Touch and Go by Studs Terkel

reveals to us the deep affection and love Debs’ fellow inmates of Atlanta felt for him, and what happened during his farewell as his old buddies met him at the Atlanta gates.
    As they joyfully and tearfully embraced and fervently kissed one another, a low rumbling in the background intensified. Warden Fred Zerbst, in violation of every prison regulation, had opened each cell block to allow more than 2,300 inmates to throng to the front of the main jail building to bid a final good-bye to their
friend. Turning away from the prison, Gene started down the long walkway to the parked car. As he did, a roar of pain and love welled up from the prison behind him. With tears streaming down his face, he turned and, hat in hand, stretched out his arms. Twice more, as he walked to the car, the prisoners demanded his attention. Twice more he reached to embrace them . . . 7
    There is a grotesque epilogue to the story of Gene Debs and his life and meaning. The dean of the Yale Law School, who advised LBJ during his lowest days, the Vietnam War, continued as governmental wise man. He was LBJ’s coldest warrior during the Vietnam War. His name was Eugene V. Rostow. His folks were admirers of old Gene; so was he. Did the irony of this escape the former Yale Law School dean?
    Some years earlier, at the Wells-Grand Hotel, a guest, Harold Hanson Utterbach, swears he attended Debs’ funeral; likewise that he had heard Bryan at his most eloquent at the Coliseum in 1896; and furthermore, that he saw Babe Ruth point to the right-field stands of Cubs Park in advance of the Bambino’s long-flying home run to that very region. I’ve a hunch he was a liar, but what the hell, his stories made the day go faster. This information was offered in 1936, about a year or so before we ceased our hoteliers’ life. I figured this one story might be truth; the arithmetic made sense. In any event, he was a fairly old gaffer and entitled to some poetic license. I know a little something about that.
    I now roam back to the rooming house where the time had come for my father to demand a change in our lives. He could not spend his last days as an invalid. There was some work he had to do. My mother, astonishingly, agreed that a change was necessary. They decided on an amicable pro-tem split. My mother would join Meyer in New York and relax. My father, through a loan from his brother-in-law, raised enough to lease a men’s hotel in Chicago.

4
    The Convention That Would Never End
    A -la-ba-ma!Twenty-foah votes fo Un-da-wood! How clinically I remember the sound and slight fury of that voice of the Deep South. Translated into English, the single language we should all speak, as our self-proclaimed philologists demand, it was: “Alabama, twenty-four votes for Underwood.” His was, for 102 ballots, the first delegate’s voice to be heard during each session. I don’t know his name, simply that the same Southern voice spoke again and again. Tom Walsh, Senator from Montana, was the chairman of the 1924 convention. He was my hero. My elder brother had told me that Thomas Walsh, of the no-nonsense full black mustache, was the bête noire of Anaconda Copper, the corporation that ran Montana. So, too, it was with the junior senator from that state, his fellow populist, Burton K. Wheeler.
    Let’s go back a bit. It is summertime, 1924, and the living is fairly easy. I am the guest at a resort in South Haven, Michigan. My mother insisted that I was suffering from something called rheumatic heart fever and that fresh air of the lake would help. As well as the good food. In fact, the favorite—the only—question my fellow guests put to one another was: “What’s for dinner?”
    For some reason I cannot determine, even now, at ninety-four, what the attraction those radio voices had for me was. My interest in this convention simply happened because it was the same year that Senator Bob LaFollette was running for