Eugene
Debs and the Kingdom of Evil
By Chris
Hedges
July
17, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- TERRE HAUTE, Ind.—Eugene Victor Debs, whose
home is an infrequently visited museum on the
campus of Indiana State University, was arguably
the most important political figure of the 20th
century. He built the socialist movement in
America and was eventually crucified by the
capitalist class when he and hundreds of
thousands of followers became a potent political
threat.
Debs
burst onto the national stage when he organized
a railroad strike in 1894 after the Pullman Co.
cut wages by up to one-third but did not lower
rents in company housing or reduce dividend
payments to its stockholders. Over a hundred
thousand workers staged what became the biggest
strike in U.S. history on trains carrying
Pullman cars.
The
response was swift and brutal.
“Mobilizing all the powers of capital, the
owners, representing twenty-four railroads with
combined capital of $818,000,00, fought back
with the courts and the armed forces of the
Federal government behind them,” Barbara W.
Tuchman writes in “The
Proud Tower: A
Portrait of the World Before the War,
1890-1914.” “Three thousand police in the
Chicago area were mobilized against the
strikers, five thousand professional
strikebreakers were sworn in as Federal deputy
marshals and given firearms; ultimately six
thousand Federal and State troops were brought
in, less for the protection of property and the
public than to break the strike and crush the
union.”
Attorney
General Richard Olney, who as Tuchman writes
“had been a lawyer for railroads before entering
the Cabinet and was still a director of several
lines involved in the strike,” issued an
injunction rendering the strike illegal. The
conflict, as Debs would write, was a battle
between “the producing classes and the money
power of the country.”
Debs
and the union leaders defied the injunction.
They were arrested, denied bail and sent to jail
for six months. The strike was broken. Thirty
workers had been killed. Sixty had been injured.
Over 700 had been arrested. The Pullman Co.
hired new workers under “yellow dog contracts,”
agreements that forbade them to unionize.
When he was in jail, Debs read the works of
socialist writers
Edward Bellamy
and
Karl Kautsky as
well as Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” The books,
especially Marx’s three volumes, set the “wires
humming in my system.”
“I was
to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of the
conflict. … [I]n the gleam of every bayonet and
the flash of every rifle the class struggle was
revealed,” he writes. “This was my first
practical lesson in Socialism.”
Debs
came to the conclusion that no strike or labor
movement could ultimately be successful as long
as the government was controlled by the
capitalist class. Any advances made by an
organized working class would be reversed once
the capitalists regained absolute power, often
by temporarily mollifying workers with a few
reforms. Working men and women had to achieve
political power, a goal of Britain’s Labour
Party for workers at the time, or they would
forever be at the mercy of the bosses.
Debs
feared the rise of the monolithic corporate
state. He foresaw that corporations, unchecked,
would expand to “continental proportions and
swallow up the national resources and the means
of production and distribution.” If that
happened, he warned, the long “night of
capitalism will be dark.”
This was a period in U.S. history when many
American Christians were socialists. Walter
Rauschenbusch, a Christian theologian, Baptist
minister and leader of the
Social Gospel movement,
thundered against capitalism. He defined the six
pillars of the “kingdom of evil” as “religious
bigotry, the combination of graft and political
power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit
(being ‘the social group gone mad’) and mob
action, militarism[,] and class contempt.”
Debs turned to the Bible as often to Marx,
arguing “Cain was the author of the competitive
theory” and the “cross of Jesus stands as its
eternal denial.” Debs’ fiery speeches, replete
with words like “sin” and “redemption,” were
often thinly disguised sermons. He equated the
crucified Christ with the
abolitionist John Brown.
He insisted that Jesus came “to destroy class
rule and set up the common people as the sole
and rightful inheritors of the earth.” “What is
Socialism?” he once asked. “Merely Christianity
in action.” He was fond of quoting the
poet James Russell Lowell,
who writes:
He’s true to God who’s true to man;
Whenever wrong is done.
To the humblest and the weakest,
’neath the all-beholding sun.
That wrong is also done to us,
And they are slaves most base,
Whose love of right is for themselves
And not for all the race.
It was also a period beset with violence,
including anarchist bombings and assassinations.
An anarchist killed President William McKinley
in 1901, unleashing a wave of state repression
against social and radical movements. Striking
workers engaged in periodic gun battles,
especially in the coalfields of southern West
Virginia, with heavily armed company goons,
National Guard units, paramilitary groups such
as the
Coal and Iron Police,
and the U.S. Army.
