![]() ![]() … have converted this railway construction into an instrument for oppressing a thousand million people (in the colonies and semicolonies), that is, more than half the population of the globe that inhabits the dependent countries, as well as the wage-slaves of capital in the “civilised” countries.Īntebellum America had consisted of thousands of small towns like Debs’ Terre Haute, little islands whose small industries catered to regional farming populations, generating a kind of private property, as Lenin explained, “based on the labour of the small proprietor, free competition, democracy.” However, by the 1870s, the steel and coal of Pennsylvania, the wheat and timber of Minnesota, the minerals of Idaho, the cattle of Texas, the cotton of Mississippi, and so on, could be shipped everywhere in a matter of days. As Lenin noted, it was these “capitalist threads” that The British, French and Germans used the railroads for similar ends in their overseas colonies. Indeed, it was the iron horse, far more than the American military, that subjugated the Sioux and the other Plains Indians to capitalism. The transcontinental lines transformed the continent into a vast new arena for the development of capitalism and put an end to the frontier, a fact officially proclaimed by the US Census of 1890. The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1881, the Northern Pacific and Southern Pacific followed in 1883, and the Great Northern in 1889. Midway between those two years, on May 10, 1869, the last spike in the Transcontinental Railroad was driven at Promontory, Utah, joining the West and East coasts. Another 30,000 miles of track were laid between 1866 and the panic of 1873. The railroads were the ligaments of that new society. The rail network thus unified the North economically and facilitated its victory in the Civil War in 1865, when Debs was 10 years old-a Second American Revolution that destroyed chattel slavery and gave birth to a whole new capitalist society. Some 30,000 miles of track were laid by 1860, with four trunk lines linking the Midwest to the East and realigning it economically away from what had been its traditional orientation to the South via the steamboat and barge commerce of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. ![]() Meanwhile, the national railroad industry grew by leaps and bounds. His leadership talents were recognized, and he rose quickly in the Brotherhood’s ranks, by 1880 becoming Grand Secretary and Treasurer and the editor of its journal, Firemen’s Magazine. Debs soon entered the ranks of organized labor, joining in 1875 the two-year-old Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Immigrants poured in, including one Johann Dreiser from Germany, whose son, the great novelist Theodore Dreiser, was born in Terre Haute in 1871, the same year as the Paris Commune and the year that Debs, 16 years old, took up work as a locomotive fireman on the Vandalia Railroad.ĭebs later said he regretted leaving school, but it was natural for youth to be drawn to work on the trains, which embodied all the technology and excitement of the age, a “ Type of the modern-emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent,” as Walt Whitman put it. The population increased sevenfold, from roughly 4,000 in the early 1850s to 30,000 in 1890, when Debs turned 35. Over the course of Debs’ youth, the railroads transformed the bucolic Wabash River town into a small industrial city. Other railroads followed, making Terre Haute into a transportation hub. ![]() The first railroad reached his hometown, Terre Haute, Indiana, from Indianapolis, in 1852, three years before his birth to Alsatian immigrant parents, who named the boy Eugene Victor after French novelists Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo. Debs and the growth of the rail industryĭebs’ life was bound up with the rail industry. His long life-from locomotive fireman, to trade unionist, to socialist candidate for American president, to class war prisoner-holds crucial lessons for today’s workers. ![]() Of particular importance is the life of the great socialist worker and railroader, Eugene V. As railroad workers prepare for a confrontation against the corporations, the government and the union bureaucracies that falsely claim to “represent” them, they must learn from and grapple with their own history. ![]()
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