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Labor and Freedom
The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs
While there is a lower class I am in it;
While there is a criminal class I am of it;
While there is a soul in prison I am not free.
Published by
PHIL WAGNER
St. Louis
1916
[Illustration: Logo. 115]
_Introduction_
_I think if I had been asked to name this work that comes to us from the
rare mind and tender heart of 'Gene Debs, I would have called it "The
Old Umbrella Mender." It was this tragic, touching tale that I first
read in the manuscript; and it is the memory of this that will always
return to me when I think of the book. It is the perfect painting from
the artist's brush--the sculptured monument from the master's
chisel--that makes one lowly, loyal soul to live forever in the hearts
of humanity's lovers._
_Not but that every line in the book is a treasure, and every sentiment
brought forth an appeal to all that makes for justice, and equality, and
freedom; nor will it detract from, but rather add to, the beauty and
inestimable value of the entire collection if others, likewise, carry
with them the image and memory of the old umbrella mender, as they
travel with Debs the struggling, storm-tossed way of Labor and Freedom._
HENRY M. TICHENOR.
St. Louis, March 1, 1916.
MISCELLANY
THE OLD UMBRELLA MENDER.
Coming Nation, March 1, 1913.
It was on a cold morning late in November last, just after the national
election, and I was walking briskly toward my office. A stiff wind was
blowing and a drizzling rain was falling. The threads in one of the ribs
of my umbrella snapped asunder and the cover flew upward, as it has a
way of doing, and I was about to lower my disabled shower-stick when I
ran slapdash into an old itinerant umbrella mender with his outfit slung
across his back and shuffling along in the opposite direction. He had
noticed the ill-behavior of my umbrella. It snapped from its bearing
even as he had his eyes upon it. Perhaps it understood. Anyway he had
not a cent in his pocket and he had not yet breakfasted that cold and
wet November morning.
He was about 65. His clothes had evidently weathered many a storm and
besides being worn and shabby were too light for that season. Overcoat
he had none. Nor gloves, nor overshoes. Mine embarrassed me.
His hat had been brushed to a standstill. His shoes were making their
last stand and a protruding toe, red with the cold, seemed to have been
shoved out as a signal of distress.
The outfit of the old fellow, carried on his back, was sorry enough to
fit his general makeup, and if he had offered himself for sale just as
he stood, including his earthly belongings and his immortal soul, he
would have found no bidder nor brought a cent.
The face of the old umbrella mender lighted up with a kindly smile as he
commented on the strange conduct of my umbrella in slipping a cog just
as he happened to come along. I asked him by what evil magic he did the
trick and he laughed in a half-hearted way just to be polite, but it was
plain that he had long since forgotten how to laugh.
As we stepped into the shelter of an adjoining store he sat down on the
steps and drawing a threaded needle from beneath the lapel of his thin
and faded coat, he began to sew the cover back into its proper place.
His fingers were red and numb. A discolored nail partly hid a badly
bruised thumb.
He had difficulty in doing this bit of sewing, and it plainly distressed
him. His eyesight was failing and his fingers were stiff in the joints.
Yet he strove eagerly and intently to master their dumb protest. And he
hoped, as he remarked, that he would be able to make an extra bit of
money to provide himself with a pair of spectacles, now that favorable
weather had set in for his trade.
Poor human soul, I thought to myself, as I looked down upon the
weatherbeaten brother at my feet! A vagabond dog among his kind would
fare better than this worn-out old umbrella mender in a civilized human
community.
The warm clothes I had on made me uncomfortable as I saw him sitting
there in rags mending my umbrella. The overcoat I wore made me ashamed
of myself. Every time the umbrella mender looked up out of his rags I
winced.
What crime had he committed that condemned him to go through the world
in tatters to be lashed by the merciless blasts of winter and tormented
by hunger-pangs, and of what rare virtue was I possessed that entitled
me to wear the best of clothes and eat the choicest food!
Dared I call him brother? And could I call him brother without insulting
him?
These were the reflections that agitated my mind and troubled my heart.
"Good morning!" was the cheery greeting of a man who passed on the
sidewalk, calling me by name.