Debs,
although a sworn enemy of the capitalist elites,
was adamantly opposed to violence and sabotage,
arguing that these actions allowed the state to
demonize the socialist movement and enabled the
destructive efforts of agents provocateurs. The
conflict with the capitalist class, Debs argued,
was at its core about competing values. In an
interview conducted while he was in jail after
the Pullman strike, he stressed the importance
of “education, industry, frugality, integrity,
veracity, fidelity, sobriety and charity.”
A life
of moral probity was vital as an example in the
face of capitalist exploitation, but that was
not enough to defeat the “kingdom of evil.” The
owners and managers of corporations, driven by
greed and a lust for power, would never play
fair. They would always seek to use the law as
an instrument of oppression and increase profits
through machines, a reduction in wages, a denial
of benefits and union busting. They would
sacrifice anyone and anything—including
democracy and the natural world—to achieve their
goals.
Debs, if he could hear today’s proponents of the
“free market,” self-help gurus,
positive psychologists,
talk show hosts and the political class as they
exhort Americans to work harder, get an
education, follow their dreams, remain positive
and believe in themselves and
American exceptionalism,
would have scoffed in derision. He knew that
corporate power is countered only through
organized and collective resistance by workers
forced to fight a bitter class war.
Debs turned to politics when he was released
from jail in 1895. He was one of the founders of
the Socialist Party of America and, in 1905, the
Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW), or “Wobblies.” He was the Socialist Party
candidate for the U.S. presidency five times in
the period 1900 through 1920—once when he was in
prison—and he ran for Congress in 1916.
Debs
was a powerful orator and drew huge crowds
across the country. Fifteen thousand people once
paid 15 cents to a dollar each to hear him in
New York City’s Madison Square Garden. In his
speeches and writings he demanded an end to
child labor and denounced
Jim Crow and
lynching. He called for the vote for women, a
graduated income tax, unemployment compensation,
the direct election of senators, employer
liability laws, national departments of
education and health, guaranteed pensions for
the elderly, nationalization of the banking and
transport systems, and replacing “wage slavery”
with
cooperative industries.
As a
presidential campaigner he traveled from New
York to California on a train, called the Red
Special, speaking to tens of thousands. He
helped elect socialist mayors in some 70 cities,
including Milwaukee, as well as numerous
legislators and city council members. He
propelled two socialists into Congress. In the
elections of 1912 he received nearly a million
votes, 6 percent of the electorate. Eighteen
thousand people went to see him in Philadelphia
and 22,000 in New York City.
He
terrified the ruling elites, who began to
institute tepid reforms to attempt to stanch the
growing support for the socialists. Debs after
the 1912 election was a marked man.
On June 18, 1918, in Canton, Ohio, he denounced,
as he had often done in the past, the unholy
alliance between capitalism and war, the use of
the working class by the capitalists as cannon
fodder in World War I and the Wilson
administration’s persecution of anti-war
activists, unionists, anarchists, socialists and
communists. President Woodrow Wilson, who had a
deep animus toward Debs, had him arrested under
the
Sedition Act,
which made it a crime to “willfully utter,
print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane,
scurrilous, or abusive language about the form
of the Government of the United States” or to
“willfully urge, incite, or advocate any
curtailment of the production” of anything
“necessary or essential to the prosecution of [a
U.S. war, in this case against Germany and its
allies].”
Debs
did not contest the charges. At his trial, he
declared: “Washington, Paine, Adams—these were
the rebels of their day. At first they were
opposed by the people and denounced by the
press. … And if the Revolution had failed, the
revolutionary fathers would have been executed
as felons. But it did not fail. Revolutions have
a habit of succeeding when the time comes for
them.”
On
Sept. 18, 1918, minutes before he was sentenced
to a 10-year prison term and stripped of his
citizenship, the 62-year-old Debs rose and told
the court:
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.
I
listened to all that was said in this court
in support and justification of this
prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged.
