Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
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Description
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.
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
Customer Reviews
Poetic
I actually liked this book; this is apparently a minority view. I too was expecting a biography of Debs and got a more general history of 19th Century America and the Labor Movement (among many other things).
However, once I made the commitment to read it (I had just started a job with quite a bit of down time), I loved it. It was obviously the product of an enormous amount of work, both research and writing. It reads like a long love poem to the people and organizations who struggled to give us what we now consider an entitlement - weekends off, the minimum wage, basic safety and health regulations on the job, etc.
It also gave me a good introduction, which I found fascinating, to the various communes, cults and socio/religious/political movements that sprung up like weeds in the 19th Century.
This is a heartfelt tribute to a bygone era well worth reading.
However, if you want a biography of Debs, read something else after you read "Harp Song."
2004-11-20
| The odyssey is almost over! (Brooklyn) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3
Poorly written, no matter how you look at it.
I bought this book as a remainder. I have attempted to struggle through it several times and it is clear to me why it was remaindered. If I could assign it zero stars I would.
As a biography this work is a total failure. I was not able to find information on E. V. Debs as one would expect from a book subtitled "The Life and Times of...". Discursions and ramblings could add spice and flavor to a conventional biography but this book seems to consist only of the discursions and ramblings.
If the intent is to create some sort of poetic meditation on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life and labor activism, I judge the work a failure here too. Obviously in this aspect my judgement is subjective and artistic and others are welcome to disagree with an aesthetic judgement. But... Pick this book up at any point and you will find the same exact material and style. The bits don't fit together. Yet the artistry escapes me too. It looks like a jumbled mismash. I want to point out that I don't consider myself any kind of Philistine. But if you want to see good stream-of-consciousness, check out Faulkner, or Joyce, etc., and you'll see that they actually look like they know what they're doing!
Finally, although this book seems to be written in relatively standard English (although with incredibly long single-sentence paragraphs), I was disappointed to find within seconds of opening the pages actual grammatical errors such as disagreement of subject and object, etc.
Failure as a biography, failure as an artistic rumination on an atmosphere. Failure all around.
2003-03-31
(TX United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 1
A lyrical history of the early American labor movement
Looking at the other customer reviews for this unusual book, I doubt that the reviewers either read the introduction or that they actually read more than a few pages. This is not a conventional biography. Nor is it a completed, polished work. Marguerite Young died when her biography of Debs was incomplete and very much a work in progress. Had she lived to complete it, it would have been a fuller picture of his life. But her idiosyncratic approach would still have colored every page.
It is also helpful to understand that in writing one of her previous books--"Angel in the Forest"--Young started out writing a lengthy poem, then converted it into a prose work. (The Debs book is in some ways reminiscent of Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body," only Young employed blank verse.)
The Debs book has been described as Whitmanesque, and it is reminiscent of both the poetry and prose of that pillar of American literature. As both a poet and prose writer, Young takes a lyrical, almost stream of consciousness approach in this book. (Her work has also been likened to James Joyce's--a comparison she apparently disliked, though it strikes me as appropriate.) Those who criticize the book for its rambling style seem to miss this point.
Others have suggested that the book might better be entitled "The Times and Life of Eugene Victor Debs." In her unconventional approach, Young does seem to focus more on a history of the times in which Debs lived than on the man himself. The book pays particular attention to the socioeconomic and political developments which shaped the industrial revolution in this country, particularly the American labor movement. The author is at her best when documenting industrial accidents and working conditions and in describing the dominance of American "captains of industry" over both the economy and the American government at all levels.
Those who find Part One of the book--the first 178 pages--difficult to read might be advised to read the first 21 pages, then skip to Part Two, which is more focused on Debs and his times. Part One of the book admittedly becomes bogged down in describing utopian socialists--it gives far too much attention to the obscure German immigrant socialist Wilhelm Weitling as well as delving into the detailed history of early Mormonism, a topic which apparently fascinated the author because Brigham Young was one of her ancestors.
