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| Eugene Debs fought his final Presidential campaign from a prison cell. |
It is no secret or surprise to
socialists that the American revolution was laced with contradictory
aspirations from the very beginning. For every Tom Paine there were ten Burkian
conservatives who saw the new nation as epitomising the promise of early
bourgeois capitalism and imperialism.
Once the 13 states had freed
themselves of the Royal British yoke, private property was enshrined to include
the right to own human slaves, taxation for the greater good was derided as a
breach of liberty and the invocation of the Common Weal to defend the
individual left the USA at odds with its espoused values from the very start –
a phenomenon that persists to this very day and the director Oliver Stone has
described as “the United States’ unique
mixture of idealism, militarism, avarice and realpolitik.”
In the first seven decades of the 19th
century, many Americans pursued what they termed their “Manifest Destiny” – the
destruction of Native peoples' cultures and seizure of their lands in the belief that
this was God’s Will. In a country rich in natural resources, and unimpeded by
archaic social conventions or physical infrastructure, American capitalists
were able to seize the technological initiative from older European states and
develop their own industrial revolution. Many fortunes were made, reinforcing
the sense of the American Dream of individualism, but ignoring the reality of a
growing, struggling proletariat. With mass migration often of the poorest
sections of European societies used to undercut the wages of existing labour,
American capitalism soon developed along the same elitist, unequal lines as the
European versions.
But so did opposition to this twisted
polity grow. Revolutionary America had supported the French revolution at least
initially and the social ideas forged then were as influential in the USA as
elsewhere. Tom Paine’s personal involvement in both was an important boost, but
other Americans during the 19th century looked for a better society
too. The anti-slavery movement was a key part of this, as were some Christian
groups and socialist thinkers, including the poet Walt Whitman, whose espousal
of humanitarian equality ran through his widely disseminated writings
Abraham Lincoln and many Republicans,
while not embracing socialism as an ideology, invoked socialist ideas in their
programmes – the fluidity of US politics may be obscured to some extent by the
ideological stance of the parties in recent decades. It’s interesting to note
that the American contribution to the international Republican forces in the
Spanish civil war was titled the Abraham Lincoln brigade.
Additionally, perversely perhaps as it
was an outcome of the conquest of native America that gave the space and
resources for it, many socialists established living communes to create
socialist societies from scratch across the US territories. As many as 1,200
existed by the 1880s, seeking to exist separately from capitalist society.
However, large scale capital was as
prevalent in dominating Washington politics as it was in any European
government. In particular, it mobilised to oppose the rising trade union
movement. American unions were organised on
craft lines and were inherently conservative, focussing on the narrow interests
of their members alone rather than wider society or economics. And it was in
this environment that Eugene Victor Debs was to first come into activism and
agitation for change.
Debs was born in 1855 to French
migrants who ran a prosperous, thoroughly bourgeois textile mill in Terre
Haute, Indiana. However, he dropped out of public school at the age of 14 and
worked on the railways, eventually becoming a night fireman on the run from
Terre Haute to Indianopolis and earning a dollar a night. He joined the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875 and attended the national convention,
soon becoming editor of the Fireman’s Magazine and later Grand Secretary of the
BLF. He also became active in local politics and served one term as a Democrat
on the Indianna State Assembly.
Debs initially took a fairly
conventional view of unionism, seeking co-operation and concentrating on
services for members. But as time went by, he saw the injustices of the
railroad companies, who were among the richest and worst-behaved corporations.
After the Burlington strike was brutally broken in 1888, he grew closer to the
idea of industrial unions and a more confrontational stance – especially as the
two decades from 1975 were seeing the first major recession in the newly industrialised
world.
He left the BLF and in 1893 with George
Howard as vice-president, Debs established the American Railway Union – the
first industrial union in the USA and inclusive of unskilled workers. Unlike
the non-striking BLF, the ARU held its first strike in 1894 against the Great
Northern Railway and membership rocketed as workers organised across the US
railways. Chicago, Illinois, was at the centre.