The old umbrella mender fairly started at the mention of my name. He had
just completed his bit of sewing and the threaded needle fell from his
fingers.
"Excuse me!" he said timidly, "is this Mr. Debs?"
"Yes," I answered.
"Eugene V. Debs?"
"Yes, brother."
"Thank God," exclaimed the old umbrella mender as he fairly bounded to
his feet and seized my extended hand with both of his. There were tears
in his eyes and his face was flushed.
"Of course I know you now," he went on. "This is your home and I have
often seen your picture. But this is the first time I have ever seen you
and if it hadn't been for your umbrella snapping just as I came along, I
would have passed you by and the chances are that I never would have
seen you. God must have tipped off your umbrella to give me a
stop-signal."
"Say, Gene," he continued, still holding me with both hands, "I am
pretty well down, ain't I? About all in and making my last stand before
shuffling off."
"But say, Gene, I never scabbed. Look at these hands! I'm an old rail
and I followed the business for twenty-seven years. I broke and ran a
freight train most of that time. Never got a passenger run because I was
too active on grievance committees and called a firebrand by the
officials. I wouldn't stand for any of their dirty work. If I'd been
like some of 'em I'd had a passenger train years ago and been saved lots
of grief. But I'd rather be a broken down old umbrella-fixer without a
friend than to be a scab and worth a million."
A gleam of triumph lighted up his seamed and weatherbeaten countenance.
"Did you belong to the A. R. U.?" I asked.
"Did I?" he answered with peculiar and assuring emphasis. "I was the
first man on our division to sign the list, and my name was first on
the charter. Look it up and you'll find me there. My card I lost in Ohio
where I was run in as a vag. The deputy that searched me at the jail
took my card from my pocket and I never saw it again. It was all I had
left. I raised a row about it and they threatened to lock me up again. I
was told afterwards that the deputy had scabbed in the A. R. U. strike."
"Did I belong to the A. R. U.? Well, I should say I did and I am proud
of it even if they did put me on the hummer and pull me down to where I
am today. But I never scabbed. And when I cross the big divide I can
walk straight up to the bar of judgment and look God in the face without
a flicker."
"We had the railroads whipped to a standstill," he said, warming up,
"but the soldiers, the courts and the army of deputy United States
marshals that scabbed our jobs were too much for us. It was the
government and not the railroads that put us out, and it was a sorry day
for the railroad men of this country. Mark what I tell you, the time
will come when they will have to reorganize the A. R. U. It was the only
union that all could join and in which all got a square deal, and it was
the only union the railroad managers ever feared."
And then he told me the melancholy story of his own persecution and
suffering after the strike. His job was gone and his name was on the
blacklist. Five jobs he secured under assumed names were lost to him as
soon as he was found out. Poverty began to harass him. He picked up odd
jobs and when he managed to get a dollar ahead he sent it to his family.
His aged mother died of privation and worry and his wife soon followed
her to the grave. Two boys were left, but whatever became of them and
whether they are now alive or dead, he could never learn.
The old fellow grew serious and a melancholy sigh escaped him. But he
was not bitter. He bore no malice toward any one. He had suffered much,
but he had kept the faith, and his regrets were at least free from
reproach.
He was a broken down old veteran of the industrial army. He had paid the
penalties of his protest against privately owned industry and the
slavery of his class, and now in his old age he was shuffling along in
his rags toward a nameless grave in the pottersfield.
Had he been an obedient corporation lackey; had he scabbed on his
fellow-workers; had he been mean and selfish and cold-blooded, he would
have been promoted instead of blacklisted by the corporation and honored
instead of hounded by society. His manhood and self-respect cost him
dearly, but he paid the price to the last farthing. His right to work
and live, his home, his family and his friends were all swept away
because he refused to scab on his fellowmen.
The old umbrella mender stood before me proud and erect and looked me
straight in the eyes as he finished his pathetic story.
The shabby clothes he wore were to him capitalist society's reward of
manhood and badge of honor.
