As he left St. Paul after his victory over Jim Hill’s Great Northern, Eugene Debs relaxed to the clack-clack of the train wheels and the deep breathing of the locomotive, familiar sounds to a man who had spent his life working and traveling on the rails. His eyes followed the bounce of the drooping telegraph wires and took in the blur of wildflowers the trains had sown along the right-of-way. He was supremely happy.
Debs had ridden a thousand trains. He would still rather be traveling up front in the engine cab than in a coach car. Organizing for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, he had often hitched rides in the locomotives of freight trains to save money. The rushing wind, the metallic bitterness of burning coal, the throb of steam, the perpetual vigilance, the sheer sense of speed—he remembered it all with excitement in his blood.
Terre Haute lay on the Wabash River in west-central Indiana. Pulling into the town, Debs was astounded to find an enormous crowd gathered around the station. Three, maybe four thousand of his fellow townsmen—workingmen and prominent citizens alike—had turned out to greet him.
He stepped down onto the platform amid the chant: “Debs! Debs! Debs!” He greeted his wife, Kate, his parents and sisters. All of them were beaming, proud that Terre Haute’s native son had become a national figure, the victor in what a local paper called “one of the completest tie-ups in the history of labor troubles.” When he spoke to the crowd, Debs praised the heroism of the workers. They had “stood up as one man and asserted their manhood.”
The outcome of the Great Northern strike was a signal of the American Railway Union’s growing power. Out of power would come harmony. “An era of close relationship between capital and labor, I believe, is dawning,” Debs told his audience.
Debs’s neighbors were enormously impressed with the young man whom many had known as a store clerk, railroad hand, and small-time politician. The minister of the First Baptist Church, a skeptic about labor matters, noted Debs’s magnanimity. The fact that he did not attack his defeated opponent showed him a “born leader.”
The shout “Our next Governor!” brought a “hearty response,” a reporter noted.
“What has occurred tonight seems to me like a dream,” Debs said after this gratifying homecoming.
* * *
For Debs, now thirty-eight, railroads, locomotives, and steam power were the shining relics of his youth. As a boy, he had watched the men in dirty denim climb down from their huffing, naked machines and swagger through town, lords of power, speed, and distance.
Gene’s father, Jean Daniel Debs, had fallen in love with Marguerite Bettrich, a laborer in one of the Debs family’s mills in the Alsace region of eastern France. When Daniel’s people objected, he gave up his patrimony and the couple fled to America. In 1851, they purchased a tiny frame house in Terre Haute.
After this fairy-tale beginning, the young immigrants faced a rugged existence in the raw western town. Men in Terre Haute still carried guns routinely. A stench wafted through the town from the fifty thousand hogs that were butchered there every year. Daniel worked in a slaughterhouse and laid track on the new Terre Haute & Indianapolis Railroad, later known as the Vandalia line. He barely eked out a living. Marguerite, always known as Daisy, took forty dollars that she had saved and bought stock for a grocery store she opened in the front room of their home. The shop made money. A year later, in November 1855, their first son, Eugene Victor, was born.
While not religious, Daniel and Daisy embraced a high idealism. The atmosphere in the house was one of gaiety and an appreciation for the small things in life. The joie de vivre left a permanent mark on Gene. He would remain devoted to his parents until they both died in 1906.
Sunday nights, Daniel read in French to his children and the house was filled with talk. The couple had named their son after Eugène Sue, who, like Charles Dickens, had written serialized melodramatic tales of the common people. Gene’s middle name was an homage to Victor Hugo, the great romantic poet, whose novel Les Misérables was published when Gene was seven. The book would always remain his favorite—he was drawn to Hugo’s extraordinary sympathy for the working class and his devotion to social justice.
While going to school, young Gene clerked in his parents’ store. He gained a reputation for giving generous weight and easy credit rather than keeping a close eye on the shop’s profits.
The forests of tulip poplars and elderberry along the riverside became his playground. He went hunting with his father for woodcock and squirrels. He watched uniformed soldiers marching through town on their way to the war that broke out when he was five. He became a hero to the younger children, helping them build kites and construct rafts on the river.
