Remembering Eugene V. Debs

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In the annals of American socialism, the name of Eugene V. Debs stands out as the most prominent personality in the move­ ment’s history. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-described independent so­ cialist now campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, considers Debs one of his heroes.

It’s almost certain Debs would not have approved of Sanders’ running for nomina­ tion in the Democratic Party. As a leader of the early 20th-century Socialist Party, Debs once said he was more proud of going to jail for leading a rail workers’ strike than early in his career serving in the Indiana state leg­ islature as an elected Democratic represen­ tative.

Unfortunately, there’s a tendency among defenders of the status quo to turn great his­ torical figures into harmless icons, saintly martyrs to high ideals who loved everyone and threatened no one. This to a degree has happened with the Rev. Martin Luther, King, Jr., a radical fighter for civil rights in his day that the political establishment now treats with a kind of perfunctory reverence. Sanders may have his own ideas about Debs’ legacy, but at least he recognizes the historical significance of the socialist lead­ er’s life. These days Debs (1855-1926) is not nearly as well known as King, or as he was in his own lifetime. In this way the his­ torical legacy of Debs has endured a similar affront, reducing him in popular culture to more or less a historical footnote. As such, conservative AFL-CIO bureaucrats proba­ bly don’t mind referencing the old Debs legend as a labor hero once in a while, forgetting his militant opposition to World War I or support for the Bolshevik-led 1917 revo­ lution in Russia.

Radical vision, principled politics Actually, some of the sanitizing occurred while Debs was still alive, as in socialist editor David Karsner’s sympathetic biographical portrayal of Debs published in 1919, when he was in federal prison for attacking the war effort and supporters were trying to win public sympathy to his case. But Debs was far more than the benevolent humanitarian with a little book of “kind sayings,” as writ­ er Floyd Dell of The Liberator complained about Kars­ ner’s portrayal, which he and others thought downplayed his revolutionary principles.

In fact, Debs was an articulate, far-reaching critic of American society, staunchly anti-capitalist and opposed to both the Democratic and Republican parties, which he saw as controlled by Wall Street. 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 la­ bor, 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.

When war hysteria swept the country, Debs openly defied the warmongers to oppose U.S. entry into World War I. He did so not as a pacifist, but because he saw the world war as an inter-imperialist dispute among the ruling classes of competing capitalist nations. He saw no reason for working people to die for a war they had nei­ ther started nor in which they had any real stake. Such was the climate of wartime intolerance that Debs was charged with sedition for making a speech against the war in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918. His sentence was 10 years in prison. The sedition charge fell under the Es­ pionage Act of 1917, a law promoted by President Wood­ row Wilson that essentially criminalized free speech. Indeed, under the wartime repression several thousand labor, anarchist, socialist, and pacifist voices were simi­ larly prosecuted. Even distribution of antiwar literature through the U.S. mail became illegal. For his part, Wilson labeled Debs a “traitor.”

Debs appealed the conviction, but in 1919 the U.S. Su­ preme Court upheld his original 10-year sentence. The court took precedent from a similar case earlier that year involving another convicted Socialist Party leader. Then Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had made the famous ar­ gument that free speech didn’t mean the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. Holmes’s metaphor was specious. In this case, the crowded theater was a European battle­ field red in blood and violence, the fire of inter-imperi­ alist war and millions of casualties very much a reality. In truth, Debs was yelling fire in a burning theater, en­ raging the likes of the sanctimonious Wilson by identify­ 8 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2015 ing the ruling classes of Europe and America for what they essentially were—arsonists of human hope and civi­ lization. Mass murderers.

If the “liberal” Wilson had his way, the aging Debs would have stayed in prison for the full sentence—and likely died there. When word came in 1920 of Wilson’s refusal to commute Debs’s sentence, despite notable pub­ lic pressure to do so, the socialist leader smuggled a state­ ment out of the prison denouncing Wilson as “the most pathetic figure in the world. It is he, not I, who needs a pardon,” declared a defiant Debs.

