This being an election year — and accordingly, utterly infuriating on a daily basis for the MAGA stupidity it embodies — I thought it might be the time at last to pull a long-neglected book down from the shelf and learn about the sort of principled Hoosier who rarely exists any longer: Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, by Marguerite Young.
Eugene Victor Debs (1855 – 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States (Wikipedia).
I’ve never been sure which of Debs’ claims to fame is more impressive: living in Terre Haute, or running for president in 1920 as a socialist while imprisoned in Atlanta for sedition (and receiving one million votes).
The author Young (1908 – 1995) was born in Indianapolis. Young is a rather obscure figure now, but several decades ago she was praised for her poetry and a novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Young also wrote about fellow Hoosier writer James Whitcomb Riley, and afterwards turned to Debs, commencing a biography that remained unfinished at her death following decades of effort, to be finished by a protege and published as Harp Song for a Radical.
I’ve no recollection of how this book came to my attention; it has been reposing on my bookshelf for two decades. I’d say only that the “times” in the title is a more accurate reflection of the contents than Debs’ actual “life.” He is barely mentioned until page 250 or so (of 581), and her continual digressions, while sometimes gripping, are conducted in a decidedly non-academic manner; in short, what I’d expect from a poet, as opposed to a biographer.
Should we even allow poets to be biographers without compelling them to get to the point?
There’d be nothing whatever “wrong” about any of this, except that my hope was for a comprehensive biography of Debs, not seemingly endless examinations of 19th-century ephemera: utopian communities (yes, like New Harmony), political theorist Wilhelm Weitling, polygamist Brigham Young, detective Allan Pinkerton, and a rogue’s gallery of frontier American weirdness (Trump didn’t invent it) set against a backdrop of exploitative capitalism.
The book is free-form; informative and not at all badly written, and entertaining in its own quixotic way. There’s just precious little in it about Eugene Victor Debs, whose face and name graces the dust cover. In short, it’s one of the worse reading choices I’ve made during the past five years.
My annoyance is supreme, but I’m a stubborn consumer of words, and have persevered to the end. Now I am desperate for a dry, factual account of Old Albanian mountain feuds.
Back in 1999 at The Nation, John Leonard reviewed Young’s non-Debs book. His review summarizes the situation in the sort of comprehensive way that I have no interest in attempting.
This, maybe, is where I ought to talk about the footnotes. There aren’t any. Or complain about a woozy impressionism that leaves us uncertain throughout what really happened and what just makes a good story. But it seems to me that we’ve been Dutched for years, by biographies in which Freud is a character telling us what to think, or Joseph Campbell, or Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx, and sometimes even malice and envy. Or tote up the discrepancies between Young’s Gene and Nick Salvatore’s. But neither ever really explains why Debs–a close chum of all the merchant princelings in Babbitt-boostered Terre Haute, who found him jobs, gave him loans and helped elect him to any office he sought–decided to be radical instead of rich.
Bizarrely, I now have the urge to go to Terre Haute and visit Debs’ home. And the book? Back it goes, up there on the shelf, probably to remain untouched until I die and it is thrown into a dumpster (alas).
Such an attractive appearance to be so disappointing of a read.