I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic
enactment in flagrant conflict with
democratic principles and with the spirit of
free institutions. …
Your Honor, I have stated in this court that
I am opposed to the social system in which
we live; that I believe in a fundamental
change—but if possible by peaceable and
orderly means. …
Standing here this morning, I recall my
boyhood. At fourteen I went to work in a
railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a
freight engine on a railroad. I remember all
the hardships and privations of that earlier
day, and from that time until now my heart
has been with the working class. I could
have been in Congress long ago. I have
preferred to go to prison. …
I
am thinking this morning of the men in the
mills and the factories; of the men in the
mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of
the women who for a paltry wage are
compelled to work out their barren lives; of
the little children who in this system are
robbed of their childhood and in their
tender years are seized in the remorseless
grasp of Mammon and forced into the
industrial dungeons, there to feed the
monster machines while they themselves are
being starved and stunted, body and soul. I
see them dwarfed and diseased and their
little lives broken and blasted because in
this high noon of Christian civilization
money is still so much more important than
the flesh and blood of childhood. In very
truth gold is god today and rules with
pitiless sway in the affairs of men.
In
this country—the most favored beneath the
bending skies—we have vast areas of the
richest and most fertile soil, material
resources in inexhaustible abundance, the
most marvelous productive machinery on
earth, and millions of eager workers ready
to apply their labor to that machinery to
produce in abundance for every man, woman,
and child—and if there are still vast
numbers of our people who are the victims of
poverty and whose lives are an unceasing
struggle all the way from youth to old age,
until at last death comes to their rescue
and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless
sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty:
it cannot be charged to nature, but it is
due entirely to the outgrown social system
in which we live that ought to be abolished
not only in the interest of the toiling
masses but in the higher interest of all
humanity. …
I
believe, Your Honor, in common with all
Socialists, that this nation ought to own
and control its own industries. I believe,
as all Socialists do, that all things that
are jointly needed and used ought to be
jointly owned—that industry, the basis of
our social life, instead of being the
private property of a few and operated for
their enrichment, ought to be the common
property of all, democratically administered
in the interest of all. …
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.
This order of things cannot always endure. I
have registered my protest against it. I
recognize the feebleness of my effort, but,
fortunately, I am not alone. There are
multiplied thousands of others who, like
myself, have come to realize that before we
may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized
life, we must reorganize society upon a
mutual and cooperative basis; and to this
end we have organized a great economic and
political movement that spreads over the
face of all the earth.
There are today upwards of sixty millions of
Socialists, loyal, devoted adherents to this
cause, regardless of nationality, race,
creed, color, or sex. They are all making
common cause. They are spreading with
tireless energy the propaganda of the new
social order. They are waiting, watching,
and working hopefully through all the hours
of the day and the night. They are still in
a minority. But they have learned how to be
patient and to bide their time. The
feel—they know, indeed—that the time is
coming, in spite of all opposition, all
persecution, when this emancipating gospel
will spread among all the peoples, and when
this minority will become the triumphant
majority and, sweeping into power,
inaugurate the greatest social and economic
change in history.
In
that day we shall have the universal
commonwealth—the harmonious cooperation of
every nation with every other nation on
earth. …
Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for
no immunity. I realize that finally the
right must prevail. I never so clearly
comprehended as now the great struggle
between the powers of greed and exploitation
on the one hand and upon the other the
rising hosts of industrial freedom and
social justice.
I
can see the dawn of the better day for
humanity. The people are awakening. In due
time they will and must come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas,
looks for relief from his weary watch, he
turns his eyes toward the southern cross,
burning luridly above the tempest-vexed
ocean. As the midnight approaches, the
southern cross begins to bend, the whirling
worlds change their places, and with starry
finger-points the Almighty marks the passage
of time upon the dial of the universe, and
though no bell may beat the glad tidings,
the lookout knows that the midnight is
passing and that relief and rest are close
at hand. Let the people everywhere take
heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the
midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the
morning.
Three years later, Debs’ sentence was commuted
by President Warren Harding to time served, and,
in broken health, he was released from prison in
December of 1921. His citizenship was not
restored until five decades after his 1926
death. The labor movement and socialist party he
had struggled to build had been ruthlessly
crushed, often through violent attacks
orchestrated by the state and corporations and
mass arrests and deportations carried out during
the
Palmer Raids in
November 1919 and January 1920. The government
had shut down socialist publications, such as
Appeal to Reason and The Masses. The “Red Scare”
was used as an ideological weapon by the state,
and especially the FBI after it was established
in 1908, to discredit, persecute and silence
dissent.
