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.
Of particular importance is the life of the great socialist worker and railroader, Eugene V. Debs. 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.
Debs and the growth of the rail industry
Debs’ life was bound up with the rail industry. 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. Other railroads followed, making Terre Haute into a transportation hub. Over the course of Debs’ youth, the railroads transformed the bucolic Wabash River town into a small industrial city. The population increased sevenfold, from roughly 4,000 in the early 1850s to 30,000 in 1890, when Debs turned 35. Immigrants poured in, including one Johann Dreiser from Germany, whose son, the great novelist Theodore Dreiser, was
— source wsws.org | Tom Mackaman | 9 Oct 2022