Isn't it ironic that our country's attitudes haven't really changed since 1917
when that Espionage Act was passed? And our truly great men and women aren't
permitted to lead?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2015 10:56 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Remembering Eugene V. Debs
http://socialistaction.org/remembering-eugene-v-debs/
Remembering Eugene V. Debs
Published September 17, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
EugeneVDebs-245x300
By MARK T. HARRIS
In the annals of American socialism, the name of Eugene V. Debs stands out as
the most prominent personality in the movement’s history. Vermont Senator
Bernie Sanders, the self-described independent socialist now campaigning for
the Democratic presidential nomination, considers Debs one of his heroes.
It’s almost certain Debs would not have approved of Sanders running for
nomination in the Democratic Party. As a leader of the early 20th-century
Socialist Party, Debs once said he was more proud of going to jail for leading
a rail workers’ strike than early in his career serving in the Indiana state
legislature as an elected Democratic representative.
Unfortunately, there’s a tendency among defenders of the status quo to turn
great historical figures into harmless icons, saintly martyrs to high ideals
who loved everyone and threatened no one. This to a degree has happened with
the Rev. Martin Luther, King, Jr., a radical fighter for civil rights in his
day that the political establishment now treats with a kind of perfunctory
reverence.
Sanders may have his own ideas about Debs’ legacy, but at least he recognizes
the historical significance of the socialist leader’s life.
These days Debs (1855-1926) is not nearly as well known as King, or as he was
in his own lifetime. In this way the historical legacy of Debs has endured a
similar affront, reducing him in popular culture to more or less a historical
footnote. As such, conservative AFL-CIO bureaucrats probably don’t mind
referencing the old Debs legend as a labor hero once in a while, forgetting his
militant opposition to World War I or support for the Bolshevik-led 1917
revolution in Russia.
Radical vision, principled politics
Actually, some of the sanitizing occurred while Debs was still alive, as in
socialist editor David Karsner’s sympathetic biographical portrayal of Debs
published in 1919, when he was in federal prison for attacking the war effort
and supporters were trying to win public sympathy to his case. But Debs was far
more than the benevolent humanitarian with a little book of “kind sayings,” as
writer Floyd Dell of The Liberator complained about Karsner’s portrayal, which
he and others thought downplayed his revolutionary principles.
In fact, Debs was an articulate, far-reaching critic of American society,
staunchly anti-capitalist and opposed to both the Democratic and Republican
parties, which he saw as controlled by Wall Street. In his five campaigns as
the Socialist Party candidate for president of the United States, Debs
excoriated the economic exploitation of workers, including the then rampant
abuses of child labor, with rare oratorical skill. He advocated for unions in
all major industries and promoted a vision of socialism as grassroots economic
democracy. In a deeply racist, patriarchal society, he was also staunchly
anti-racist and pro-women’s rights.
When war hysteria swept the country, Debs openly defied the warmongers to
oppose U.S. entry into World War I. He did so not as a pacifist, but because he
saw the world war as an inter-imperialist dispute among the ruling classes of
competing capitalist nations. He saw no reason for working people to die for a
war they had not started nor in which they had any real stake.
Such was the climate of wartime intolerance that Debs was charged with sedition
for making a speech against the war in Canton, Ohio in June 1918. His sentence
was 10 years in prison. The sedition charge fell under the Espionage Act of
1917, a law promoted by President Woodrow Wilson that essentially criminalized
free speech. Indeed, under the wartime repression several thousand labor,
anarchist, socialist, and pacifist voices were similarly prosecuted. Even
distribution of antiwar literature through the U.S. mail became illegal. For
his part, Wilson labeled Debs a “traitor.”
Debs appealed the conviction, but in 1919 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his
original 10-year sentence. The court took precedent from a similar case earlier
that year involving another convicted Socialist Party leader. Then Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes had made the famous argument that free speech didn’t mean
the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. Holmes metaphor was specious. In
this case, the crowded theater was a European battlefield red in blood and
violence, the fire of inter-imperialist war and millions of casualties very
much a reality.
In truth, Debs was yelling fire in a burning theater, enraging the likes of the
sanctimonious Wilson by identifying the ruling classes of Europe and America
for what they essentially were—arsonists of human hope and civilization. Mass
murderers.
