June 15, 2018
One hundred years ago, Eugene
V. Debs spoke out against the First World War in a speech in Canton, Ohio — and
was given a 10-year prison sentence for it. Marlene Martin recounts
one of the most famous moments in the history of socialism in the U.S.
THE FIRST thing Eugene V. Debs
did when he walked to the stage in Canton, Ohio, on the afternoon of June 16,
1918, was to gesture toward the courthouse building where he had just been
visiting fellow socialists imprisoned for speaking out against the war.
“I have just returned from a
visit over yonder where three of our most loyal comrades are paying the penalty
for their devotion to the cause of the working class,” he told the crowd of
1,200 who had come to hear the best-known leader of the Socialist Party and its
presidential candidate four times before.
To shouts and cheers, Debs
said: “I am proud of them; they are there for us, and we are here for them.
Their lips, though temporarily mute, are more eloquent than ever before, and
their voice, though silent, is heard around the world.”
Those words were prophetic
about Debs himself. He was arrested and prosecuted for making that speech in
Canton on charges of sedition under the Espionage Act. Found guilty, he was
sentenced to 10 years in a federal prison.
But Debs, like his comrades in
Canton, was “heard around the world” and for generations to come, despite the
government’s temporary success in silencing him. One hundred years later, his Canton
antiwar speech is a powerful and inspiring statement of the socialist
principles of internationalism and opposition to imperialist war.
WORRIED THAT sentiment against
the First World War would grow, Congress looked for a way to enforce support
for it. So a year before Debs’ speech, it passed the Espionage Act, which made
it a criminal offense to publicly oppose the war (by the way, this law is still
on the books).
By the time Debs spoke in
Canton, many socialists comrades had already been arrested and jailed. He told
the crowd that he had to be careful with what he said because there were
“certain limitations placed upon the right of free speech.”
Still, he said, “I may not be
able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think.
I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant
and coward in the streets.”
Debs was the most popular
socialist of his time. He was beloved for his ability to put into words the
cause of the working-class movement and the vision of socialism, with so much
passion and animation.
In a speech he once gave to a
majority Polish-speaking audience, Debs couldn’t understand why the audience
was so responsive when they probably understood little of what he said. A
Polish socialist explained simply: “Debs talks to us with his hands, out
of his heart, and we all understood everything he said.”
James Cannon, who became a
main leader of the socialist movement in the years that followed, heard Debs
speak several times and described the effect he had on people, including
himself:
He was a man of many talents,
but he played his greatest role as an agitator, stirring up the people and
sowing the seed of socialism far and wide. He was made for that, and he gloried
in it...to wake people up, to shake them loose from habits of conformity and
resignation, to show them a new road.
Debs had come to socialism via
trade unionism. As the head of the American Railway Union, he became the leader
of the 1894 strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company — a huge struggle
just south of Chicago that pitted thousands of workers against a greedy and
paternalistic employer.
The strike lost, and Debs was
convicted and sent to jail for six months for defying an injunction against the
union. Because he stood firmly with the workers and was willing to go to jail
for it, Debs won great respect and admiration.
In his jail cell, Debs
received and read books, pamphlets and letters sent to him from socialists
everywhere. He read Capital and became a convinced Marxist. Following
his release, he joined the socialist movement, running five times for president
between 1900 and 1920. In 1920, while he was in jail for the speech in Canton,
he won almost a million votes.
DEBS’ CANTON speech expressed
the source of his unwavering devotion to the working class:
I am suspicious of leaders,
and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day
in the week.
If you go to the city of
Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will
find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians,
members of Congress, and misrepresentatives of the masses — you will find that
almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks
to places of eminence and distinction.
I am very glad I cannot make
that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the
ranks. When I rise, it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.
Debs also emphasized that it
was these very ranks that were called upon to fight the wars, and not the
“master class” that “always declared the wars,” but never had to fight them:
“[T]he subject class has always fought the battles,” Debs said. “The master
class has all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing
to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.”
This statement of socialism’s
principled opposition to imperialist war came as the majority of the socialist
movement had collapsed into support for their own governments in the First
World War. In Europe, revolutionaries such as the Bolsheviks in Russia were a
small minority in opposing the war when it began in 1914.
Because of the U.S.’s late
entry into the war, the Socialist Party didn’t face the same challenges, but by
the time of Debs’ speech, many prominent socialists had left the party over
this question. Upton Sinclair, the well-known socialist author of The
Jungle, had urged Debs to support the U.S. war effort, but Debs wasn’t
swayed. In
a 1915 article, he wrote:
I am not a capitalist soldier;
I am a proletarian revolutionist...I am opposed to every war but one; I am for
that war with heart and soul, and that is the worldwide war of the social
revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may
make it necessary, even to the barricades. There is where I stand and where I
believe the Socialist Party stands, or ought to stand, on the question of war.
Less than a year before the
Canton speech, the Bolsheviks in Russia had been leaders of the revolution that
established the first-ever workers’ state — whose top priority was to end
Russia’s participation in the carnage of the First World War.
In Canton, Debs celebrated the
fact that revolutionary Russia had called for all sides in the war “to send
representatives to a conference to lay down terms of peace that should be just
and lasting.”
“Here,” Debs said, “was the
supreme opportunity to strike the blow to make the world safe for democracy.