Ironically, it was Republican President Warren G. Hard­ ing who would commute Debs’s sentence in December 1921. Considering that even A. Mitchell Palmer, the U.S. Attorney General who led many of the wartime raids and arrests of radicals, had come to favor Debs’s release from prison, Wilson’s personal vindictiveness toward Debs was likely fueled by the way the latter’s principled anti­ war stance exposed the hypocrisy of the president’s mor­ alistic posturing as some sort of progressive visionary of “world peace.”

Such was the world of that time that the man who sent some 116,000 young Americans to their battlefield deaths, who took a hammer blow to the free speech rights of peace advocates, would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. Yet Debs, who never killed anyone and was guilty only of the deed of the word, had his freedom cruelly taken away.

Such our world also remains. Now another Nobel Prize winner in the White House embraces this same Espio­ nage Act with vigor unprecedented since Wilson’s day. This time the persecuted include Chelsea Manning, Ed­ ward Snowden, John Kiriakou, and other “whistleblow­ ers” who dare to expose U.S. war crimes and threats to political freedoms by the U.S national security state. A man of a different cloth 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 the 2008 primary campaign, then Democratic Senator Barack Obama couldn’t even bring himself to openly declare his support for same-sex marriage rights, which he did in fact privately support. Instead, fearful of los­ ing votes, he publicly insisted he only supported “civil unions” for gays and lesbians.

This admission comes from former Obama advisor David Axelrod in his recently published book, “Believ­ er: My Forty Years in Politics.” Obama was following Axelrod’s advice to lie about the issue, counseling the future president that he would lose support from conser­ vative Black churches. That’s not to particularly single out Obama. After all, that’s just politics!

Actually, for Debs that was not politics. For him, politi­ cal leadership always meant telling the people the truth. “I am not going to say anything that I do not think,” de­ clared Debs in the 1918 speech that earned his conviction for sedition. Debs believed in organizing working peo­ ple to realize their own power, through independent social and political action, union organizing, and building grassroots mass movements for social justice. It was a vision of a new society that inspired him, one in which popular economic de­ mocracy would rule and inequality and exploitation would be vanquished to his­ tory’s proverbial dustbin.

Sustained by his identification with the socialist cause, Debs went to prison at the age of 63 characteristically optimistic and defiant. After a few months in a West Virginia facility, he was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

Debs did not exactly languish in prison.

In 1920 he ran for president in the nation­ al elections on the Socialist Party ticket, earning over 900,000 votes, or about 3.5 percent of the total vote. Indeed, his fight­ ing spirit remained strong. But Debs was also in poor health in prison. He suffered from chronic myocarditis, an inflamma­ tion of the heart muscle, a condition he had for much of his adult life. The stress of the prison environment, including poor nutrition, caused his health to worsen. At times he was hospitalized, while his weight dropped from 185 pounds to 160.

When finally released in December 1921, Debs returned home to Terre Haute, Ind., greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of more than 30,000 people. There he hoped to rest and regain his strength, but as the months passed his health did not improve. In the summer of 1922, Debs decided to register as a patient at the naturopathic Lindlahr Sanitarium in the Chicago sub­ urb of Elmhurst, Ill.

Debs stayed at Lindlahr for more than four months, benefiting from a strict but healthful diet, exercise, physical therapy, nature walks, and other restorative treatments. He be­ came fond of the Lindlahr staff, telling his brother that his palpitations, back pain, and exhaustion had lessened considerably as a result of the “nature cure” regimen he was following.

Debs returned to work for the Socialist Party, speak­ ing around the country, and returned again to Lindlahr in 1924. Unfortunately, by 1926 Debs health began to take another turn for the worse. Larger doses of digitalis pre­ scribed by his Terre Haute physician, Madge Stephens, MD, could not reverse his failing heart condition. In the final weeks of his life, Debs returned to Lindlahr on Dr. Stephen’s advice, hoping for yet another reprieve from his suffering. After collapsing while walking back from a visit at the nearby home of friend Carl Sandburg, Debs lapsed into a coma and died on October 20. He was 70 years old.