If the “liberal” Wilson had his way, the aging Debs would have stayed in prison
for the full sentence—and likely died there. When word came in 1920 of Wilson’s
refusal to commute Debs’s sentence, despite notable public pressure to do so,
the socialist leader smuggled a statement out of the prison denouncing Wilson
as “the most pathetic figure in the world. It is he, not I, who needs a
pardon,” declared a defiant Debs.
Ironically, it was Republican President Warren G. Harding who would commute
Debs’s sentence in December 1921. Considering that even A.
Mitchell Palmer, the U.S. Attorney General who led many of the wartime raids
and arrests of radicals, had come to favor Debs’s release from prison, Wilson’s
personal vindictiveness toward Debs was likely fueled by the way the latter’s
principled antiwar stance exposed the hypocrisy of the president’s moralistic
posturing as some sort of progressive visionary of “world peace.”
Such was the world of that time that the man who sent some 116,000 young
Americans to their battlefield deaths, who took a hammer blow to the free
speech rights of peace advocates, would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
1919. Yet Debs, who never killed anyone and was guilty only of the deed of the
word, had his freedom cruelly taken away.
Such our world also remains. Now another Nobel Prize winner in the White House
embraces this same Espionage Act with vigor unprecedented since Wilson’s day.
This time the persecuted include Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, John
Kiriakou, and other “whistleblowers” who dare to expose U.S. war crimes and
threats to political freedoms by the U.S national security state.
A man of a different cloth
As a principled left-wing socialist, Debs was cut from a different cloth than
most mainstream politicians, then and now. How many career politicians today
would be willing to go to prison for their views and ideals? In the 2008
primary campaign, then-Democratic Senator Barack Obama couldn’t even bring
himself to openly declare his support for same-sex marriage rights, which he
did in fact privately support.
Instead, fearful of losing votes, he publicly insisted he only supported “civil
unions” for gays and lesbians.
This admission comes from former Obama advisor David Axelrod in his recently
published book, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.” Obama was following
Axelrod’s advice to lie about the issue, counseling the future president that
he would lose support from conservative Black churches. That’s not to
particularly single out Obama. After all, that’s just politics!
Actually, for Debs that was not politics. For him, political leadership always
meant telling the people the truth. “I am not going to say anything that I do
not think,” declared Debs in the 1918 speech that earned his conviction for
sedition. Debs believed in organizing working people to realize their own
power, through independent social and political action, union organizing, and
building grassroots mass movements for social justice. It was a vision of a new
society that inspired him, one in which popular economic democracy would rule
and inequality and exploitation would be vanquished to history’s proverbial
dustbin.
Sustained by his identification with the socialist cause, Debs went to prison
at the age of 63 characteristically optimistic and defiant. After a few months
in a West Virginia facility, he was transferred to the federal penitentiary in
Atlanta.
Debs did not exactly languish in prison. In 1920 he ran for president in the
national elections on the Socialist Party ticket, earning over 900,000 votes,
or about 3.5 percent of the total vote. Indeed, his fighting spirit remained
strong. But Debs was also in poor health in prison. He suffered from chronic
myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, a condition he had for much
of his adult life. The stress of the prison environment, including poor
nutrition, caused his health to worsen. At times he was hospitalized, while his
weight dropped from
185 pounds to 160.
When finally released in December 1921, Debs returned home to Terre Haute,
Ind., greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of more than 30,000 people. There he
hoped to rest and regain his strength, but as the months passed his health did
not improve. In the summer of 1922, Debs decided to register as a patient at
the naturopathic Lindlahr Sanitarium in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst, Ill.
Debs stayed at Lindlahr for more than four months, benefiting from a strict but
healthful diet, exercise, physical therapy, nature walks, and other restorative
treatments. He became fond of the Lindlahr staff, telling his brother that his
palpitations, back pain, and exhaustion had lessened considerably as a result
of the “nature cure” regimen he was following.
Debs returned to work for the Socialist Party, speaking around the country, and
returned again to Lindlahr in 1924. Unfortunately, by 1926 Debs health began to
take another turn for the worse. Larger doses of digitalis prescribed by his
Terre Haute physician, Madge Stephens, MD, could not reverse his failing heart
condition. In the final weeks of his life, Debs returned to Lindlahr on Dr.
Stephen’s advice, hoping for yet another reprieve from his suffering. After
collapsing while walking back from a visit at the nearby home of friend Carl
Sandburg, Debs lapsed into a coma and died on October 20. He was 70 years old.