The Debses soon moved to a larger house as their family grew to four girls and two boys. Gene’s parents imagined their son climbing the ladder of education to reach a secure position in society. Yet they were understanding when, at the age of fourteen, he left school to pursue a railroad career. Gene’s father asked a favor of another Alsatian immigrant, landing his son a position with the Vandalia line, which now extended from Indianapolis to St. Louis.
Out of his fifty-cents-a-day wages, Gene had to purchase a scraper for removing caked grease from the engines in the Vandalia roundhouse. He would keep the implement until he died, an emblem of his passage to adulthood. The tedious scraping and washing with caustic potash was hardly the work of his dreams, but Debs was an able and willing laborer. He was soon promoted to the paint crew, renewing the finish on engines and freight cars. He also used his skill to paint signs for neighbors.
Debs had the good fortune to enter the business during the boom years that followed the Civil War. The Vandalia was expanding, and labor was in short supply. A week before Christmas in 1871, a fireman reported for his shift drunk. The supervisor called on the sixteen-year-old Debs to assume the man’s duties. He soon became a regular fireman. Stationed on the left side of the cab, he learned all there was to know about the intricate tasks of operating a steam engine. “The locomotive was my alma mater,” he would later declare.
Running flat out, a fireman might heave two tons of coal into the firebox in an hour, all the while maintaining his balance on the swaying footplate. It was exhausting work, swinging like a pendulum to scoop and lift and toss. Muscles protested, then screamed. In summer, he sweated. In winter, icy air clawed through the cab.
Besides spreading coal across the blazing grate, the fireman had to monitor the water in the boiler. Allowing it to drop below the top of the firebox could result in a catastrophic explosion. He had to keep alert for rock slides, misaligned switches, or straying cattle approaching on his side of the engine. The job offered little respite—Debs sometimes worked six sixteen-hour shifts in a week.
The teenager took pride in his work-hardened hands. He loved the sense of movement. He came to know America’s midlands by heart, the names bearing down on him in dreams: Plainfield, Cartersburg, Bellville. Next stop Clayton, Pecksburg, Cincinnatus. He continued his education by fitting in classes at a local business school. He was participating in the most dynamic enterprise of the age and felt that his prospects could not be brighter.
* * *
Reality brought him up short. Years of overinvestment in rail lines had created a shaky financial foundation for the industry. In 1873 the house of cards collapsed. Fifty-five railroads went bankrupt. The country plunged into an economic depression. Gene Debs was laid off.
He went on the tramp, joining the tens of thousands of unemployed men who hopped freight trains and chased rumors. Debs’s journey took him south through Illinois and finally to East St. Louis. He found a job there as a substitute night fireman in a rail yard. The work was sporadic and disappointing, but it was a job. “I have a little company,” he wrote home. “But sometimes I am all alone and I am so homesick, I hardly know what to do.”
He observed firsthand the extreme poverty of which Victor Hugo had written. “It makes a person’s heart ache,” he wrote, “to see men women & children begging for something to eat.” He yearned for home, for the familiar certainties of Terre Haute, but he was reluctant to trudge back in disgrace. He would stay long enough “to prove that I can act manly when must be.”
His youth and natural resilience sustained him. In his spare time, he studied books on railroad economics and technology, making himself an amateur authority on the industry. He read French and German classics. He shared a room with an engineer who said Debs was a “damn fool” to spend so much time reading. Thirty years later, the engineer observed, “I still believe there was a damn fool in that room, but I know now that it wasn’t Debs.”
Gene’s mother had a single concern: the danger. No job in the nineteenth century involved more bodily peril than railroad work. When one young man signed on as a switchman, his sister “kept one clean sheet for the express purpose of wrapping up my mangled remains.”
Railroad men knew that many American lines had been built cheaply. Steep grades, tight curves, wobbly trestles, and questionable engines made accidents commonplace. So did loose or spread rails, defective switches, ice, landslides, and cattle wandering onto the unfenced tracks.
