This is an attempt to compile short bios as an introduction to the outstanding socialists of American history. We hope to have biographical information on Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Mother Jones, Helen Keller, Max Shachtman, Samuel H. Friedman, Bayard Rustin, Reinhold Niebuhr, A. Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Tom Kahn, Rob Tucker, Frank Zeidler, David McReyonlds, to start with.
Norman Thomas is one of the giants of American socialism. He ran for president six times; the high point was his 1932 stand against democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and incumbent republican Herbert Hoover. In that election, he received almost a million votes. His last election was in 1948 when he served as a protest vote for liberals and radicals who didn't want to vote for incumbent democrat Harry Truman or Henry Wallace of the communist-dominated progressive party. Thomas received only about 150,000 votes, but his presence helped keep democratic socialism alive through the McCarthyite/Cold War 50's until the torch could be passed, with the cooperation of third camp leader, Max Shachtman, to the new left of Students for a Democratic Society and the Young Peoples' Socialist League (before it soured into totalitarian violence). He is widely credited for pressuring Roosevelt's New Deal into carrying out, in a weakened and distorted form, programs like Social Security--although he always insisted Roosevelt carried them out "on a stretcher." In the meantime, he performed great humanitarian services like opposing Roosevelt's internment/imprisonment in the war of Japanese-Americans. He lived long enough to help lead the Vietnam anti-war movement and famously said, at a rally, that protesters should wash the American flag, not burn it.
Who was this giant of the American labor movement and the progressive citizenry?
Eugene V. Debs was born in a wooden shack in Terre Haute, Indiana on February 5, 1855. At age 16 he became a locomotive fireman, stoking fires on the early prairie railroads. His years working on the railroad affected him so deeply that when the local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen was organized in 1875 Debs played an active role. He became secretary of the local at the Buffalo Convention of 1878. He was made Associate Editor of the Fireman's Magazine; two years later he became Grand Secretary and Treasurer of the entire union and Editor in Chief of the magazine.
Debs worked for the Brotherhood, sometimes laboring 18 hours a day. He traveled constantly, riding the engines, sleeping in bunks and cabooses, tramping through railroad yards in rain, snow or sleet, fighting with conductors and railroad detectives. As he labored, the seed of agitation took deep root in his heart during these years of intimacy with the workers. He worked for the union through the 1880s, briefly interrupting his labor to serve a term as a Democrat in the Indiana legislature.
However, he discovered that to make a labor organization effective, he could not concentrate on firemen alone. He found himself organizing brakemen, switchmen, car men, telegraphers; and he came to feel more and more that union organization along craft lines might itself be a fatal error. He recognized that craft unionism simply gave the employer new weapons for the ancient game of divide and conquer. Labor must recognize its interests as indivisible; it must act as a single force – and this meant trade union organization in industrial units which corresponded to the units of business.
In 1893 Debs brought into existence the American Railway Union (ARU), an industrial union designed for all classes of railway workers. In April 1894, Debs and the ARU won their first major strike - an 18 day affair against James J. Hill and the Great Northern. His next challenge was to lead the Pullman Workers against the harsh wage cuts unaccompanied by any reduction in the cost of living in the company town. Although Debs was reluctant to gamble the ARU in an all-out strike against the Pullman Company, the Union voted for the strike. Once the decision was made Debs wholeheartedly took charge. Forty-thousand workers were out on strike. The business community, already panic stricken by the combination of labor militancy and hard times, now set out to mobilize behind Pullman. After sweeping injunctions and the introduction of Federal troops into Illinois, the strike was broken in a few weeks.
Debs was sentenced to six months in jail for contempt as a result of his defiance of the injunction. Debs' life changed as a result of his jailing. He did extensive reading. He thought out the injustice in American life. Debs also understood that working people in the United States needed their own political party. In 1887, Debs transformed the American Railroad Union into the Social Democratic Party of the United States. "There is no hope for the toiling masses of my Countrymen," he said, "except by the pathways mapped out by Socialists, the advocates of the cooperative Commonwealth."
Debs ran for President of the United States in 1901 under the Socialist Party banner and polled 100,000 votes. In 1904 he polled 400,000 votes and in 1912 Debs polled 900,000 votes - almost 6 percent of the total. In 1905, Debs helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) - the realization of his ancient dream of ONE BIG UNION. Through the years Debs had been unsparing in his denunciation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) which seemed to have found a comfortable niche in the status quo.
"The old form of trade unionism," cried Debs, "no longer meets the demands of the working class ... It is now positively reactionary, and is maintained, not in the interests of the workers who support it, but in the interests of the capitalist class who exploit the workers." So long as the working class was parceled out among thousands of separate unions, united economic and political action would be impossible. The IWW provided new hope.
