Showing posts with label : # Eugene V. Debs # Pullman strike # Socialism # Presidential Candidate' # IWW# History # Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label : # Eugene V. Debs # Pullman strike # Socialism # Presidential Candidate' # IWW# History # Politics. Show all posts

Saturday 5 November 2022

Eugene Victor Debs ( 5/ 11/1855 - 20/10 /26 ) The American Socialist Who Once Campaigned for President From Prison

 


Outspoken  Socialist firebrand, political activist  and labour organiser Eugene Victor Debs  was born on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Marguerite Bettrich and Jean Daniel Debs, two immigrants from Alsace, France. They came to the U.S. in 1849 and worked in the grocery business.
At the age of14. Eugene dropped out of High school and took a job as a paint scraper at Vandalia Railroad, where he earned just $.50 a day. He soon moved up to become a railroad fireman, shoveling piles of coal into the locomotive’s firebox for more than $1 each night . This was at a time when workers toiled for 16 hours a day, six days a week. 
In the waning years of the 20th century Debs emerged as a working class leader, a hero of the railroad workers of the U.S and Canada. After working for the railroad, Debs went on to  lead the Fireman's union, and assist in the organising of other rail unions and ultimately organise the nations first industrial union - the American Railway Union ( ART).
By the turn of the 20th century, Debs became the leader of the Socialist party, and from there went on to assist in the founding of the Industrial Workers  of the World  (IWW) aka the Wobblies, helping to pioneer a fighting union politics that organized all workers, regardless of skill, craft, or occupation, with Debs becoming the beloved figurehead of American radicalism. Debs story is the story of labor battles in industrialising America, of a working class politics grown directly of the Midwestern heartland, and of a distinct American vision of Socialism.
 The wobbly motto is ' An injury to all  is an injury to all.' They were noted for their use of poetry and song to promote their radical ideas, publicise strikes and other protests and generally present the case that still  holds up today, that there can be no solution to industrial warfare, no end to injustice and want, until the profit system itself is abolished.In striving to unite labor as a class in one big union. The IWW also seeks to build the structure of a new and better social order within the shell of the old system which fails to provide for the needs of all.Combined with a commitment to workers solidarity which they have a rich history off, along with their militant tactics. 
 The wobblies  are still going strong , still organising, still resisting.In these divided times,of economic despair,  they continue to be a strong radical voice that stands defiantly, on behalf of the people, following an old tradition of solidarity that does not seperate along lines of nationality, race or gender, speaking too to the unemployed, the sick, and  the marginalised  spreading messages of hope among the carnage that is  currently being unveiled.
In 1875 Debs was elected secretary of the Terre Haute lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. His intelligence and commitment, coupled with his conservative outlook (he argued against participation in the nationwide railroad strikes of 1877), attracted the attention of the brotherhood’s leaders. By 1881, he was national secretary of the brotherhood, increasingly its spokesman on labor issues, and its most tireless organizer. Simultaneously, Debs entered politics as a Democratic candidate for city clerk in 1879 when only 23. First elected over Republican and Greenback-Labor party candidates, Debs was overwhelmingly reelected in 1881. Four years later, he was elected to the Indiana State Assembly with broad support from the wards of Terre Haute’s workers and businessmen.  Debs organized the American Railway Union, which waged a strike against the Pullman Company of Chicago in 1894
During the 1880s Debs’s ideas began to change. At first a firm proponent of organization of workers by their separate crafts, he resisted the industrial organization implicit in the efforts of the Knights of Labor and ordered his members to report to work during the Knights’ 1885 strike against the southwestern railroads. But his year-long involvement (1888-1889) in the strike against the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad altered these views. He now thought craft organization divisive, a hindrance to working people’s efforts to secure fair wages and working conditions. And concentrated corporate power, he argued, had a debilitating effect on the political rights and economic opportunity of the majority of Americans. By 1893 he had resigned his position as secretary of the brotherhood and begun organizing an industrial union of railroad workers, the American Railway Union (aru).
The  1894 strike against the Pullman Company of Chicago marked a second turning point in Debs’s thinking. Pullman Palace Car Company, was  the largest railway car company in the United States at the time, George Pullman the owner had a business plan that was, if nothing else, creative. He built a company town around his factory in Illinois, named it after himself and made it a requirement that the workers live there (and pay rent to their employer, guess who?). Some historians have said of the town of Pullman (now a suburb of Chicago), that it was "a version of the Indian reservation system.
 The ARU, even before its first convention, was besieged with reports from Pullman as to the unfairnesses of the company towards its employees including a unilateral; 25% cut in wages in 1893, while all of the world reeled from a great economic depression. This, in spite of a discreet increase in the annual dividend payment Pullman sent to his stockholders. 