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The
breakdown of capitalism saw a short-lived
revival of organized labor during the 1930s,
often led by the Communist Party, and during a
short period after World War II, and this
resurgence triggered yet another prolonged
assault by the capitalist class.
We have returned to an oligarchic purgatory.
Wall Street and the global corporations,
including the fossil fuel industry and the war
industry, have iron control over the government.
The social, political and civil rights won by
workers in long and bloody struggles have been
stripped away. Government regulations have been
rolled back to permit capitalists to engage in
abuse and fraud. The political elites, along
with their courtiers in the media and academia,
are hapless corporate stooges. Social and
economic inequality replicates the worst
excesses of the
robber barons.
And the great civic, labor and political
organizations that fought for working men and
women are moribund or dead.
We have
to begin all over again. And we must do so
understanding, as Debs did, that any
accommodation with members of the capitalist
class is futile and self-defeating. They are the
enemy. They will degrade and destroy everything,
including the ecosystem, to get richer. They are
not capable of reform.
I
walked through the Debs home in Terre Haute with
its curator, Allison Duerk. It has about 700
visitors a year. Rarely do these visits include
school groups. The valiant struggle by radical
socialists and workers, hundreds of whom were
murdered in labor struggles, has been
consciously erased from our history and replaced
with the vacuity of celebrity culture and the
cult of the self.
“Teaching
this kind of people’s history puts a lot of
power in working-class people’s hands,” Duerk
said. “We all know what that threatens.”
The walls of the
two-story frame house,
built by Debs and his wife in 1890, are covered
with photos and posters, including pictures of
Debs’ funeral on the porch and 5,000 mourners in
the front yard. There is the key to the cell in
which he was held when he was jailed the first
time. There is a photo of Convict No. 9653
holding a bouquet at the entrance to the federal
penitentiary in Atlanta as he accepts the
nomination from leaders of the Socialist Party
to be their 1920 presidential candidate. There
are gifts including an intricately inlaid wooden
table and an ornately carved cane that prisoners
sent to Debs, a tireless advocate for prisoner
rights.
I opened the glass panel of a cherry wood
bookshelf and pulled out one of Debs’ books,
running my fingers lightly over his signature on
the front inside flap. I read a passage from a
speech he gave in 1905 in Chicago:
The
capitalist who does no useful work has the
economic power to take from a thousand or
ten thousand workingmen all they produce,
over and above what is required to keep them
in working and producing order, and he
becomes a millionaire, perhaps a
multi-millionaire. He lives in a palace in
which there is music and singing and dancing
and the luxuries of all climes. He sails the
high seas in his private yacht. He is the
reputed “captain of industry” who privately
owns a social utility, has great economic
power, and commands the political power of
the nation to protect his economic
interests. He is the gentleman who furnishes
the “political boss” and his swarm of
mercenaries with the funds with which the
politics of the nation are corrupted and
debauched. He is the economic master and the
political ruler and you workingmen are
almost as completely at his mercy as if you
were his property under the law.
I
leafed through copies of Appeal to Reason, the
Socialist party newspaper Debs edited, which
once had almost 800,000 readers and the fourth
highest circulation in the country.
Debs, like many of his generation, was literate.
He read and reread “Les Misérables” in French.
It was his father’s bible. It became his own.
His parents, émigrés from
Alsace, named
him after the French novelists Eugene Sue and
Victor Hugo. His father read Sue, Hugo,
Voltaire, Rousseau, Dumas and other authors to
his six children. Debs found in Hugo’s majestic
novel the pathos of the struggle by the wretched
of the earth for dignity and freedom. He was
well aware, like Hugo, that the good were
usually relentlessly persecuted, that they were
not rewarded for virtue and that those who held
fast to truth and justice often found their way
to their own cross. But there was no other
choice for him: The kingdom of evil had to be
fought. It was a moral imperative. It was what
made us human.
“Intellectual and moral growth is no less
indispensable than material improvement,” Hugo
writes in an appendix to “Les Misérables.”
“Knowledge is a
viaticum;
thought is a prime necessity; truth is
nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty,
deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We
should feel the same pity for minds that do not
eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder
than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a
mind dying of hunger for lack of light.”
Chris
Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the Middle
East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported
from more than 50 countries and has worked for
The Christian Science Monitor, National Public
Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York
Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent
for 15 years.
This
article was first published by
Truthdig
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The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