There was something peculiarly grand about the scarred old veteran of
the industrial battlefield. His shabbiness was all on the outside, and
he seemed transfigured to me and clad in garments of glory. He loomed
before me like a forest-monarch the tempests had riven and denuded of
its foliage but could not lay low.
_He had kept the faith and had never scabbed!_
THE SECRET OF EFFICIENT EXPRESSION.
Coming Nation, July 8, 1911.
_The following was written for the Department of Education of the
University of Wisconsin, under whose direction there is being
conducted an investigation of the subject of "Distinguished
Contemporary Orators or Lecturers--With special reference to
fertility and efficiency of expression. What is the key to their
ability as masters of language? What school subjects, or what kinds
of training have entered into their lives that have given them
power to express themselves effectively?"_
The secret of efficient expression in oratory--if secret it can properly
be called--is in having something efficient to express and being so
filled with it that it expresses itself. The choice of words is not
important since efficient expression, the result of efficient thinking,
chooses its own words, moulds and fashions its own sentences, and
creates a diction suited to its own purposes.
In my own case the power of expression is not due to education or to
training. I had no time for either and have often felt the lack of both.
The schools I attended were primitive and when I left them at fourteen
to go to work I could hardly write a grammatical sentence; and to be
frank I am not quite sure that I can do so now. But I had a retentive
memory and was fond of committing and declaiming such orations and poems
as appealed to me. Patrick Henry's revolutionary speech had first place.
Robert Emmet's immortal oration was a great favorite and moved me
deeply. Drake's "American Flag" stirred my blood as did also Schiller's
"Burgschaft." Often I felt myself thrilled under the spell of these,
recited to myself, inaudibly at times, and at others declaimed boldly
and dramatically, when no one else was listening.
Everything that was revolutionary appealed to me and it was this that
made Patrick Henry one of my first heroes; and my passion for his
eloquent and burning defiance of King George inspired the first speech I
ever attempted in public, with Patrick himself as the theme. This was
before the Occidental Literary Club of Terre Haute, Ind., of which I was
then a member, and I still shudder as I recall the crowded little
club-room which greeted me, and feel again the big drops of cold sweat
standing out all over me as I realized the plight I was in and the
utter hopelessness of escape.
The spectacle I made of myself that evening will never be effaced from
my memory, and the sympathetic assurances of my friends at the close of
the exhibition did not relieve the keen sense of humiliation and shame I
felt for the disgrace I had brought upon myself and my patron saint. The
speech could not possibly have been worse and my mortification was
complete. In my heart I hoped most earnestly that my hero's spiritual
ears were not attuned to the affairs of this earth, at least that
evening.
It was then I realized and sorely felt the need of the education and
training I had missed and then and there I resolved to make up for it as
best I could. I set to work in earnest to learn what I so much needed to
know. While firing a switch-engine at night I attended a private school
half a day each day, sleeping in the morning and attending school in the
afternoon. I bought an encyclopedia on the installment plan, one volume
each month, and began to read and study history and literature and to
devote myself to grammar and composition.
The revolutionary history of the United States and France stirred me
deeply and its heroes and martyrs became my idols. Thomas Paine towered
above them all. A thousand times since then I have found inspiration and
strength in the thrilling words, "These are the times that try men's
souls."
Here I should say, for the purpose of this writing, that from the time
I began to read with a serious mind, feeling keenly as I did my lack of
knowledge, especially the power of proper expression, both oral and
written, I observed the structure and studied the composition of every
paragraph and every sentence, and when one appeared striking to me,
owing to its perfection of style or phrasing, I read it a second time or
perhaps committed it to memory, and this became a fixed habit which I
retain to this day, and if I have any unusual command of language it is
because I have made it a life-long practice to cultivate the art of
expression in a sub-conscious study of the structure and phrasing of
every paragraph in my readings.
It was while serving an apprenticeship in a railroad shop and in later
years as a locomotive fireman and as a wage worker in other capacities
that I came to realize the oppressions and sufferings of the working
class and to understand something of the labor question. The wrongs
existing here I knew from having experienced them, and the irresistible
appeal of these wrongs to be righted determined my destiny. I joined a
labor union and from that time to this the high ambition, the
controlling purpose of my life has been the education, organization and
emancipation of the working class. It was this passionate sympathy with
my class that gave me all the power I have to serve it. I felt their
suffering because I was one of them and I began to speak and write for
them for the same reason. In this there was no altruism, no
self-sacrifice, only duty. I could not have done otherwise. Had I
attempted it I should have failed. Such as I have been and am, I had to
be.