In the year 1890, when statistics began to be compiled, 2,451 railroad employees were killed on the job, more than the Union deaths at the bloody battle of Antietam. Another 22,000 men were injured. Debs would write that he understood “the ceaseless danger that lurks along the iron highway.”
The engineer and fireman were subject to head-on collisions: many lines ran on single tracks, and the switch and signal systems to prevent crashes were primitive. Boilers sometimes exploded with catastrophic force. Derailments were all too frequent, train wrecks a popular spectacle.
In order to slow a freight train, a brakeman had to climb onto the roof of a boxcar and turn a horizontal wheel. Then he ran along the top of the car and hopped to the next one to apply the next brake. The process “took nerve, coordination, timing and a perfect sense of balance,” one brakeman said. “Wary feet, an alert mind, and chilled nerves were needed every instant.” At night or during a sleet storm, the danger multiplied. A fall usually meant death.
Rail yards, like the one where Gene was working, held serious dangers, too. The cars of early trains were joined by link-and-pin couplers. One of the jobs of a switchman was to position an iron chain link that dangled from the front of one car to fit into a slotted drawbar attached to the rear of the next. He then dropped in an iron spike to hold the two together. If his hand accidentally came between the unforgiving iron parts, flesh and bone could be crushed. The switchman often had to keep pace with rolling cars. If he caught his foot in intersecting rails and tripped, the wheels might slice off a leg or worse.
Automatic couplers and George Westinghouse’s air brake system were available in the 1880s and would have protected workers against some of these perils, but railroads were slow to adopt the new technology. Critics accused them of economizing at the expense of workers’ safety. But issues of competing technology and standardization across systems also played a part in the delay.
The dangers were accepted by workmen and railroad managers alike as natural hazards. Losing a finger, a worker reported to a government commission, had “never been considered serious by the trainmen.” Veteran railroaders could often be spotted by their missing digits.
Many of the men who worked on the roads during the era had fought in the Civil War. They had learned the nobility of facing risk, bearing pain, and accepting inevitable casualties. The danger on the roads gave their jobs a soldierly dignity and reinforced the esprit de corps among comrades.
* * *
Mothers saw it differently. According to one biographer, Debs witnessed the death of a friend under the wheels of a freight car in the East St. Louis yard. Certainly he was aware of the grim reality of bodies crushed and dismembered. So was Daisy.
He finally gave in to his mother’s pleas. In October 1874, he returned to Terre Haute, “that sacred little spot.” The Debs grocery remained prosperous. His father again stepped in, landing Gene a job with Herman Hulman, who operated one of the largest wholesale outfits in the West.
Debs put his business education to work as an accounting clerk. Working amid the aroma of coffee and spices, he quickly mastered his clerical duties. With his amiable personality, he made friends with everybody, including Hulman. He had the satisfaction of contributing to his family’s finances.
He hated the job. “There are too many things in business that I cannot tolerate,” he wrote. “Business means grabbing for yourself.” What was second nature to men like George Pullman was foreign to Debs. He found himself wandering down to the rail yards, watching the engines come and go, greeting old pals. He spent evenings in saloons where railroad men told stories of adventures on the iron highway.
In February 1875, he mounted the stairs of a Terre Haute meeting hall to hear a speech by Joshua Leach, the Grand Master of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. The encounter set his life on a new path.
Debs was impressed by Leach’s “rugged honesty, simple manner, and homely speech,” but the Grand Master had as yet only managed to organize thirty-one lodges with six hundred members. Leach was surprised that a billing clerk from a wholesale company would apply, but he was happy to accept the nineteen-year-old Debs as an associate member.
Debs continued to work his white-collar job, but his heart was more and more captured by his union duties. He devoted all his free time to the BLF. He looked on his initiation into the brotherhood as “the obligation that is to bind me to my fellow-firemen to the end of my days.”
Like other organizations of skilled railroad workers, the brotherhood was more a fraternal society than a labor union. It helped unite far-flung members into a community. The meetings of the local lodge were occasions for male camaraderie and fellow feeling. Since the railroads did not compensate injured workmen, providing accident insurance and death benefits at a reasonable cost was one of the BLF’s principal functions.