Part Two of the book is also sweeping in its scope, but it provides a memorable description of the early decades of Debs' life (with emphasis on 1855-1877), tracing the emigration of his parents to the U.S. from Alsace Lorraine, describing the influence of his parents' radicalism on his own personal beliefs, and detailing his work as a railroad laborer and union organizer. It does this against the backdrop of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, Reconstruction, the Indian Wars, national politics, and labor developments, culminating in the violent railroad strikes of 1877. Given Young's and Debs's Hoosier origins, it devotes a lot of attention to Indiana, particularly the poet James Whitcomb Riley. (The book started out as a Riley biography, but Young became fascinated with Debs and decided to rework it into Debs's life story.)
This is not a book for the casual reader--it is a demanding book to get through. But that understood, it is a worthwhile investment of time and beautifully written. On completing the book, I found myself regretting that Marguerite Young did not live to complete this imperfect yet remarkable work of American history and literature.
2002-12-01
(Columbia, MD USA) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 4
Harp Song Gibberish
It is almost unbelievable how Marguerite Young, the respected New York academic who died before completing this work, was able to turn nearly every sentence she wrote into a bombastic political diatribe. If you are hankering for a moralistic, preachy lecture on the evils of American capitalism, pick up this volume and select any sentence at random (or if you prefer, start on page 1 and read sequentially; it will still seem random). Sometimes you have to wonder what this little old lady was smoking in her pipe:
"In June 1886, one month after the Haymarket bombings, Debs with diurnal and nocturnal hopes of man's redemption by way of labor unions was trying to steer the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen across a bridge which would not be a Bridge of Sighs, a Bridge of Lies, and crumble into the chaos created not by men in search of justice but by those capitalistic powers who did whatever they pleased and did not seem to care how many trains and train men were destroyed because of overpasses as untrustworthy as if they were tons and tons of steel and iron and wood upheld by toothpicks and often so pressed upon by heavy traffic that rose petals thrown upon a rail and adding to that weight might cause a total collapse with loss of many lives, not only those of train men but of passengers in parlor cars and passengers in boxcars, the latter including cattle and tramps." [p. 351]
That's pretty much what you'll find in this book, folks. Tells you a lot about Eugene Debs, doesn't it? Unlike some well-known reviewers, I do not find this author's interminable run-on sentences "poetic," but merely incoherent. Some have praised it as "quirky" and "non-traditional" -- code words, apparently, for a literary experiment gone terribly wrong. If you're in the right mood, you may find yourself laughing out loud -- surely not an intended reaction, however. One of the blurbs on the back cover, by William Goyen in the NYT, calls it "one of the most arresting literary achievements in our last twenty years..." Well, it is arresting, all right. I could barely read a page without having my interest arrested. Perhaps someone should consider arresting the editors who saw fit to publish it.
2000-12-12
(Pennsylvania) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 1
Big disappointment!
This book was a big disappointment. I bought what I thought was a biography on the great socialist leader Eugene Debs only to find that it was a long winded, pretentious and disjointed meditation on the socialist movement and the utopian communities that led up to it.
I don't know what Marguerite Young was thinking when she decided to tackle this project but it certainly wasn't a biography in the traditional sense. I guess I should have paid more attention to the words 'Harp Song' in the title because that's what this book really was- a bloody long harp song.
I suppose that if you're a fan of Young's prose you might appreciate this book but for anyone looking to get some insight into the life of Eugene Victor Debs- you'll have to go elsewhere.
2000-09-09
| Chad (Shanghai China/Provo, UT) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 1
Building DesignYoung guns team up to win primary school workBy Marguerite Lazell The five up-and-coming practices will work together under the banner Form5, and will focus on winning projects in the Primary Capital Programme, the 15-year, £7 billion government initiative to rebuild 8000 of England's 18000