I abhorred slavery in every form. I yearned to see all men and all women
free. I detested the idea of some men being ruled by others, and of
women being ruled by men. I believed that women should have all the
rights men have, and I looked upon child labor as a crime. And so I
became an agitator and this ruling passion of my life found larger
expression.
In the clash of conflict which followed and the trials incident to it I
grew stronger. The notoriety which came in consequence enlarged my
hearing with the people and this in turn demanded more efficient means
of expression. The cause that was sacred to me was assailed. My very
life and honor were on trial. Falsehood and calumny played their part. I
was denounced and vilified. Everything was at stake. I simply had to
speak and make the people understand, and that is how I got my training
in oratory, and all the secret there is in whatever power of expression
I may have.
In reading the history of slavery I studied the character of John Brown
and he became my hero. I read the speeches of Wendell Phillips and was
profoundly stirred by his marvelous powers. Once I heard him and was
enthralled by his indescribable eloquence. He was far advanced in years,
but I could see in his commanding presence and mellow and subdued tones
how he must have blazed and flashed in the meridian of his powers.
At about the same time I first heard Robert G. Ingersoll. He was in my
opinion the perfect master of the art of human speech. He combined all
the graces, gifts and powers of expression, and stood upon the highest
pinnacle of oratorical achievement.
Robert G. Ingersoll and Wendell Phillips were the two greatest orators
of their time, and probably of all time. Their power sprang from their
passion for freedom, for truth, for justice, for a world filled with
light and with happy human beings. But for this divine passion neither
would have scaled the sublime heights of immortal achievement. The
sacred fire burned within them and when they were aroused it flashed
from their eyes and rolled from their inspired lips in torrents of
eloquence.
No man ever made a great speech on a mean subject. Slavery never
inspired an immortal thought or utterance. Selfishness is dead to every
art. The love of truth and the passion to serve it light every torch of
real eloquence.
Had Ingersoll and Phillips devoted their lives to the practice of law
for pay the divine fire within them would have burned to ashes and they
would have died in mediocrity.
The highest there is in oratory is the highest there is in truth, in
honesty, in morality. All the virtues combine in expressing themselves
in beautiful words, poetic phrases, glowing periods, and moving
eloquence.
The loftiest peaks rise from the lowest depths and their shining
summits glorify their hidden foundations.
The highest eloquence springs from the lowliest sources and pleads
trumpet-tongued for the children of the abyss.
Wendell Phillips was inspired by the scarred back, the pleading eyes,
and the mute lips of chattel slavery and his tongue, eloquent with the
lightning of Jehovah's wrath, became an avenging flame to scourge the
horror of slavery from the earth.
Denial of one's better self seals the lips or pollutes them. Fidelity to
conviction opens them and truth blossoms in eloquence.
The tongue is tipped with the flame that leaps from the altar-fire of
the soul.
Ingersoll and Phillips were absolutely true to their convictions. They
attacked monstrous evils and were hated and denounced. Had they yielded
to the furies which assailed them they would have perished. But the
fiercer the attacks upon them the stauncher they stood and the more
eloquent and powerful they became. The truth fired their souls, flashed
from their eyes, and inspired their lips.
There is no inspiration in evil and no power except for its own
destruction.
He who aspires to master the art of expression must first of all
consecrate himself completely to some great cause, and the greatest
cause of all is the cause of humanity. He must learn to feel deeply and
think clearly to express himself eloquently. He must be absolutely true
to the best there is in him, if he has to stand alone.
Such natural powers as he may have should be cultivated by the study of
history, science and literature. He must not only keep close to the
people but remember that he is one of them, and not above the meanest.
He must feel the wrongs of others so keenly that he forgets his own, and
resolve to combat these wrongs with all the power at his command.