Debs was conservative in his view of the developing conflict between workers and their employers. He opposed the massive, disorganized, and violent railroad strike that swept from Baltimore to Chicago in 1877.
The firemen’s brotherhood, like organizations representing engineers, conductors, and other skilled trades, restricted membership to those who possessed the required technical skills. Running a train was an intricate and demanding task involving immense responsibility. “Benevolence, Sobriety and Industry” was the motto of the BLF. Members whose drinking interfered with their duties were reprimanded by the union and might be reported to their employers.
When Debs won election as Terre Haute city clerk in 1879, his victory was touted as “the triumph of the laboring man.” A local paper called Debs “the blue-eyed boy of destiny.”
Debs pursued his political career as far as the Indiana state legislature but grew frustrated with that stodgy body. Turning away from a career in government and giving up his clerk’s job with Hulman, Debs became a full-time officer of the Grand Lodge of the BLF, the brotherhood’s national organization. He edited the brotherhood’s periodical, the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, building it into a national publication read by influential people outside the industry.
The Firemen’s Magazine fulfilled many of the functions of what we now call social media. It offered space for firemen to air their opinions about everything from technical railroad questions to matters of health and politics. It was a networking tool, allowing far-flung lodge members to keep up on the activities of friends in the business. Debs included articles about mathematics, chemistry, coin collecting, and international politics. He urged members to gather new knowledge and to expand their horizons.
Admired by working people, Debs was also friendly with men like William Riley McKeen, a prominent Terre Haute banker and organizer of the Vandalia Railroad. Debs admired McKeen for treating his employees with respect. “Mr. McKeen,” he declared, “is absolutely adored by his men.”
In Terre Haute, the idea of community was palpable. The town’s elite—the merchants and factory owners—were not outsiders. Bonds of family and affection tied them to a wide swath of townspeople. Older residents could remember Terre Haute’s frontier roots. The egalitarian values that had governed the lives of pioneers still prevailed.
As a rising labor leader, Debs organized other workers, including Terre Haute’s carpenters. He advised groups of coopers and printers. He helped gather these local organizations into a Central Labor Union in the city. He even formed an organization for the youngsters who were the city’s newsboys and bootblacks. He traveled, sometimes paying his own expenses, as far as Oklahoma and Texas to organize firemen, conductors, brakemen, and telegraphers. His name became well known in labor circles around the country.
Again and again in Firemen’s Magazine, Debs came back to the theme of manhood, a prevailing idea in nineteenth-century America. Elements of traditional masculinity and patriarchal authority were part of it. Women’s roles in work and society had been increasingly abridged by Victorian mores and the industrialization of labor. But self-reliance and personal dignity were important elements of manhood as well. To be possessed of manhood was to be somebody. It meant earning a living and winning respect. It meant, Debs said, to be able to approach bosses on a basis of “perfect social equality, and state our grievances like men.” He still held to the republican notion, increasingly a myth, that there were no classes in American society.
“One of our fundamental doctrines,” Debs wrote in Firemen’s Magazine, “is that labor and capital are brothers.” Money could do nothing without labor, which he called “muscle capital.” Owners and workers could only prosper in a “harmonious alliance.” He insisted that the role of the brotherhoods was to provide the corporations with “a class of honest and intelligent laborers, men upon whom they can depend.”
These were a young man’s ideas, looking up to authority, deferring to power, stressing education and uplift for workingmen. They were ideas shaped by his boyhood in a town where business owners and employees shared a sense of community. His early years had imbued him with hopes and ideals that he would never entirely relinquish.
* * *
Debs’s world was changing by the second half of the 1880s. Terre Haute was losing its small-town qualities, and the precious idea of social harmony was becoming an anachronism. Consolidation meant that business owners no longer had a personal connection with workers. Shared interests disappeared.
The large railroads, run by management bureaucracies, employed executives who were not personally familiar with the work of the roads. Responding to demands from on high, they stripped the men of their long-established privileges. Work rules and hours grew more onerous.