The political legacy As a politician, Debs was primarily a speaker and writer, skills he used to great effect in his campaigns for elected office. As a party leader, Debs had a tendency to avoid the many internal factional debates in the all-inclu­ sive Socialist Party. In doing so he sometimes became, as contemporary socialist and early Communist Party leader James P. Cannon later recalled, a pawn of those who by every measure were far less the leader Debs was. Yet perhaps even this weakness stemmed from one of Debs’s attributes. By nature Debs was an engaged, gen­ erous personality, capable of “beautiful friendliness,” as Cannon described. As a man steeped in the spirit of hu­ man solidarity, it went against the grain of his personality to engage too much in the sometimes heated, vitupera­ tive debates that can mark the internal life of a political party. Instead Debs preferred to reserve the full flame of his words and spirit for those who oppressed the ordinary people, the poor, the dispossessed and exploited whose cause he spent his life championing.

Whatever his limits, the record of Debs stands in tribute to the heights an individual can ascend in devoting their life to the cause of human liberation. Unlike a wealthy narcissist like Donald Trump, Debs saw himself essen­ tially only as an instrument of the cause he served. When in the 1920s Carl Sandburg told him he hoped to write a tribute to his friend, Debs begged off, telling the great writer and poet he feared there was “not enough of me to warrant any such venture.” Nor was Debs a politi­ cian like Hillary Clinton, long ensconced in the vision­ less “realpolitik” of the Washington beltway, a liberal war hawk and friend of Wall Street, charging private groups $200,000 or more a speech.

Neither was his brand of socialism limited to demo­ cratic reform of capitalism, to softening the harsh facts of inequality under capitalism without getting rid of capital­ ism itself, as Bernie Sanders represents.

The life and legacy of Eugene V. Debs stands as a rich (continued on page 9)

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Leon Trotsky: Revolutionary Fighter and greed of the capitalist economic system, and to end known, but I believe he did not get my name,” recalled wage slavery and all forms of social oppression. He called Karsner in a letter written on ILD letterhead to Theodore Debs a week after his brother’s death. “It was quite clear to me that he was very weak and I tried to get away. But Gene, in his characteristic way, would not permit me to and vibrant testament to one man’s dedication to a liberated Coincidentally, during Debs’s last stay at Lindlahr in leave. He did not know who I was, but he heard me say future. Indeed, Debs was an individual for whom solidarity 1926, Cannon, then national secretary of the International ‘comrade’ and that was enough for him. He sat and spoke Labor Defense (ILD), a civil rights group established by Debs also thought for himself, and he evolved. His ex­ the Workers (Communist) Party to defend political prison­ As Karsner concluded, “Personally, I feel that Gene be­ perience as a labor organizer for the American Railway ers, was also a patient at the Elmhurst clinic. When the ILD longed to us all and especially to those of us engaged in Union pushed him toward socialism, which he didn’t em­ was established the year before, Debs in typical fashion work which characterized his activities most—the united brace until he was nearly 40 years old. Once he did he nev­ action of ALL in behalf of the working class, regardless of er looked back, abandoning the more conservative outlook While at Lindlahr, Cannon’s partner, Rose Karsner, re­ political, industrial, or philosophical opinions. He rose a calls how they wanted very much to talk to Debs, but under bove party differences and factional lines, and we love him As a socialist, Debs denounced as irrational and unjust the circumstances were hesitant to intrude upon the ailing for it. The tradition of Gene is the greatest treasure of the a capitalist system that created extravagant wealth for a man. On the day after their arrival, Karsner saw Debs sit­ few at the top, while millions of ordinary working people ting in the reception room while waiting for his room to In the twilight of his days, there was revealed perhaps in be made up. In the moment she decided to very briefly say that fleeing moment with Rose Karsner something of the Most important, he thought it was possible to build a new, full measure of Eugene V. Debs, a man for whom the word cooperative society, to transcend the irrationality, waste, “I went over to Gene and attempted to make myself “comrade” was always enough for him. n SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2015 9 Leon Trotsky, By Paul LeBlanc, “Leon Trotsky,” Reaktion Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2015, 224 pages, $16.95 paperback P aul LeBlanc’s new and admirable brief biography of Leon Trotsky comes on the 75th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination in Coyoacan, Mexico, at the hands of Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader. Trotsky, along with Vladimir Lenin, was the co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revo­ lution, the world’s first socialist revolu­ tion. This was an event that changed the course of world history in establishing for the first time a government and state of the working class—a workers’ state— which abolished capitalism and ruled so­ ciety through democratic working-class institutions (soviets) that advanced the interests of the vast majority.