The most thrilling and inspiring oratory, the most powerful and
impressive eloquence is the voice of the disinherited, the oppressed,
the suffering and submerged; it is the voice of poverty and misery, of
rags and crusts, of wretchedness and despair; the voice of humanity
crying to the infinite; the voice that resounds throughout the earth and
reaches heaven; the voice that awakens the conscience of the race and
proclaims the truths that fill the world with light and liberty and
love.
JESUS, THE SUPREME LEADER.
Coming Nation (Formerly Progressive Woman), March, 1914.
It matters little whether Jesus was born at Nazareth or Bethlehem. The
accounts conflict, but the point is of no consequence.
It is of consequence, however, that He was born in a stable and cradled
in a manger. This fact of itself, about which there is no question,
certifies conclusively the proletarian character of Jesus Christ. Had
His parents been other than poor working people--money-changers,
usurers, merchants, lawyers, scribes, priests or other parasites--He
would not have been delivered from His mother's womb on a bed of straw
in a stable among asses and other animals.
Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as every other babe ever born
into the world. He was of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of
mankind. The scriptural account of his "immaculate conception" is a
beautiful myth, but scarcely more of a miracle than the conception of
all other babes.
Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but
for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of
which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an
intellectual, moral and spiritual human being.
The chronicles of his time and of later days are filled with
contradictory and absurd stories about him and he has been disfigured
and distorted by cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by
ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their blind bigotry and
savage superstition, but there is no impenetrable myth surrounding the
personality of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary being or an
allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and others have shown us, a flesh
and blood Man in the fulness of his matchless powers and the
completeness of his transcendent consecration.
To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and pervasive as a historic
character as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln or Karl Marx. He has persisted
in spite of two thousand years of theological emasculation to destroy
his revolutionary personality, and is today the greatest moral force in
the world.
The vain attempt persisted in through twenty centuries of ruling class
interpolation, interpretation and falsification to make Jesus appear the
divinely commissioned conservator of the peace and soother of the
oppressed, instead of the master proletarian revolutionist and sower of
the social whirlwind--the vain attempt to prostitute the name and
teachings and example of the martyred Christ to the power of Mammon, the
very power which had murdered him in cold blood, vindicates his
transcendent genius and proclaims the immortality of his work.
Nothing is known of Jesus Christ as a lad except that at twelve his
parents took him to Jerusalem, where he confounded the learned doctors
by the questions he asked them. We have no knowledge as to what these
questions were, but taking his lowly birth, his poverty and suffering
into account, in contrast with the riches of Jerusalem which now dazzled
his vision, and in the light of his subsequent career we are not left to
conjecture as to the nature of the interrogation to which the
inquisitive lad subjected the smug doctors in the temple.
There are but meagre accounts of the doings of Jesus until at a trifle
over thirty he entered upon his public "ministry" and began the campaign
of agitation and revolt he had been planning and dreaming through all
the years of his yearning and burning adolescence. He was of the working
class and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood to the very hour of
his death. He hated and denounced the rich and cruel exploiter as
passionately as he loved and sympathized with his poor and suffering
victims.
"I speak not of you all; I know whom I have chosen," was his
class-conscious announcement to his disciples, all of whom were of the
proletariat, not an exploiter or desirable citizen among them. No, not
one! It was a working class movement he was organizing and a working
class revolution he was preparing the way for.
"A new commandment I give unto you: That ye love one another; as I have
loved you, that ye also love one another." This was the pith and core of
all his pleading, all his preaching, and all his teaching--love one
another, be brethren, make common cause, stand together, ye who labor to
enrich the parasites and are yourselves in chains, and ye shall be free!
These words were addressed by Jesus not to the money-changers, the
scribes and pharisees, the rich and respectable, but to the ragged
undesirables of his own enslaved and suffering class. This appeal was to
their class spirit, their class loyalty and their class solidarity.