The changes angered workers and made Debs reconsider his opposition to confrontation. He supported BLF delegates when they rescinded their vow never to strike and when they set up a fund to support members involved in job actions.
“Our fundamental principle is justice,” Debs now declared. Men should receive a fair share of what they produce. He came to see employers’ paternalism as demeaning, not generous. Men must have the right to join a union. “Strike down that idea,” Debs declared, “and the idea of personal liberty disappears.”
* * *
In spite of his relentless travel to attend to BLF duties, Debs found his emotional sustenance along the lazy Wabash River. His ties to Terre Haute were tightened when in 1885 he married Katherine Metzel, a handsome woman two years his junior. Kate’s stepfather owned the largest drugstore in Terre Haute. The marriage joined two of the town’s middle-class families. Five years later, when Kate came into a small inheritance, she helped finance a Queen Anne–style home for the couple in a fashionable Terre Haute neighborhood convenient to the train station.
Critics pointed to the house and to Kate’s taste for diamonds and furs as evidence that Gene was drifting from his working-class bearings. Kate’s inability to conceive children and Gene’s frequent travel led to persistent rumors that the marriage was a loveless formality. The idea was given credence by Gene’s brother, Theodore, who referred to Kate as “a self-adorning clotheshorse.”
In fact, the couple enjoyed a stable marriage that lasted more than forty years. Kate—Gene usually called her Ducky—fully shared her husband’s ideals. Highly self-sufficient, she was able to cope with his frequent absences and almost obsessive work habits, while at the same time responding to his emotional neediness when he returned home after long trips. At times Kate helped Gene with his work and sometimes she accompanied him on his travels. She compiled a voluminous scrapbook as a record of Gene’s accomplishments.
Always, she played the crucial role of gatekeeper to screen the many visitors who clamored for his attention. Gene’s health was not robust—he needed the periods of recuperation at home that his wife made possible.
* * *
During these years, a series of shocks pushed Debs toward an ever more radical view of the world. In 1886, he supported the broad coalition of workingmen fighting for an eight-hour day. May Day rallies to support the movement led to violence two days later near the McCormick Harvesting Machine plant in Chicago. The next night, as police moved to break up a demonstration in the city’s Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded. The blast and the barrage of gunfire that followed killed seven officers and at least four civilians.
The result was the first red scare in America, a wave of repression aimed at anarchists, immigrants, and labor advocates. Membership in the Knights of Labor had ballooned in recent years. Because of the group’s involvement in the eight-hour movement and the fact that two of those arrested for the crime were KOL members, the organization saw its membership plummet.
A rigged trial convicted eight men on little or no evidence. It was their fiery speeches and anarchist sympathies rather than guilty actions that convicted them. Four of the men were hanged; one committed suicide. Debs, like many labor leaders, took a stand against the hysteria and the injustice. To him, the activism of American workers was rooted in Jeffersonian principles and evoked the independence and self-worth enjoyed by farmers and craftsmen in the early Republic.
Two years after Haymarket, members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen joined engineers in a strike against the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, a major western line that ran through Burlington, Iowa, and on to Denver. Burlington president Charles Elliott Perkins took a hard stance against union demands for a pay increase. The failure of workers on other railroad lines to support the Burlington strikers doomed the effort. Employees turned on each other and the strike collapsed. Brotherhood members returned to work with no gains.
The Burlington fiasco hardened Debs’s views. “The strike is the weapon of the oppressed,” he wrote. “The Nation had for its cornerstone a strike.” It was a radical departure from his younger views.
Hoping to build unity among the members of the various rail crafts, Debs spent several fruitless years trying to cobble together a federation of the existing railroad unions. He failed. The brotherhoods were built on exclusion. Engineers, conductors, and firemen felt that their power was in their unique skills. They eschewed alliances with less-skilled track workers and shop men.