In 1918, Debs made a speech that violated the Espionage Act. He was accused of promoting resistance to the war (WWI). In his last speech to the jury, Debs eloquently stated his case: "I admit to being opposed to the present form of government ," he said. "I admit being opposed to the present social system. I am doing what little I can and have been for many years to bring about change that shall do away with the rule of the great body of the people by a relatively small group and establish in this country an industrial and social democracy ... What you may choose to do to me will be of small consequence ... American institutions are on trial here before a court of American Citizens."
War hysteria was high at the time. In April 1919, Debs, an old man, broken health but still indomitable in spirit, was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison. In 1920 at the Socialist Party Convention, convict #9653 was nominated for President of the United States -- Eugene Victor Debs. Debs polled over 900,000 votes running for President from inside a jail cell.
Debs had great foresight. He understood industrial unions were necessary and the birth of the CIO in the 1930s was validation of this view. When Eugene Victor Debs died on October 20, 1926, a great patriotic American passed from the scene. His life had a profound effect on the emerging labor movement. We should honor Debs by studying his life.
Note: The above text has been selectively extracted and edited from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s introduction to The Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs, NY: Hermitage Press, Inc., 1948.
"[W]herever desperate workers went on strike, wherever exploited child laborers cried for help, this querulous, gray-haired, black-bonneted woman with a high-pitched voice and piercing stare appeared to lead them on," writes Joseph Gustaitis about Mary Harris Jones.
Born in Ireland on May 1, 1830, Mary Harris immigrated with her family to the United States in 1838. She attended school in Toronto, Canada and, as a young woman, worked as a dressmaker and as a school teacher. In 1861, she married George Jones, an iron molder and strong union supporter. Six years later, her husband and four children died in a yellow fever epidemic.
Mary Jones moved to Chicago where she opened a dressmaking business, but soon after, her home was destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871. Taking refuge in a church basement, she wandered into nearby meetings of the Knights of Labor. She became involved in the labor movement, a cause to which she remained committed the rest of her life.
Determined to encourage and support workers' organizing efforts, she traveled all over the country to inspire them with fiery speeches and words of encouragement. Over her long career as a union organizer, Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, organized coal miners, child textile workers, street carmen, steel workers and metal miners.
Although she often clashed with its leadership, Mother Jones worked as an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America for much of her life. She dedicated 40 years to helping coal miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania win union representation. "In the Miners' cause she waded creeks, faced machine guns, and taunted many a mine guard to shoot an old woman if he dared," writes historian Priscilla Long.
Mother Jones often organized the women in mining towns to become an active and vital part of the struggle for worker's rights. One tactic she used was the "dishpan brigade." When coal miners were on strike in Arnot, Pennsylvania, in 1900, Mother Jones organized the women to prevent replacement, or scab, workers from taking the striking workers' jobs. The women gathered at the mine, banging together their pots, pans, brooms and mops, while screaming and shouting at the scab workers. "From that day on the women kept continual watch of the mines to see that the company did not bring in scabs. Every day women with brooms or mops in one hand and babies in the other arm, wrapped in little blankets, went to the mines and watched that no one went in. And all night long they kept watch," wrote Mother Jones.
Mother Jones was particularly outraged by the conditions in which children worked in textile mills and coal mines. To learn firsthand about the conditions of child workers, she worked in textile mills in the South. While in Kensington, Pennsylvania in 1903 to help organize support for a textile workers strike, Mother Jones described the plight of children working in the mills: "Every day little children came into Union Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped little things, round shouldered and skinny. Many of them were not over 10 years of age, although the state law prohibited their working before they were twelve.”
Jones led a march of child workers from Philadelphia to ask President Theodore Roosevelt, vacationing at his summer home in Oyster Bay, New York, for a federal law "prohibiting the exploitation of children. President Roosevelt refused to see them but the march did draw attention to their cause, and the Pennsylvania legislature soon passed a child labor law. Mother Jones, who lived to be 100 years old, shared the struggles and successes of workers around the country. Her motto was "Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living."
Sources:
Joseph Gustaitis. "Mary Harris Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America," American History Illustrated. January 1988.
Priscilla Long. Mother Jones, Woman Organizer and Her Relations with Miners' Wives, Working Women and the Suffrage Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1976.
Autobiography of Mother Jones. Edited by Mark Field Parton. Introduction by Clarence Darrow. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1925.
“I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.”
Born in slavery in 1817, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was a young boy when he was sent to Baltimore to become a house slave. There he learned to read and write. When he was 20, he ran away:
“My free life began on the third of September, 1838. On the morning of the fourth of that month, after an anxious and most perilous but safe journey, I found myself in the big city of New York, a FREE MAN — one more added to the mighty throng which, like the confused waves of the troubled sea, surged to and fro between the lofty walls of Broadway [ . . . ] For the moment, the dreams of my youth and the hopes of my manhood were completely fulfilled. The bonds that had held me to 'old master' were broken. No man now had a right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me.”