The political legacy
As a politician, Debs was primarily a speaker and writer, skills he used to
great effect in his campaigns for elected office. As a party leader, Debs had a
tendency to avoid the many internal factional debates in the all-inclusive
Socialist Party. In doing so he sometimes became, as contemporary socialist and
early Communist Party leader James P. Cannon later recalled, a pawn of those
who by every measure were far less the leader Debs was.
Yet perhaps even this weakness stemmed from one of Debs’s attributes. By nature
Debs was an engaged, generous personality, capable of “beautiful friendliness,”
as Cannon described. As a man steeped in the spirit of human solidarity, it
went against the grain of his personality to engage too much in the sometimes
heated, vituperative debates that can mark the internal life of a political
party. Instead Debs preferred to reserve the full flame of his words and spirit
for those who oppressed the ordinary people, the poor, the dispossessed and
exploited whose cause he spent his life championing.
Whatever his limits, the record of Debs stands in tribute to the heights an
individual can ascend in devoting their life to the cause of human liberation.
Unlike a wealthy narcissist like Donald Trump, Debs saw himself essentially
only as an instrument of the cause he served.
When in the 1920s Carl Sandburg told him he hoped to write a tribute to his
friend, Debs begged off, telling the great writer and poet he feared there was
“not enough of me to warrant any such venture.” Nor was Debs a politician like
Hillary Clinton, long ensconced in the visionless “realpolitik” of the
Washington beltway, a liberal war hawk and friend of Wall Street, charging
private groups $200,000 or more a speech.
Neither was his brand of socialism limited to democratic reform of capitalism,
to softening the harsh facts of inequality under capitalism without getting rid
of capitalism itself, as Bernie Sanders represents.
The life and legacy of Eugene V. Debs stands as a rich and vibrant testament to
one man’s dedication to a liberated future. Indeed, Debs was an individual for
whom solidarity with his fellow humans was in his blood.
Debs also thought for himself, and he evolved. His experience as a labor
organizer for the American Railway Union pushed him toward socialism, which he
didn’t embrace until he was nearly 40 years old. Once he did he never looked
back, abandoning the more conservative outlook of his younger years.
As a socialist, Debs denounced as irrational and unjust a capitalist system
that created extravagant wealth for a few at the top, while millions of
ordinary working people struggled to get by. Most important, he thought it was
possible to build a new, cooperative society, to transcend the irrationality,
waste, and greed of the capitalist economic system, and to end wage slavery and
all forms of social oppression. He called this socialism.
Rose Karsner: “He belonged to us all”
Coincidentally, during Debs’s last stay at Lindlahr in 1926, Cannon, then
national secretary of the International Labor Defense (ILD), a civil rights
group established by the Workers (Communist) Party to defend political
prisoners, was also a patient at the Elmhurst clinic.
When the ILD was established the year before, Debs in typical fashion had
offered to serve on its national committee.
While at Lindlahr, Cannon’s partner, Rose Karsner, recalls how they wanted very
much to talk to Debs, but under the circumstances were hesitant to intrude upon
the ailing man. On the day after their arrival, Karsner saw Debs sitting in the
reception room while waiting for his room to be made up. In the moment she
decided to very briefly say hello to Debs.
“I went over to Gene and attempted to make myself known, but I believe he did
not get my name,” recalled Karsner in a letter written on ILD letterhead to
Theodore Debs a week after his brother’s death. “It was quite clear to me that
he was very weak and I tried to get away. But Gene, in his characteristic way,
would not permit me to leave. He did not know who I was, but he heard me say
‘comrade’ and that was enough for him. He sat and spoke to me for a few
seconds.”
As Karsner concluded, “Personally, I feel that Gene belonged to us all and
especially to those of us engaged in work which characterized his activities
most—the united action of ALL in behalf of the working class, regardless of
political, industrial, or philosophical opinions. He rose above party
differences and factional lines, and we love him for it. The tradition of Gene
is the greatest treasure of the younger generation.”
In the twilight of his days, there was revealed perhaps in that fleeing moment
with Rose Karsner something of the full measure of Eugene V.
Debs, a man for whom the word “comrade” was always enough for him.
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Posted in Labor, Marxist Theory & History. | Tagged Debs, socialism,
World War I.
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