In early 1892, switchmen in Buffalo walked off the job to pressure state authorities to enforce a law mandating a ten-hour day. They appealed to the other brotherhoods, but none agreed to help. State militiamen put down the strike. A railroad industry publication, noting the recent Indian wars against the “red savage,” declared that “the white savage needs his lesson” as well. Debs saw that something more than a federation of existing unions was needed.
That same year one of the most violent labor battles of the century exploded at Homestead, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. Members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers failed to come to terms with the Carnegie Steel Company for a new contract. Both union and non-union workers voted to strike. Andrew Carnegie, vacationing in Scotland, left the dirty work to his company president, Henry Clay Frick. Frick ordered a wall built around the massive plant on the Monongahela River. Refusing to negotiate, he locked out the workers and barricaded the factory. Union picket lines shut down the operation.
On July 6, 1892, Frick sent a private army of three hundred Pinkerton detectives down the river on barges to open the factory. Strikers broke into the grounds and both sides began shooting. During the twelve-hour gunfight that followed, the trapped strikebreakers fired from inside their barges and workers used dynamite and burning oil to try to dislodge them. Nine strikers and five Pinkerton men died in the melee.
Then the government stepped in. State authorities sent 8,500 National Guardsmen to take control of the plant. The company immediately filled positions with replacement workers. On July 23, anarchist Alexander Berkman strode into Frick’s office and shot him twice in an unsuccessful assassination attempt.
In the aftermath of the strike, the Amalgamated Association was barred from the plant. Carnegie enforced longer hours and lower wages, as did other steel companies.
After watching one of the nation’s most powerful trade unions go down in defeat, Debs became determined to devise a new and more comprehensive approach to labor organizing. He wanted a union that would bring the workers of an entire industry into a single organization. He jettisoned his relationship with the BLF, telling members he was no longer “in harmony” with the brotherhood. What had worked a generation earlier did not answer now.
It did not mean he was giving up on working people. “I have a heart for others and that is why I am in this work,” he said. “When I see suffering about me, I myself suffer, and so when I put forth my efforts to relieve others, I am simply helping myself.”
His new vision took shape as the American Railway Union, the industry-wide organization that he and other railroad men formed in 1893. The ARU grew rapidly. The showdown on James J. Hill’s Great Northern line—what Debs called the “only clear cut victory of any consequence ever won by a railroad union in the United States”—inspired more workers. Men, especially the unskilled who had been ignored by the brotherhoods, began signing up with the ARU at a rate of two thousand a day.
Many of the new local unions consisted of a few dozen members and a post office box. What they lacked in organization and experience, they made up for in enthusiasm. Debs gave them what guidance he could by telegram and letter and during frequent organizing trips around the country.
By the summer of 1894, the union had gathered in a remarkable 150,000 members, more than all the railroad brotherhoods combined. The group now rivaled in size the American Federation of Labor, which drew members from a wide range of crafts. Eugene Debs had, almost overnight, become the single most powerful labor leader in the country.
* * *
American Railway Union bylaws allowed the employees of any company that operated a railroad line to become members. On Chicago’s South Side, George Pullman’s enormous manufacturing facility needed short rail lines to move cars onto and off of the roads. His employees were therefore qualified for ARU membership, even though they followed none of the traditional railroad trades.
George Howard, the ARU vice president, knew of the growing discontent among the Pullman workers. During his career, he had served on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe and half a dozen other roads, in every function from gandy dancer to superintendent of transportation. He was a respected organizer and a persuasive speaker. That spring he had been circulating among the Pullman men, talking up the idea of the industrial union. The discontent at the factory prompted many of the employees to take a chance on the new organization.
Largely in secret, men and women from the various departments began to form ARU locals in the Pullman shops. By late April, an organizing meeting in Kensington’s Turner Hall, a German health club, drew an overflow crowd. Soon, a large portion of the four thousand employees had cast their lot with the union and formed themselves into nineteen locals. Elated by the results of the Great Northern strike, these workers began to wonder if, like Jim Hill, George Pullman could also be induced to pay a fair wage. With the might of the American Railway Union behind them, they hoped to stand up to one of the premier industrialists of the era.