Frederick Douglass, although free, was still a fugitive. Douglass found relative safety in 1838 with David Ruggles of the New York Vigilance Committee which was linked to the Underground Railroad. Douglass then married a free woman named Anna Murray whom he had met in Baltimore. To further evade capture, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass.
Douglass and his wife moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts but soon discovered it was no paradise. Black and white children attended the same schools, but public lecture halls were closed to blacks. Churches welcomed blacks but they had to sit in separate sections. White employees would not allow skilled black laborers to work beside them. But he also discovered in New Bedford the newspaper of the leading white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator. "The paper became my meat and drink," wrote Douglass. "My soul was set all on fire."
Douglass became involved with the local black community, including the battle against attempts by white southerners to force blacks to move to Africa. In March 1839 some of Douglass' anti-colonization statements appeared in The Liberator. When the 23-year-old Douglass spoke at a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison immediately recognized Douglass' potential and hired him as an agent for the society. For most of the next 10 years, Douglass traveled in the northern states, talking about his life and selling subscriptions to The Liberator. He was praised for his elegant use of words and his debating skills. His tall figure, large mass of hair and flashing eyes added force to his speeches that dealt mainly with his personal experiences as a former slave.
Soon, Douglass began to add comments about the racial situation in the North. He reminded his audiences that even in Massachusetts a black man could not always find work in his trade. He described how he had been thrown out of railroad cars reserved for white passengers and how even churches segregated their congregations. Like many abolitionist lecturers Douglass led a poor and perilous existence. Despite this, Douglass had found his purpose in life. As his eloquence and precision of language became famous, audiences began to question the validity of his stories.
To defend his reputation, in 1844 he decided to write a detailed account of his years in slavery despite the risk to his freedom. His autobiography rapidly became a bestseller. For safety, Douglass decided to go to England, where for two years he lectured to win support for the American anti-slavery movement. When Douglass decided to return to the United States, two English friends raised enough money to buy his freedom. The sum of $710.96 was sent to Hugh Auld who, on December 5, 1846, signed the papers declaring the 28-year-old Douglass a free man.
In England, Douglass had acquired a certain independence from the Garrison abolitionist group. Back in the United States, he founded a new abolitionist newspaper with the goal of promoting the antislavery cause and to fight for black equality. Douglass moved to Rochester, New York in 1847 and began his second career as editor of a weekly newspaper, the North Star. On the masthead appeared the motto: "Right is of no sex - Truth is of no color - God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
During his years in Rochester, Douglass continued to grow in stature as the editor of the nation's best known black newspaper. During that time he met politically active women who served in the antislavery and women's rights movements. Recognizing the help the women abolitionists had given blacks, he demonstrated his support for the feminist cause by attending the first women's rights convention in 1848. Delegates hesitated to demand voting rights as a part of their movement's platform. In response, Douglass spoke convincingly that political equality was an essential step in their liberation.
Douglass also became intimately involved in the Underground Railroad; during the 1850s, his home in Rochester became an important station. At times, as many as 11 fugitives hid in his home. But relatively few of the slaves who tried to escape from the South were successful and Douglass fiercely attacked the fugitive slave laws and the atrocities committed against runaway slaves. In a speech on Independence Day in 1852, Douglass pointed out how differently blacks and whites viewed the day's celebrations: "What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all the other days of the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim ... " Douglass urged blacks to unite for the painful struggle to win their liberty, and warned: "We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others."
As the Civil War began, Douglass turned his attention to two goals: the emancipation of all slaves in the Confederacy and the border states of the Union, and the right of blacks to enlist in the armies of the North. In 1863, Congress authorized black enlistment in the Union army but paid them half of what the white soldiers received, gave them inferior weapons and poor training. Blacks were not allowed to become officers. More than 200,000 blacks enlisted in the Union army and 38,000 of them were killed or wounded. Comprising about 10 percent of the North's troops, the black soldiers made their numbers felt on the battlefield and distinguished themselves in combat.
As Reconstruction was under way in the South newly freed slaves labored under conditions similar to those existing before the war. Black Americans still desperately needed an advocate, and Douglass took up yet another fight, that of voting rights for blacks. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment gave full citizenship to blacks. The Fifteenth Amendment, that guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, was ratified in 1870. President Benjamin Harrison appointed Douglass Minister Resident and Consul General to the Republic of Haiti. Douglass died of a heart attack at the age of 77 on February 20, 1895.
Source:
Philip S. Foner. Frederick Douglass. 2nd ed. New York: The Citadel Press, 1969 (1950).