The Durham daily globe. (Durham, N.C.) 1889-1894, 1894-07-04
EUGENE Y. DEBS
at Whose. Command Tens of Thousands
of Men Stop Work.
New York World

NS" AOAn OA
4 few DAYS ago nobody outside OF the
American Railway Union ever heard OF
Mr.. Eugene V. Debs. Now Ma Debs is
exercising an authority that is not given
to the car Of Russia, and that has never
been delegated Ia any man who live,
under ii liberal and constitutional gov
ernmeut. He has waved his hand in
Chicago, and twenty railroads came to a
standstill a tract of country almost as
big as Europe stood mOmentarily para
lived at his beck.
The great city of Chicago, with over a
millionOf people, was commercially help
less against his fiat. Two hundred thou
sand people living in the suburbs Of that
city were cut off from their homes, travel
was virtually suspended, trade languished,
manufacturers ceased, traffic with the
West was stopped, distress and discom-
fort penetrated into all the shops and
homes, anxiety walked the streets with
fOrcbOdings.
Freight was piled up on the wharVes
and in the depots. A great deal of it was
perishable, and every hour of its deten,
tion meant thousands Of dollars Of loss
to somebody. The great stock yards were
struck with a blight. 1ncalculabie suf-
fering of dumb brutes extended over
acres.
At the corner of Archer aVenu and
Halstead street a mob prevented the
handling of milk trains. Fifty thousand
children and perhaps as many invalids
would in another twelve hours begin to
share in the misery which Mr.. Debs had
decreed should come to all alike.
On Thursday night the Illinois Cen
trail railroad issued a bulletin which was
virtually an order, saying that it could
not handle any more live stock or perish.
able freight. Do you know what that
means to a great city, that lives day by
day npon the s~ustenance that come over
its railroads?
Westward from Chicago Mr.. Debs'
| imperious hand was stretched. Kansas
was dumb and trade stood still. Every
| through train had been abandoned on
the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe
road on Friday. The United States
mails for 600 miles had to catch the local
trains from town to town and beg their
way across the State. The tracks in To-
peka were covered with cars held as if
enchanted by Mr.. Debs. The Northern
Pacific, so far as Montana in concerned,
was still; not a throughtrain was running.
In far.away New Mexico the Santa Fe
system had been ordered to go out of
business temporarily by Mr.. Debs, or
until Mr.. Debs telegraphs permission for
the normal and necessitous traffic Of the
domain to be resumed. Passengers were
| budding about the water tanks on the
great alkali plains and locking YEARLY
| across the great desert for cars that Mr..
Debs did not permit to come or go.
Overland travel was stopped in Califor-
MIA. Business, life and death, love, adj
venture and politics must wait for Mr..
Debs.
But it is not only westward that this
new star of empire takes his way. No
pent-up Utica contracts his powers. He
would have it understood that the whole
boundless continent is his. He wagged
his little finger and the stagnation moved
to Cincinnati. Twelve hundred men
obeyed him there and all the roads
onooo+ 4l,o IT, Lo,r n rI tho TOon EIonI1p
went into a syncope.
New York, lying as it does CONNER
cially in the lap Of New Jersey, began to
feel that mysterious Mr.. Debs, like the
Black Death, was spreading over the con
tinent, and there was no escape from
him.
E. V. Debs, who has suddenly come tC
view as the director of this boycott
is a young man. He was born in Terra
Haute, Ind, in 1865, on Guy Fawkes
day. His father was a family grocer
there. The son tended store in the day
time and got his education at night
His first work was in the paint shops O
the Vandalia railroad, from which posi-
ton he rose to be a fireman On a locOmo'
tive running between Terre Haute anC
Vandalia.
1t was not, however, until he Joined s
lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive
Firemen that he developed his ambition
He was sent as a delegate to the conven
tons and ultimately became editor Of the
Locomotive Firemen's Magazine.
In 1884 he was sent to the state legis
lature by the democrats. In 1879 he wa
elected city clerk of Terre Haute. II
1898 he set TO work to organize TIT
American Railway Union.
Personally Mr.. Debs is an earnest
quiet, determined man, with a good dea
of undemonstrative egotism. No one il
Terre Haute ever suspected him of being
either a PHILOSOPHER or a general. Hi