09/04/2026
For Kurt Vonnegut, Labor Day was about the dignity of working people and the moral responsibility of those who stood alongside them. Yet Vonnegut was candid about the limits of his own experience. When he received the Eugene V. Debs Award in Terre Haute in 1981, he joked, “I am no labor hero,” adding that the award “should always go to a working stiff.” In the same speech, when asked what radicalizes Americans, his answer was strikingly simple: “America.”
Two Hoosiers in particular embodied the ideals Vonnegut admired. He never met Eugene V. Debs, but considered him a personal hero and repeatedly quoted the Terre Haute labor leader’s belief that “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Vonnegut did meet Indianapolis labor organizer Powers Hapgood, whom he later described in Jailbird as a wealthy Harvard graduate who went to work in a coal mine because he believed a true friend of working people should be a worker
himself. Vonnegut wrote that he was “enchanted by brave veterans like Powers Hapgood,” and resolved, “If I am going to go on living, I had better follow them.”
