Eugene Debs recalled as free-speech champion

Bill Knight column for Mon., Tues. or Wed., July 2, 3 or 4, 2018

The day before July 4th, when we celebrate independence with patriotic zeal, a patriotic troublemaker who for years led labor unions, controversial strikes and anti-war activists will be remembered with the video release of the documentary: “American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs.”

Debs was a native Indianan and five-time Socialist Party candidate for U.S. President who had several ties to Illinois. He gave his life to organized labor, and to standing up to the federal government in work disputes and in World War I – a life recounted in Yale Strom’s 97-minute film.

A high school dropout, Debs had worked for railroad companies cleaning engines or cars, painting, and as a fireman; worked for a grocery while attending night school; and then returned to railroading as a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF). There, he rose in its ranks and eventually edited its monthly magazine until 1894, when the periodical moved to Peoria.

A losing BLF strike in 1888 against the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad influenced Debs’ organizing skills, and the Great Northern Railway strike by Debs’ American Railway Union six years later was successful. Months later, after workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company launched a wildcat strike over pay cuts, Debs expanded the union and called for a boycott of trains with Pullman cars. Supposedly to keep the U.S. mail running, Democratic President Grover Cleveland used the U. S. Army against the strike, and court injunctions to halt the work stoppage (later made illegal) were filed.

The 1894 strike involved a quarter of a million workers in dozens of states. Defended by Clarence Darrow before the U.S. Supreme Court, Debs was convicted of violating the injunctions and imprisoned. During his detention in the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, Ill., he read voraciously and emerged as a socialist, eventually co-founding the Social Democracy of America (1897), the Social Democratic Party of America (1898), and the Socialist Party of America (1901).

Debs is recognized with an historical marker at the Old Courthouse and Sheriff's House in Woodstock, Ill., where he was first jailed for six months after defying a court order to end the strike. The marker’s installation last summer was controversial for not only his 1895 incarceration there, but for noting his devotion to socialism.

“You can see Debs as a labor leader; you can see him as a socialist,” said Woodstock Celebrates, Inc. board member Kathleen Spaltro. “You could also reconceptualize Debs as an American whose constitutional freedoms were violated twice … and who stands for citizens pushing back.”

Years later, World War I broke out, and contrary to conventional wisdom, it was relatively senseless (10 million died), a war involving no invasion but a callous “reboot” for Europe’s Great Powers – and a contributing factor to both Nazism and Stalinism. Many Americans objected to the nation’s involvement, and hundreds were imprisoned for voicing opposition. Democratic President Woodrow Wilson used the Espionage Act of 1917 as a bludgeon against dissent. Debs was arrested for speaking out against World War I’s draft, and he was tried as a traitor in the summer of 1918.

At Debs’ sentencing, he said, “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… Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”

His 10-year prison term was commuted three years later by Republican President Warren Harding, and upon Debs’ release from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary (where he ran for President for the last time, receiving almost 1 million votes), fellow prisoners cheered, and when he arrived home in Terre Haute, he was welcomed by a crowd of about 50,000 well-wishers. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1924

Another Illinois/Debs connection, sadly, is in Elmhurst, where in 1926 Debs became a patient at Lindlahr Sanitarium, where he died.

The movie “offers so many piquant moments through visual documents and a vivid narrative that highlighting one or another becomes difficult,” wrote labor historian Paul Buhle. “Debs and the socialist movement did not fail the U.S.; quite the reverse. He saw – and the film is quite clear about this – the world emerging from war as brutal, the war’s unprecedented slaughter as normalized, and a terrifying sign of what lay ahead.”