Was there any response to that noble appeal...for universal peace? No, not the
slightest attention was paid to it by the Christian nations engaged in the
terrible slaughter.”
Defending the Russian
revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky against charges that they made a “traitorous
peace with Germany,” Debs declared that “in this alert and inspiring
assemblage, our hearts are with the Bolsheviki of Russia.”
AS IN all his speeches, Debs
was able to explain the vision of a socialist society.
In Canton, he focused on the
example of coal production, where there was an abundance of coal in the ground,
yet thousands of coal miners weren’t working. The capitalists manipulated
production and created an artificial “coal famine” to keep profits high:
Here is the coal in great
deposits all about us; here are the miners and the machinery of production. Why
should there be a coal famine upon the one hand and an army of idle and hungry
miners on the other hand? Is it not an incredibly stupid situation, an almost idiotic
if not criminal state of affairs?
We Socialists say: “Take
possession of the mines in the name of the people.” Set the miners at work and
give every miner the equivalent of all the coal he produces. Reduce the workday
in proportion to the development of productive machinery.
Debs extended the point to
highlight the fundamental injustice at the heart of capitalism:
In the present system the
miner, a wage slave, gets down into a pit 300 or 400 feet deep. He works hard
and produces a ton of coal. But he does not own an ounce of it. That coal
belongs to some mine-owning plutocrat who may be in New York or sailing the
high seas in his private yacht; or he may be hobnobbing with royalty in the
capitals of Europe, and that is where most of them were before the war was
declared.
The industrial captain, so-
called, who lives in Paris, London, Vienna or some other center of gaiety does
not have to work to revel in luxury. He owns the mines and he might as well own
the miners...
We Socialists say: “Take
possession of the mines; call the miner to work and return to him the
equivalent of the value of his product.” He can then build himself a
comfortable home; live in it; enjoy it with his family. He can provide himself
and his wife and children with clothes — good clothes — not shoddy; wholesome
food in abundance, education for the children, and the chance to live the lives
of civilized human beings, while at the same time the people will get coal at
just what it costs to mine it.
Debs drove home the point of
needing to change the whole system: “[A] change is certainly needed, not merely
a change of party, but a change of system; a change from slavery to freedom and
from despotism to democracy, wide as the world.”
DEBS WAS 63 when he made the
Canton speech, and his health had been failing. The prison conditions to come
made things worse.
Within two weeks of the
speech, Debs — who was already known to the Democratic Wilson administration as
“a traitor to his country” — was indicted and charged with sedition. He went on
trial in the fall — instead of putting on a defense, Debs asked to address the
court, and spoke for more than two hours.
He was convicted, and at his
sentencing hearing, Debs again spoke, making one of
his most famous statements: “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship
with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better
than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a
lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and
while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Incarcerated in federal prison
on a 10-year sentence, Debs lost weight, suffered from excruciating headaches
and had kidney problems. Nonetheless, he put his own condition aside to make
himself available to fellow prisoners. He would open his cell to anyone who
wanted, reading letters aloud that they couldn’t read themselves, listening to
their troubles, writing letters for them and giving encouragement.
Woodrow Wilson is said to have
maintained his vindictive attitude toward Debs to the very end, rejecting
proposals for clemency even from Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the
anti-red witch-hunter of his day. In 1921, the new President Warren Harding
commuted Debs’ sentence to time served.
On the day he left prison,
Debs nevertheless felt badly about leaving his fellow prisoners behind. “They
trust me and depend on me,” he said to a friend, “and I hate to leave them.”
In his biography of Debs
titled The Bending Cross, Ray Ginger writes that the warden suspended the
rules on the day Debs was to be released, allowing the prison’s 2,300 convicts
to:
crowd against the front wall
of the huge prison building. Each chest became a sounding board. The ivied
walls trembled with the vibrations from a shouted farewell. Eugene Debs turned
and paused for a moment, facing his friends, tears streaming down his cheeks,
his hat held immobile, high above his head.
Such was the power of Eugene
Debs. After his release, he wrote a book in tribute to those he was
incarcerated with, called Walls and Bars, which talks about prisons as
warehouses for people who essentially suffer from the “crime” of poverty. His
proposal rings true to this day: “Abolish the social system that makes the
prison necessary and populates it with the victims of poverty.”
Socialists today stand proudly
in the tradition of Debs, and take inspiration from his words from 100 years
ago that remain as powerful as they ever were. Toward the end of his speech in
Canton, Debs repeated the importance of being part of the socialist movement:
The little that I am, the
little that I am hoping to be, I owe to the Socialist movement. It has given me
my ideas and ideals; my principles and convictions, and I would not exchange
one of them for all of Rockefeller’s bloodstained dollars. It has taught me how
to serve — a lesson to me of priceless value. It has taught me the ecstasy in
the handclasp of a comrade.
It has enabled me to hold high
communion with you, and made it possible for me to take my place side by side
with you in the great struggle for the better day; to multiply myself over and
over again, to thrill with a fresh-born manhood; to feel life truly worthwhile;
to open new avenues of vision; to spread out glorious vistas; to know that I am
kin to all that throbs; to be class-conscious, and to realize that, regardless
of nationality, race, creed, color or sex, every man, every woman who toils,
who renders useful service, every member of the working class without an
exception, is my comrade, my brother and sister — and that to serve them and
their cause is the highest duty of my life.
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