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| The Pullman strike was violently suppressed. |
This led in the following year to the
Pullman Strike, which Debs initially opposed, but embraced when he saw it was
the clear demand of the members.
The Pullman corporation used the
economic crash of 1894, the Great Panic, to justify cutting wages by 28%. In
response, the ARU’s members in Illinois refused to handle Pullman coaches and
this was eventually extended until 80,000 rail workers boycotted Pullman.
The press called the action the Debs Revolt and denounced him as an enemy of the human race, not just management.
The Government sent the army against the strikers on the grounds that the
boycott was interfering with the mail, which was a federal offence. 30
railwaymen were shot dead, thousands were sacked and blacklisted, and Debs was
arrested and jailed. He was sent to Woodstock prison for six months.
It was there that Debs began to
question the system that had killed workers and imprisoned him.
"...I began to read and think and dissect
the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be
shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke. The writings of
Bellamy and Blatchford early appealed to me. The Cooperative Commonwealth of
Gronlund also impressed me, but the writings of Kautsky were so clear and
conclusive that I readily grasped, not merely his argument, but also caught the
spirit of his socialist utterance – and I thank him and all who helped me out
of darkness into light."
He was visited in prison by Victor
Berger, a newspaper editor from Milwaukee in Wisconsin, where there was a
rising socialist movement. Berger talked passionately about his socialism and
gave him a copy of Das Kapital which
Debs described as “providential” and
after reading it, he emerged from jail with a transformed view of the world and
his mission in it.
Returning to his union duties, he
persuaded the ARU to join with the Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth
to establish the Social Democracy of America. This still had a focus on Chicago
with 11 of its 50 branches there, but had a reach throughout the Eastern USA.
It sought to combine trade union organising and socialist communes with
political action. But it quickly became evident that the communes were ill at
ease with engaging with mainstream political and industrial life. At its first
convention in 1898, it split and Debs and Berger went with the minority to set
up the Social Democratic Party, under which title he stood for President in
1900, winning 87,000 votes, 0.6% of the total.
In 1901, the SDP merged with elements
of the much older Socialist Labor Party to form the Socialist Party of America,
which was to endure until 1972.
The Socialist Party was a broad church
initially at any rate. It joined the Second International of global socialist
parties and caught and shaped the radical sense of the time, named historically
as the Progressive Era, when a wide range of people and thinking coalesced to
demand change in the USA. The appalling conditions in factories and big city
housing, the rural poverty across the mid-west and the South, the continuing
exclusion and exploitation of people of colour, created a powder keg that even
some capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie found either morally unacceptable or
politically dangerous, or both. Although many reformers did not embrace
socialism, socialist thinking and proposals heavily influenced them and even
eventually policy-making.
Debs himself was influenced by Marx
but also by Whitman, Paine, Wendell Phillips and the later writings of Mark Twain.
He often invoked religious imagery in his speeches, referencing Jesus as a
working craftsman, but organised religion was of no interest to him – the
pulpit always sided with the Masters in his view.
Debs sought peaceful revolution, but
accepted that at the point of revolution, some degree of force would be
necessary and although he embraced electoral politics, this was more about
having a platform to promote and spread socialism than to win legislative power
to change society by parliamentary means. He did not see himself becoming
President and believed that, when the time came, others would organise the new
society. In 1906, he said:
“I am not a Labor Leader;
I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses
to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you
are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led
you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as
your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”
Although he embraced the broad
movement, he was sceptical of the so-called “sewer
socialists”, who followed a community politics approach to develop
socialism from the ground up via existing institutions, especially at city
level. This tactic did enjoy some success. In its time, the Socialist Party
won over 1,200 elections, including two members of Congress – Berger and Meyer
London – as well as 70 Mayors and 32 state legislators. Berger’s home city of
Milwaukee became a particularly centre of socialist government, implementing
widespread reform of housing, education and welfare that helped hundreds of
thousands of people. But inevitably they had to, or were seen to, compromise
with the existing system.
