Re: [blind-democracy] Remembering Eugene V. Debs

One of the truly great men. Too bad his contributions have been
sanitized and then buried. But look around, we are feeling a stirring
in the ground. I think that Eugene Debb is coming back to life.

Carl Jarvis

On 9/18/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> 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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