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I've recently been reading "The Bending Cross" by Ray Ginger which is the best biography of Debs out there and it raised some questions for me. So, Debs moved briefly to St. Louis in 1873, which would become the most radical part of the Great Railroad Strike just four years later in 1877. He moved to St. Louis for work on the railroads, unable to find any in Terre Haute. The entire time he was in St. Louis his mother begged him to quit the railroads before he was injured or killed and come back home, and he was eventually persuaded when one of his friends slipped and fell under and engine and was killed. He quit, moved back to Terre Haute, becoming a grocery store clerk and starting his involvement in the railroad brotherhoods becaus ehe understood the need for cheap insurance (the main benefits of the brotherhoods). Say that his friend does not die and Debs stays on the railroads in St. Louis until the Great Railroad Strike. What does his experience with this event do? Does an earlier radicalization prevent him from becoming an important name in the railroad brotherhoods and thus becoming a national figure? Or does his experience forever burn him on radicalism and do we see a Debs who remains an important partner of Samuel Gompers, perhaps becoming a President of the AFL or Governor of Indiana if he continues his career in the Democratic Party?
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