The workers at Pullman contacted the ARU and Debs paid the town a visit. With Debs in command, the ARU agreed with the suggestion made by Pullman workers, and called for a boycott of all trains in America pulling Pullman cars. It was a risky move but the ARU fell behind its new members from Pullman. Train traffic in and out of Chicago collapsed almost immediately. The press, owned by smaller tycoons, came out in Pullman's side calling Debs a "dictator" and "King Debs". The New York Times called Debs "an enemy of the human race". The cover of the popular magazine, Harper's Weekly had an image of Debs sitting on an idle Chicago railway yard, wearing a crown. 
Railroad owners hired security firms to break the strike and violence broke out. US President Grover Cleveland sent in the federal militia, railway cars were set on fire and inevitably, gun fire broke out. The courts helped out in issuing an injunction on this basis:
 
"… (that) the interstate transportation of persons and property, as well as the carriage of the mails, is forcibly obstructed, and that a combination and conspiracy exists to subject the control of such transportation to the will of the conspirators."
 
This led to Debs being arrested with other boycott leaders on July 17, 1894, and jailed. This broke the union as Debs later described:
 
"Once we were taken from the scene of action, and restrained from sending telegrams or issuing orders or answering questions, then the minions of the corporations would be put to work..
"Our headquarters were temporarily demoralized and abandoned, and we could not answer any messages. The men went back to work, and the ranks were broken, and the strike was broken up, … not by the army, and not by any other power, but simply and solely by the action of the United States courts in restraining us from discharging our duties as officers and representatives of our employees."
 
Clarence Darrow signed up as Debs' lawyer and argued the case before the Supreme Court of the United States in March of 1895, to release Debs and his union brethren from their prison cells. The decision went against the union, with Justice David Josiah Brewer writing:
 
"A most earnest and eloquent appeal was made to us in eulogy of the heroic spirit of those who threw up their employment, and gave up their means of earning a livelihood, not in defence of their own rights, but in sympathy for and to assist others whom they believed to be wronged. We yield to none in our admiration of any act of heroism or self-sacrifice, but we may be permitted to add that it is a lesson which cannot be learned too soon or too thoroughly that under this government of and by the people the means of redress of all wrongs are through the courts and at the ballot-box, and that no wrong, real or fancied, carries with it legal warrant to invite as a means of redress the cooperation of a mob, with its accompanying acts of violence."
 
The unified power of railroad management working intimately with federal authorities  ultimately broke the strike but  Debs emerged from this experience as an avowed and committed socialist and dedicated himself to the start-up of a number of institutions now prominent in the American politics and international labor law such as Social Democracy of America, the Social Democratic Party of the United States, the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Debs questioned the ultimate ability of trade unions to combat successfully capital’s economic power and, after the 1896 elections, looked upon socialism as the answer to working people’s problems.
Between 1900 and 1920 Debs was the Socialist party’s standard-bearer in five presidential elections. In 1912, in a four-way race with Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, he received 6 percent of the vote-,highest total ever.
Between campaigns, Debs was a tireless, charismatic and passionate  speaker who sometimes called on the vocabulary of Christianity and much of the oratorical style of evangelism—even though he was generally disdainful of organized religion.
Debs often was uncomfortable with his position  as a  leader, despite the Socialist's great love for him and his oratorical skills. Debs  personal values  and lifelong philosophy can be summed up by the following quotes from him  : 
 
"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
 
" I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world."
 
" In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor  and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to decieve and overawe the People. "
 
"Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth... While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
 
As an  organizer he traveled the nation defending workers in their strikes and industrial disputes. Although many workers enthusiastically applauded Debs’s vision, sadly relatively few actually  endorsed his political program.
On June 16,1918 Debs made his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I which was raging in Europe. 
 
 ". I   am for that war with heart and soul, and that is thee world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades." 

