Right. And it seems that each generation has its own version of
censorship. President Wilson did not invent the iron glove. Before
WWI there was the Spanish American War with its own governmental
controls. And before that came the many Indian Wars, our own bloody
Civil War, and on and on, each perceived threat to the Establishment
was met with one sort of censorship or another.
But of course we are living in the here and now, so naturally today's
censorship is the most horrible of all. But I recall the Red scare of
the late 40's and early 50's. I watched several of my parents close
friends have their lives ruined. And I remember during WWII, people
breaking up all of their knickknacks that had been made in Japan,
because it was Un-American to have anything made by the Evil Japs.
Of course probably most of us lived through the Commie Threat, with
the rush to build bomb shelters. There was a spy under every bed and
in every closet.
So even though today's censorship is focused on Muslims, it's the same
fear that has driven us from the very beginning of Time.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/19/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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World War I.
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