In this context, the decision of the
party to join with the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (the
Wobblies), headed by Big Bill Heywood, in 1911, was set to divide the party.
Heywood debated with Morris Hillquit, a champion of the sewer socialists, in
1911 in New York and the event dissolved into trading personal insults,
presaging the 1913 split when the IWW left the party.
But Debs himself, although firmly on
the left of the party, managed to transcend many of these divisions and even
after various splits maintained productive personal relationships with
socialists of all tendencies. He stood for President of the USA five
times. His 1912 run was in many ways the most successful, while his final 1920
one was the most striking and poignant.
In 1912, reflecting the turmoil of the
progressive era and the rise of socialist thinking and home and abroad, as well
as all the contradictions of a now rapidly expanding but inherently grossly
unequal and inequitable capitalist system, the Presidential election was a
uniquely four-way contest.
Former Republican President Theodore
Roosevelt, uncle of the later Democrat President FDR, formed his own Bull Moose
Progressive Party to challenge as a capitalist reformer. Roosevelt openly
boasted of stealing what he termed the "reasonable" elements of socialism.
Woodrow Wilson for the Democrats
grabbed large parts of the Socialist Party platform including housing and child
labour reform, while for the Republicans, incumbent President Taft denounced
Debs and his party an unAmerican.
Debs ran a powerful,
well-funded campaign across the entire USA. The Socialist Party was at
its peak with 150,000 members and the IWW on board. There were well-organised
parties across the country, education programmes in place and a dozen daily
newspapers as well as some sympathetic journalists and editors in more
mainstream journals.
His line was revolutionary. The
interests of capital and labour were and always would be in conflict and could
never be reconciled. Liberals and progressives might seek to ease the symptoms
of the conflict; only socialist would remove the cause by demolishing the
capitalist system and starting anew. He opposed regulating corporations –
instead, the people should simply seize them.
The resulting vote saw Wilson win with
Roosevelt defeating Taft – the best 3rd party result in history and
the worst outcome for a sitting President. For the SPA and Debs, the
901,555 votes and 6% share was the strongest electoral performance for
socialists anywhere in the world at that time.
In the years that followed, the
Democrats were to neutralise some of the Socialists' appeal by tackling a few of the worst
excesses of capital while the IWW split weakened the party significantly, with
a decline of almost a third in membership by 1914.
The First World War brought new
challenges – while Wilson initially promised to keep the USA out of the war,
his anglophile attitude caused concern among many German immigrant communities,
many of which were close to the Socialist Party. Berger himself was of German
background and this led to the Socialists opponents tarring their opposition to
the war as being pro-Kaiser rather than anti-war.
Debs himself spoke out against the
war, but found some influential socialists, including the author Upton
Sinclair, arguing for a war for democracy. A party referendum was 90% for
neutrality in 1915, but there were clear tensions within the party and some
were directed at members of German descent.
However, he did not run for President
in 1916 although in many ways fear of war had improved Socialist prospects. He
cited exhaustion as his reason, though he stood in his native Indianna for
Congress, coming a strong second. Meanwhile, a journalist, Allan Benson, stood for
President and polled 600,000 votes – his anti-war platform was founded on no
offensive war being legal unless a popular referendum ratified it. Woodrow Wilson, running on a repeated promise
of no war, narrowly won re-election and soon reneged completely on his commitment
to peace.
When the time came and Wilson called
for war in April 1917, Debs returned to national anti-war campaigning,
especially when the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act outlawed anything deemed
to interfere with the war effort and a number of socialists were jailed as a
result.
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| Woodrow Wilson, War President |
He welcomed the then ongoing Soviet revolution:
“Out of Russia, the land of despotism and
dungeons, of exile and death to political agitators flashed the red flame of
revolution in the night of Capitalism’s wars.”
Capitalism was, he believed, about to
collapse, so “Must we send the workers of one country against those of another
because a citizen has been torpedoed on the high seas, while we do nothing
about the 600,000 working men that are crushed each year needlessly under our
industrial machinery?”