For this speech he was arrested and convicted in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio under the war-time espionage law. He was his own attorney and his appeal to the jury and his statement to the court before sentencing, are regarded as two of the great classic statements ever made in a court of law. He was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison.also disenfranchised for life meaning he could never again vote again in America. At his sentencing he told the court:
 
"Your honor, I ask no mercy, I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more fully comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come into their own."
 
His conviction was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States who, again, ruled against him and upheld both the conviction and sentence.
 Debs began serving his sentence in Moundsville, W. Va. State prison and was transferred to Atlanta, Ga. Federal prison two months later. His humility and friendliness and his assistance to all won him the respect and admiration of the most hardened convicts.
Over time, calls went out that Debs be pardoned  bringing this remark this from President Woodrow Wilson:
 
"This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration."
 
Debs conducted his last campaign for president as prisoner 9653 in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and received nearly a million votes, though he had been stripped of his citizenship. 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.
Refusing to ask for or accept special treatment, he was confined to his cell for fourteen hours a day and was allotted twenty minutes a day in the prison yard. He wore a rough denim uniform. He ate food barely fit to eat. He grew  gaunt and weak. He  became an American folk hero, a principled advocate of free speech, and even as he grew sicker Convict No. 9653 refused to ask for a pardon.
While he was accustomed to campaigning by train and speaking in front of thousands, in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Debs was allowed  to give one political statement every week, which was then handed over to news wires. Supporters did the campaigning for him on the ground, making posters featuring the slogan “From Atlanta Prison to the White House, 1920” and campaign buttons that showed Debs in a prison jumpsuit with the words “For President: Convict No. 9653” splashed across them. It wasn't so much a campaign as it was a protest against what many thought was Debs's unconstitutional imprisonment.
On Christmas Day 1921 he was released without a pardon but with a commuted sentence. He was 66. 
But with the war over, President Harding pardoned Debs and invited him to the White House. “I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally,”Harding said  upon meeting him. Indeed, Debs had left prison almost as a mythic figure to his followers—50,000 of whom lined up to watch his train pull in upon his return to Terra Haute.
Though the meeting with Harding was as close as he ever got to the White House, Debs proved he didn't need to win an election to make his voice heard.
Sadly Debs never recovered from his time in prison  and lived most of of what remained of his life  in a sanatorium.  He died on October 20, 1926, at the age of 70 in Elmhurst.
 Throughout his lifetime Debs was the nation’s most widely known and eloquent exponent of a socialist alternative to American capitalism. Unlike many other American and European socialist leaders, Debs sought to avoid complex and often divisive ideological debates over the pace and purity of a theoretical socialist revolution and sought instead to connect the idea of socialized control over the industrial economy to indigenous American traditions of political democracy, utopian individualism, and radical reform.
He is remembered as an opponent to big corporations and World War One. American socialists, communists, and anarchists honor his compassion for the labor movement and motivation to have the average workingman build socialism without large state involvement. He motivated the left in America and continues to this day. In the legacy of Eugene Debs there is much more than a speech here, a prison term there, and nor did he push the plow of labor rights by himself. But on countless occasions he said what had to be said, urged on his nervous union leaderships to do what was right in spite of the overwhelming force and might of the wealthy in America of his generation. In this, he always put himself on front lines and paid the prices that were collateral to his duties as a social justice crusader: jail, fines, ridicule in the press, but also the heavy personal cost of not just those personal injuries but also of being necessarily loud and alone at the front of a still unawares and very suspicious population as slowly, the American citizen became aware of the importance of unions and of worker rights.
Ten years after his death  later his beloved wife, Kate, was buried beside him. Debs was cremated and his ashes were interred in Highland Lawn cemetery, Terre Haute, with only a simple marker. Today, his home in Terre Haute, Indiana has the designation of a National Historic Landmark, and a website http://debsfoundation.org/   dedicated to him Debs citizenship was finally restored in 1976, fifty years after his death and in 1990, the U.S. Department of Labor named Debs a member of its Labor Hall of Honor.
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. 
 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. who used his  voice in defense of the common man, his legacy can  best summed up in his own words.:
 
 "Yes, I am my brother's keeper," he wrote. "I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe myself.

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 short Debs is a socialist icon that we so need  in our present times.