Interest in the ideas of Leon Trotsky, as LeBlanc aptly notes, has far from waned in recent decades, with one or another book, novel, and other works—poems, plays, films—focusing on Trotsky’s revo­ lutionary socialist ideas published on av­ erage every six months. LeBlanc is a life­ long revolutionary socialist activist and scholar, currently Professor of History at La Roche College in Pittsburgh. He is the author of “Unfinished Leninism” and co-editor of “Trotsky’s Writings from Exile.” LeBlanc sets out to focus on the latter period of Trotsky’s life when, following his failed Left Opposition efforts to chal­ lenge Stalin’s bureaucratic regime, he was expelled from the central leadership of the Bolshevik Party and exiled, first to Siberia and then to Prinkipo, a small is­ land off the Turkish coast. As with any se­ rious scholar, however, LeBlanc does not refrain from covering critical aspects of Trotsky’s leading role during the Soviet Union’s revolutionary period.

LeBlanc writes that “to understand the man, we must, of course, look at his en­ tire life—but in some ways the most de­ cisive qualities of this revolutionary are to be found in the Trotsky who, in order to remain true to the ideals that animated his entire life, followed a trajectory that took him out of the center of power. This was the doomed but determined fighter who sought to defend and explain the relevance of the heroic best that was the early communist tradition. “He expended immense energy to place the recent revolutionary experience—in­ cluding achievement, mistakes, and fail­ ures—into perspective, and to use such insights for analyzing and battling global crises, new totalitarianisms and the deep­ ening violence that engulfed humanity from 1929 to 1940.”

While LeBlanc properly refers to Trotsky as a “brilliant innovative theorist,” early on in his book he nonetheless, and strangely, refers to “aspects of unoriginal­ ity in Trotsky’s thought, especially in re­ lation to the much-vaunted theory of per­ manent revolution, his analysis of Stalin­ ... Gene Debs (continued from page 8)

with his fellow humans was in his blood.

of his younger years.

struggled to get by. ism, his prescriptions for defeating Hitler, and the much misunderstood Transitional Program” (emphasis in original). Here LeBlanc’s weak side, or superobjective “scholarly” impulse to present a “balanced” view of Trotsky’s politics, at least at first, is far off the mark. While he attributes this “unoriginality” to the fact that Marx and other revolutionaries had previously dealt with similar issues, none did so in the context of the actuality of the Russian Revolution, not to men­ tion Trotsky’s Marxist epic analysis of the conditions that led to the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the rise of fascism in Germany, and the necessity of the workers’ united front to thwart Hitler’s drive for power.

Using LeBlanc’s method,, one might easily point to the “unoriginality” of Al­ bert Einstein’s theory of relativity since Einstein undoubtedly based his ideas on the accomplishments of the mathemati­ cians and physicists who preceded him. Indeed, were we to apply this ahistori­ cal conception to any human field of en­ deavor, we would be compelled to dis­ count as “unoriginal” the contributions of Beethoven in music or Manet and Picasso in art. The latter artists were trained in the school of classical realism, much as Marx trained in the classical economic theories first advanced by Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

Fortunately, LeBlanc’s “unoriginal” la­ bel with regard to a number of Trotsky’s key contributions to Marxism, gives way to a valuable and accurate exposition of Trotsky’s central ideas.