Centuries later Karl Marx embodies the appeal in his famous manifesto
and today it blazes forth in letters of fire as the watchword of the
world-wide revolution: "_Workers of all countries unite: you have
nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain._"
During the brief span of three years, embracing the whole period of his
active life, from the time he began to stir up the people until "the
scarlet robe and crown of thorns were put on him and he was crucified
between two thieves," Jesus devoted all his time and all his matchless
ability and energies to the suffering poor, and it would have been
passing strange if they had not "heard him gladly."
He himself had no fixed abode and like the wretched, motley throng to
whom he preached and poured out his great and loving heart, he was a
poor wanderer on the face of the earth and "had not where to lay his
head."
Pure communism was the economic and social gospel preached by Jesus
Christ, and every act and utterance which may properly be ascribed to
him conclusively affirms it. Private property was to his elevated mind
and exalted soul a sacrilege and a horror; an insult to God and a crime
against man.
The economic basis of his doctrine of brotherhood, and love is clearly
demonstrated in the fact that under his leadership and teaching all his
disciples "sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men,
_as every man had need_," and that they "had all things in common."
"And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking
bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and
singleness of heart."
This was the beginning of the mighty movement Jesus had launched for
the overthrow of the empire of the Caesars and the emancipation of the
crushed and miserable masses from the bestial misrule of the Roman
tyrants.
It was above all a working class movement and was conceived and brought
forth for no other purpose than to destroy class rule and set up the
common people as the sole and rightful inheritors of the earth.
"Happy are the lowly for they shall inherit the earth."
Three short years of agitation by the incomparable Jesus was sufficient
to stamp the proletarian movement he had inaugurated as the most
formidable and portentous revolution in the annals of time. The
ill-fated author could not long survive his stupendous mischief. The aim
and inevitable outcome of this madman's teaching and agitation was too
clearly manifest to longer admit of doubt.
The sodden lords of misrule trembled in their stolen finery, and then
the word went forth that they must "get" the vagabond who had stirred up
the people against them. The prototypes of Peabody, McPartland, Harry
Orchard, et. al., were all ready for their base and treacherous
performance and their thirty pieces of blood-stained silver. The priest
of the Mammon worshipers gave it out that the Nazarene was spreading a
false religion and that his pernicious teachings would corrupt the
people, destroy the church, uproot the old faith, disrupt the family,
break up the home, and overthrow society.
The lineal descendants of Caiaphas and Judas and the pharisees and
money-changers of old are still parroting the same miserable falsehood
to serve the same miserable ends, the only difference being that the
brood of pious perverts now practice their degeneracy in the name of the
Christ they betrayed and sold into crucifixion twenty centuries ago.
Jesus, after the most farcical trial and the most shocking travesty upon
justice, was spiked to the cross at the gates of Jerusalem and his
followers subjected to persecution, torture, exile and death. The
movement he had inaugurated, fired by his unconquerable revolutionary
spirit, persisted, however, through fire and slaughter, for three
centuries and until the master class, realizing the futility of their
efforts to stamp it out, basely betrayed it by pretending conversion to
its teachings and reverence for its murdered founder, and from that time
forth Christianity became the religion, so-called, of the pagan ruling
class and the dead Christ was metamorphosed from the master
revolutionist who was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his class, into
the pious abstraction, the harmless theological divinity who died that
John Pierpont Morgan could be "washed in the blood of the lamb" and
countless generations of betrayed and deluded slaves kept blinded by
superstition and content in their poverty and degradation.
Jesus was the grandest and loftiest of human souls--sun-crowned and
God-inspired; a full-statured man, red-blooded and lion-hearted, yet
sweet and gentle as the noble mother who had given him birth.
He had the majesty and poise of a god, the prophetic vision of a seer,
the great, loving heart of a woman, and the unaffected innocence and
simplicity of a child.
This was and is the martyred Christ of the working class, the inspired
evangel of the downtrodden masses, the world's supreme revolutionary
leader, whose love for the poor and the children of the poor hallowed
all the days of his consecrated life, lighted up and made forever holy
the dark tragedy of his death, and gave to the ages his divine
inspiration and his deathless name.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY: A REMINISCENCE
Socialist Woman, January, 1909.
