Early Life
At age two he was taken with his father to Tsarist Russia to educate himself in Russian as well as learn his father's business of tannery. They both returned in 1868.
In 1881, Eugene's father Joseph sent him to America in order to escape the draft of the Kaiser as well as to hide some of his father's socialist literature. Eugene had to safeguard his father's literature because it had already landed Joseph in jail a few years before. Eugene was only 19 years old when he arrived in New York City. He started to work for a German drafting company, but eventually moved to Chicago and started the Eugene Dietzgen Drafting Company, which is still in operation today under different management.
At the time Eugene was heavily influenced by his father, one of Karl Marx's favorite philosophers on socialist theory. As a result, Eugene was very working-class conscious and provided his factory workers with many amenities not found in the mid 19th century. Some of these amenities include separate bathrooms for men and women, open windowsills with flowers decorating the air, and a general atmosphere of a healthy working community. The original building still stands at 218 23rd Street, Chicago.
Eugene's first wife could not bear him children, so he got divorced and moved to Zurich, Switzerland, in 1912. There he met his second wife, Jansen, and they had a total of six children: three boys and three girls.
Read more about this topic: Eugene Dietzgen
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“It’s not the men in my life, but the life in my men.”
—Mae West (1892–1980)