit hard by a financial panic. In response, Pullman fired workers and cut wages, but refused to lower rent. As conditions in town rapidly deteriorated, laborers organized a strike led by rising politician and labor activist, Eugene Debs.

Nicholas S.: Debs was the titular leader of the strike. He was rooted in Chicago. He was the symbol of the strike on a national level. He traveled to other strike sites to give rallies, give speeches, et cetera, et cetera. So, he became this singular figure, and his speeches were really dynamic and hard biting. He was laying out as clearly as he possibly could what actually was happening in this Pullman strike and what the stakes in the strike were for working people who simply had absolutely no control at that point of their workplace situations.

Brian Balogh: If it is a fact that after working for George Pullman for many years, you appear two weeks after your work stops, ragged and hungry, it only emphasizes the charge I made before this community. I do not believe in violent methods, but I do believe in telling the truth. The paternalism of Pullman is the same as the self-interest of a slaveholder in his human chattels. You are striking to avert slavery and degradation.

Nicholas S.: In the Pullman corporation’s response to the strike, he saw the power and unyielding commitment of capital to do as it wants to do and to ignore whatever the issues or grievances or concerns that their workforce had about wages, conditions or whatever it may be. And, he saw that that was not going to change voluntarily.

Brian Balogh: As the strike escalated, Pullman and his allies appealed to the government for help. Fearing a national crisis, President Cleveland dispatched federal troops and brutally defeated the strike. Debs was arrested soon thereafter, and sentenced to six months in prison.

Nicholas S.: The head of the prison at Woodstock allowed him to have untold numbers of visitors, so British socialists showed up, American socialists came, working people came, leaders of unions came. They would bring him a book or they would leave a pamphlet or they would talk for an hour or two or three about conditions in America or whatever the … We don’t have all the details about what they talked about, but the point was is that his vision broadened in that framework.
He essentially went to graduate school in Woodstock Jail, and he really had a lot to think about. I don’t know what happened in jail because we don’t have the record of that from him, but in reading his speeches, et cetera, after Woodstock, it’s in that process that he begins to see that you can both be a socialist and a fiercely committed American, small d democrat who believed in the vote and believed in democratic processes.

Brian Balogh: Debs’ release from prison marked his arrival on the national scene. Although he wasn’t yet a Socialist, by 1895 he had undoubtedly become one of the most prominent labor activists in America.

Nicholas S.: When he came out of jail and came on the train from Woodstock to the depot in Chicago, according to the contemporary newspapers, some hundred thousand people jammed the depot to welcome him back. That’s where Debs really became almost … I hate to use this word but almost canonized as a national leader of dissent and of working people, as a fighter for working people’s rights. Then it’s a little bit later in ’96 that he declares as a Socialist.

Brian Balogh: Debs spent much of his career traveling the country, spreading the word about the ills of industrial capitalism. Tall and lanky in appearance, Debs was a force of nature on stage drawing huge crowds from all political stripes just to see him speak.
There are two social and economic systems which have been conflicting since the morning stars sang together and the Son of God shouted forth their joy. Under one system, the few have enjoyed the fruits of the Earth and the masses have been doomed to serve as beasts of burden. The beneficiaries of this system believe that a system under which the few rule and the masses toil and submit to their masters in silence, is, on the whole, a good system. It is a system, however, which has filled the world with unspeakable woe, and it is needless to say that it is under this system we now live.
There is another system under which there is no favored class, no special privileges where the Earth and the fullness thereof becomes the heritage of the common people.

Nicholas S.: It’s, I think, important to remember with Debs that his socialism is a socialism that is not calling for revolution as might be understood in a more orthodox, Marxist framework from a European background. He’s saying, “We can use the mechanisms of our democratic process, which have been brutalized by corporate interests and actions, and we can, in fact, turn this around.” He never rejected the concept of American democracy. He criticized it fiercely for its lapses. It’s the absence of fulfillment, et cetera, et cetera, but he never, to my knowledge, he never sought to replace it.

Brian Balogh: Debs’ unique brand of American socialism had broad appeal. As a Socialist Party candidate, he ran for president five times, at one point, garnering 12% of the popular vote. While many Americans had mixed feelings about Debs, he was almost universally beloved by the working class.
In 1918, Debs was arrested again. This time for speaking out against America’s involvement in World War I. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and even behind bars, Salvatore says Debs found a way to deeply affect those around him.

Nicholas S.: Here was this guy who was accused of being disloyal to the United States in prison with people charged and convicted of doing all sorts of different things from murder and what have you to robberies, to this, to that, the other thing. Debs starts talking to them, and he’s not bashful about who he is and what he’s done and et cetera, et cetera. By the time he left prison … I don’t know that this has ever happened before or since. By the time he left prison, the warden opened the jail cells and let all of the prisoners who wanted to come to the side of the prison where he would be walking out of down to meet the car where he was getting picked up.
They were applauding him. There was something he did in that prison in terms of trying to return to these men some sense of their dignity and their humanity by recognizing them. That was stunning, absolutely stunning. It had little to do with socialism in the sense of ideological, but it was Debs the man and the quality of his personality and his concern for other people that led the warden, of all people, to do that.

Brian Balogh: Nicholas Salvatore is Professor Emeritus at Cornell University and the author of Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist.