The Incendiary Eugene V. Debs Essay

Dane Andrews
Mr. Gunnink
AP Language and Composition
12/15/2015
The Incendiary Eugene V. Debs During the turn of the 20th Century, the United States of America was a great but turbulent empire: internationally powerful, but domestically destitute. Workers in the United States were often subjected to harsh working conditions and pittances for wages, and were controlled by monopolies and corporate interests. Enter Eugene Victor Debs, a former Democrat-turned-Socialist who advocated on behalf of workers for the entirety of his adult life. His plethora of works employ a histrionic and unifying voice, coursing with rousing belligerence and an unfettered ferric despondency for the layman's plight while zealously maintaining stark logic and intimacy
For example, Debs said, “We must stand avowedly, face front, for labor-for the people who produce, who render needed service, and who are useful and necessary to the world” ("The American Labor Party"), as well as “Look here, my good friend, do you know how absolutely impossible a thing it is getting to be in this overcrowded country for even a willing man to work?” ("The Tramp"). In both of these instances, he utilizes language that brings him and his audience together and histrionically ennoble them: he massages his audience’s egos, claiming that they are useful and necessary to the world; he sides with their struggles to find and maintain work. By bringing himself as a representative to the workers of the world, he creates a dichotomy between laborers and industrialists that will help back his arguments for the rest of his respective pieces, making the listeners more apt to agree with him. For example, he calls upon the “Brothers of the American Railway Union” ("Proclamation to the American Railway Union"), bringing in not only unifying language, but language that invokes the association with family and familial ties, a concept that is universal. This familial language helps create a sense of intimacy between Debs and his audience, which further aligns Debs’ audience with his
One such example is in the Eight-Hour Workday, when he wrote about “the emancipation from wage slavery,” making historical reference to debtors prisons in Colonial America--an archaic relic of oppression--and the then-current problem of sharecropping, which was little better than legal and overt slavery. In doing this, Debs sets a precedent that this struggle was longer and more pervasive than just the work place: he insinuated that Americans workers would fighting for their own revolution-given rights. This idea of social change was especially prominent given the particular time period of the speech—the Progressive era— which would enable Debs to push to change as society already began its upheaval of its norms, such as Prohibition. He takes it even further, invoking the eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii ("The Tramp") and “Bartholdi's Goddess of Liberty with her torch enlightening the world [that] has succumbed to the ravages of time,” ("Proclamation to American Railway Union")--the Statue of Liberty. Debs uses these allusions to align his cause with powerful occurrences and events that, in contrast to some previous passages, are seen as nearly sacrosanct; he invokes a spiritual and ethereal ethos that places him and his movement for equality on a higher plane than his corporate contemporaries, giving him not only an ideological but also a mythological