An ad for the Socialist party in the election of 1904, featuring noted Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, along with images of the “working man” and of industry. Debs was a founding member of the first industrial union in the US, the American Railway Union (ARU) – notice the locomotive behind his portrait on the left-hand side of the poster.
CONNECTIONS WITH THE JUNGLE
In chapter 28, Jurgis attends an open meeting of the Socialist party and is inspired by the enigmatic speaker. Sinclair devotes several pages to the speaker’s oratory, beginning on page 337.
A union leader , Debs began his political career as a Democrat, elected to the Indiana General Assembly (Senate) in 1884. He educated himself about Socialism while serving a prison term for failing to obey an injunction involving a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894. He emerged from prison a committed Socialist.
Debs was noted for his speeches and for calling on the vocabulary of Christianity and employing the oratorical style of evangelism.
Socialist leader Eugene Debs delivering his famous Canton, Ohio speech against World War I in 1918.
Compare Sinclair’s fictional speech to the real one delivered by Eugene V. Debs in 1900. Read Eugene V. Debs’s “The Outlook for Socialism in the United States.”
Though the soundtrack is old and rather shaky, you can listen to this speech of Debs’s, delivered by a contemporaneous actor, in the following rare footage:
The Literary Works 