Twice only did I personally meet Susan B. Anthony, although I knew her
well. The first time was at Terre Haute, Indiana, my home, in 1880, and
the last time shortly before her death at her home at Rochester, New
York. I can never forget the first time I met her. She impressed me as
being a wonderfully strong character, self-reliant, thoroughly in
earnest, and utterly indifferent to criticism.
There was never a time in my life when I was opposed to the equal
suffrage of the sexes. I could never understand why woman was denied
any right or opportunity that man enjoyed. Quite early, therefore, I was
attracted to the woman suffrage movement. I had of course read of Susan
B. Anthony and from the ridicule and contempt with which she was treated
I concluded that she must be a strong advocate of, and doing effective
work for, the rights of her sex. It was then that I determined, with the
aid of Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, the brilliant writer, who afterward
became her biographer, to arrange a series of meetings for Miss Anthony
at Terre Haute.
In due course of time I received a telegram from Miss Anthony from
Lafayette announcing the time of her arrival at Terre Haute and asking
me to meet her at the station. I recognized the distinguished lady or,
to be more exact, the notorious woman, the instant she stepped from the
train. She was accompanied by Lily Devereaux Blake and other woman
suffrage agitators and I proceeded to escort them to the hotel where I
had arranged for their reception.
I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly expressed for this
magnificent woman. Even my friends were disgusted with me for piloting
such an "undesirable citizen" into the community. It is hard to
understand, after all these years, how bitter and implacable the people
were, especially the women, toward the leaders of this movement.
As we walked along the street I was painfully aware that Miss Anthony
was an object of derision and contempt, and in my heart I resented it
and later I had often to defend my position, which, of course, I was
ever ready to do.
The meetings of Miss Anthony and her co-workers were but poorly attended
and all but barren of results. Such was the loathing of the community
for a woman who dared to talk in public about "woman's rights" that
people would not go to see her even to satisfy their curiosity. She was
simply not to be tolerated and it would not have required any great
amount of egging-on to have excited the people to drive her from the
community.
To all of this Miss Anthony, to all appearance, was entirely oblivious.
She could not have helped noticing it for there were those who thrust
their insults upon her but she gave no sign and bore no resentment.
I can see her still as she walked along, neatly but carelessly attired,
her bonnet somewhat awry, mere trifles which were scarcely noticed, if
at all, in the presence of her splendid womanhood. She seemed absorbed
completely in her mission. She could scarcely speak of anything else.
The rights and wrongs of her sex seemed to completely possess her and to
dominate all her thoughts and acts.
On the platform she spoke with characteristic earnestness and at times
with such intensity as to awe her audience, if not compel conviction.
She had an inexhaustible fund of information in regard to current
affairs, and dates and data for all things. She spoke with great
rapidity and forcefulness; her command of language was remarkable and
her periods were all well-rounded and eloquently delivered. No
thoughtful person could hear her without being convinced of her honesty
and the purity of her motive. Her face fairly glowed with the spirit of
her message and her soul was in her speech.
But the superb quality, the crowning virtue she possessed, was her moral
heroism.
Susan B. Anthony had this quality in an eminent degree. She fearlessly
faced the ignorant multitude or walked unafraid among those who scorned
her. She had the dignity of perfect self-reliance without a shadow of
conceit to mar it. She was a stern character, an uncompromising
personality, but she had the heart of a woman and none more tender ever
throbbed for the weak and the oppressed of earth.
No leader of any crusade was ever more fearless, loyal or uncompromising
than Susan B. Anthony and not one ever wrought more unselfishly or under
greater difficulties for the good of her kind and for the progress of
the race.
I did not see Miss Anthony again until I shook hands with her at the
close of my address in Rochester, but a short time before she passed to
other realms. She was the same magnificent woman, but her locks had
whitened and her kindly features bore the traces of age and infirmity.
Her life-work was done and her sun was setting!
How beautiful she seemed in the quiet serenity of her sunset!
Twenty-five years before she drank to its dregs the bitter cup of
persecution, but now she stood upon the heights, a sad smile lighting
her sweet face, amidst the acclaims of her neighbors and the plaudits of
the world.