Indeed, perhaps forgetful of his initial evaluation, LeBlanc spends consider­ able time explaining the brilliance and uniqueness of Trotsky’s ideas, especially when contrasted to their twisted distor­ tions at the hands of Stalin, his heirs, and Trotsky’s pro-capitalist critics. Undoubtedly, Trotsky himself sought to root in Marxist theory his views and this socialism.

Rose Karsner: “He belonged to us all”

had offered to serve on its national committee.

hello to Debs. the absolutely necessity of their relevance in the fight against Stalin, but to the end of returning the Soviet Union to its revo­ lutionary roots as opposed to affirming some religious-type dogma.

At times, I did find LeBlanc’s effort at balance a bit disturbing. He has the habit of making statements that are patently un­ true or distorted, only to soon afterward present the other side of the equation, in which he almost always returns to a clear-sighted affirmation of Trotsky’s political conceptions and practice. Perhaps this is just the required or acquired academic expression of LeBlanc’s work, wherein “balance” is a prerequisite to publication. Like this reviewer, LeBlanc received his initial education in revolutionary so­ cialist politics from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), founded in 1928 by James P. Cannon and other expelled U.S. Com­ munist Party members. Trotsky himself played a key role in the formation of the SWP, once the preeminent revolutionary socialist party in the U.S. until its degen­ eration beginning in 1979. That LeBlanc retains the essential lessons preserved in the SWP’s half-century of leading revo­ lutionary Marxist work is a testament to his integrity.

In a few important instances, however, Paul LeBlanc briefly challenges Trotsky’s views on critical questions, as with his in­ terpretation of the events surrounding the 1921 Red Army’s crushing of the Kro­ nstadt Rebellion during the height of the civil war. Without a single reference to Trotsky’s writings on this subject—one that has inflamed anarchist passions and anti-Leninist/Trotskyist sentiment to this day—LeBlanc faults Trotsky, who led the Red Army’s quashing of this “rebellion” that threatened the very existence of the nascent Soviet state by opening the door to a possible British imperial invasion. Trotsky was the central leader of the 1.5 million-person Red Army that success­ fully and heroically defended the belea­ younger generation.” (Above) Leon Trotsky (rt.) in Mexico with Farrell Dobbs of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. guered Soviet Union when it was invaded by the armies of 14 nations, including armies from opposed sides of the first world imperialist war.

Similarly, and again without a single reference to Trotsky’s writings, LeBlanc comes close to identifying Trotsky’s views with those of Joseph Stalin with regard to the latter’s disastrous 1929 col­ lectivization of agriculture and associated slaughter of untold tens of thousands or more of Russian peasants. Serious stu­ dents of Marxism and its revolutionary practice would do well to revisit these questions from Trotsky’s vantage point. Despite these significant lapses, LeB­ lanc’s book is a modest but important contribution toward the education of to­ day’s emerging youthful revolutionaries. The author properly references a number Trotsky’s key writings as landmark ac­ complishments and necessary readings in revolutionary socialist literature, in­ cluding Trotsky’s magnificent threevolume “History of the Russian Revolu­ tion” and his autobiography, “My Life.” Trotsky bibliographer Lewis Sinclair long ago told this reviewer that Trotsky’s life works constituted some 80 volumes, making him perhaps the most prolific rev­ olutionary among socialist writers. That he was also among the pantheon of Marx­ ist thinkers, the central organizer of the insurrection that toppled capitalist rule, the founding leader of the revolution­ ary Soviet Army, and the most important post-revolutionary expositor of Marx­ ism makes LeBlanc’s contribution all the more valuable.

I am sure that he would agree that read­ ing Trotsky’s work is similarly a neces­ sity for those who would follow in this great revolutionary’s trailblazing and he­ roic footsteps. n to me for a few seconds.”

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website: http://socialistaction.ca legislation, as they did to Air Canada, Canada Post and railway workers. Liberals did it to transit workers and teachers in Ontario. The Tories further reduced ac­