And facing the denunciation of Wilson
and Roosevelt and other warmongers clamouring for a so-called patriotic war, Debs said:
“I have no country to fight for; my country is
the Earth and I am a citizen of the world. Let the capitalists do their own
fighting and furnish their own corpses and there will never be another war on
the face of the earth.”
In June 1918, joining a protest
outside Canton prison in Ohio where three socialists were being held, Debs
denounced the war as one of conquest and plunger where “the Master class has always declared the war and the subject class has
fought the battles.”
He was arrested and charged with 10
breaches of the Espionage Act. He pled guilty and on 18 November 1918, a week
after the war had ended, he was jailed for 10 years. His sentence began on 13
April 1919 and was marked soon after by a May Day riot in Cleveland.
Debs ran again for President from his
prison cell, leading to leaflet asking people to vote for Prisoner 9653 with a
photograph of a now increasingly frail man. In spite of the huge crackdown on
socialists and anarchists in the two years after the war, with J Edgar Hoover
making his virulent anti-communism evident for the first time, Debs saw his
vote tally reach over 919,799, the highest vote ever achieved by an American
socialist.
He was released by the new President,
Warren Harding, who hosted him at the Whitehouse and he returned to a hero’s
welcome in Indiana. But he was a broken man and his health never recovered from
prison. He wrote on prison reform, but his main activity was being treated for
a circulatory disorder and he died of heart failure in Illinois in October 1926
at the age of 70.
The Socialist party itself declined
and split almost as soon as Debs was imprisoned – it divided over whether or
not to join Comintern and faced severe attacks sponsored by the Government as
part of the Red Scare of 1919 to 1921 – thousands were imprisoned, sacked or
deported; socialist meetings were broken up by thugs and police; 5 Socialists
elected and re-elected to the New York state assembly were expelled by the
Republican majority for being “unAmerican”; trumped up charges of violence were
brought against activists and some were even lynched – an act the press saw as
cleansing of the American soul.
But socialism remained influential
with five million striking in 1919 alone. After backing the independent “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s
1924 campaign for left progressivism which took 17% of the national vote, the
Socialist Norman Thomas stood for President several times from 1928 onwards,
peaking at 884,000 votes in 1932. Socialist party members were even employed by
FDR to help shape the New Deal in response to the rise of populists like Huey
Long in the 1930s.
But the Socialist Party lost support
when it first admitted and then split with Trotskyists after disagreements on
the Spanish civil war. By 1941 it had declined to a small core and this fell
further when it opposed the war against Hitler. Although many American
Communists joined it after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, it fought
its final Presidential campaign in the same year, polling just 2,044 votes. There
was some revival in the 1960s in the civil right movement, but the party was
split over whether to seek to influence the Democratic Party or take a more independent
stance. In 1972, it renamed itself Social Democrats USA before splitting again
into the Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats. With the recent rise in
interest in socialism in the USA, it has been largely bypassed by followers of
Bernie Sanders and younger people looking for an alternative to neoliberalism - Sanders' use of the terms "socialism" and "revolution" is of course open to some discussion, but his relative success in mobilising a whole swathe of younger people to the concept shows the growing thirst for real change in contemporary American politics.
Debs himself remains a slight quixotic
character, representing the optimism of the age as well as the apocalyptic
character it took on alongside rampant capitalism and the industrial-scale
world war. He was passionate, committed and risked his all for his cause – he
fought capital and in response capital denounced him, beat and killed his comrades, threatened and imprisoned him
and eventually in effect murdered him. But his words echo through time and are
as relevant today as ever.
As he faced a decade in jail, these are some
passages from his speech to the jury at his 1918 trial and committal:
I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills
and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled
to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed
of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the
remorseless grasp of Mammon, and forced into the
industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being
starved body and soul....
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.
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, and 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 look-out knows that
the midnight is passing – that relief and rest are close at hand.
Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for
the cross is bending, midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.
I am ready to receive your sentence.
