Adversary in the House

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Adversary in the House is the novelized story of Eugene Debs. Irving Stone has spared no effort in searching out the details of inheritance and environment which combined to make Debs one of the great figures in the evolution of our country — a labor and political leader unique in our history. One cannot read this book without feeling that the author entered upon his task as a labor of love. Debs emerges from the biographical novel a paragon of so many virtues that he seems at times scarcely human. Even the scenes in which on rare occasions he sought to assuage his despair, or his too intense jubilation, with whiskey do little to diminish the impression that the book is written by a worshiper of this extraordinary son of extraordinary parents.

Quite a number of the colloquies — notably some of those between Eugene and his younger brother. Theodore, and between Eugene and his German-derived wife, Kate Metzel — seem to this reviewer romanticized out of all reality. In fact, the picture Mr. Stone paints of the relationship between Debs and bis wife from beginning to end strains one’s credulity. It is as if Mr. Stone fashioned in his mind’s eye his ideal of a liberal leader and his concept of a woman whose values were each and every one antipathetic to that leader’s. He then placed them together in a relationship which he calls love in order to demonstrate the hollow destructiveness of the woman’s standards and the triumphant creativeness of the labor leader’s.

Mr. Stone is at his best when dealing with the struggles of Debs and his brother in establishing the Terre Haute local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and in subsequently building the American Railway Union, the first industrial union in the country. He is vital and true in his characterizations of the labor movement pioneers

— those spicy, generous, and courageous men and women who underwent so many hardships in helping to build our present industrial machine.

His description of the strike against George Pullman centering in Chicago and led by Debs— Debs compelled by deliberately incited provocation to abandon temporarily his faith in the Biblical injunction “Resist not evil” — is a fine piece of writing.

With deep and sympathetic understanding he has woven a rich tapestry of persons and action in an important epoch of our country, climaxed by Debs’s imprisonment in Atlanta Penitentiary at the direction of Woodrow Wilson and his ironically paradoxical release by Warren G. Harding.

The stirring description of the railroad builder, James J. Hill, paralleled by an equally moving portrayal of Daniel De Leon, iron-willed leader of the Socialist-Labor Party, is Mr. Stone’s symbolic way of posing the basic question of what type of leadership our nation and world are to have in the critical years ahead. Between Hill and De Leon the author places Debs, and, by inference, proclaims that only through leaders like Debs will democracy survive and prosper.

GARDNER JACKSON