Susan B. Anthony freely consecrated herself to the service of humanity;
she was a heroine in the highest sense and her name deserves a place
among the highest on the scroll of the immortals.
LOUIS TIKAS--LUDLOW'S HERO AND MARTYR.
Appeal to Reason, September 4, 1915.
"And now that the cloud settled upon Saint Antoine which a
momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the
darkness of it was heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance and want,
were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great
power all of them; but most especially the last. Samples of a
people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the
mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old
people young, shivered at every corner.... The mill which had
worked them down was the mill that grinds young people old; the
children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and
upon the grown faces, and plowed into every furrow of age and
coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent
everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the
wretched clothing that hung upon the poles and lines; hunger was
patched into them with straw and rags and wood and paper; hunger
was repeated in every modicum of fire-wood that the man sawed off;
hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from
the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything
to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written
in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the
sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for
sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in
the turned cylinder; hunger was shred into atoms in every farthing
of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
"Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offense and stench, with other narrow winding
streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all
smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a
brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the
people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of
turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of
fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with
what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of
the gallows-rope they mused about enduring or inflicting."--_A Tale
of Two Cities._
* * * * *
In these ghastly colors Charles Dickens painted the picture of poverty
and its starving victims in France on the eve of the French revolution,
and yet, "every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the
scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather took no
warning." Then the storm broke and the pent-up furies were unleashed;
the day of reckoning had come at last and the crimes of the centuries,
inflicted without mercy upon the long-suffering people, were wiped out
in the hearts' blood of their aristocratic and profligate oppressors and
despoilers.
The bloody revolution of a century and a quarter ago in France fills
uncounted pages in the world's history, but its terrible warning to the
lords of misrule and despoilers of the people has been in vain. Today as
ever the greed and avarice of the ruling class blind them to their
impending fate and drive them to their inevitable doom.
In the state of Colorado in "our own free America" the conditions that
make for savage and bloody revolution are ripening with incredible
rapidity and the lurid handwriting of fate is already upon the wall, but
the Rockefellers and their capitalist cohorts, stricken blind as the
penalty of their insatiate greed, are unable to see it.
That the monstrous crime of Ludlow, the fiendish destruction of the
tented village, the wanton killing of the homeless, hunted, hopeless
victims--half-clad, famishing, terror-stricken and
defenseless--bludgeoned, bullied, shot down like dogs, and their wives
and suckling babes roasted in pits before their eyes--that this
appalling massacre, without a parallel in history, did not infuriate the
suffering and persecuted victims of capitalism's worse than satanic
ferocity, fire their blood with the tiger-thirst for revenge, and drench
the despotic and shameless state with blood is one of the miracles of
patience and submissiveness of the exploited, downtrodden, suffering
masses.
The tragic story of Ludlow, the hideous nightmare of the infernal
regions of the Rocky(feller) Mountains--written in the violated wombs of
shrieking mothers and the spattered life-drops of their murdered
babes--has yet to be traced on history's ineffaceable pages. The blood
of the twenty-three innocents who perished there will be the holy fount
of the writer's inspiration whose fire-tipped pen will give to the world
this tragic and thrilling epic of the embattled miners in the mountain
ramparts of Rockefellerado.
In the story of Ludlow, Louis Tikas, the intrepid leader, the loyal
comrade, the noble-hearted Greek who fell the victim of gunmen-brutes
in military uniform while pleading that the women and children be
spared, takes on the robes of deity and joins the martyrs and heroes of
history. The rifle-butt that crushed his noble head and silenced his
brave and tender heart gave his soul to the cause he loved and his name
to the ages.
The lion-hearted Greek is at rest, but the cause he lived and died for
goes on forever!
Louis Tikas was educated, cultured and refined, a graduate of the
University of Athens; yea, he was more than that, he was a MAN! His
heart was true as his brain was clear; he followed the truth and he
loved justice; he sided with the weak and ministered to the suffering,
even as his elder brother had in the days when other pharisees crucified
the Son of Man for loving his despoiled and despised fellow-men.
_Louis Tikas made Ludlow holy as Jesus Christ made Calvary!_
He was the loyal leader of the persecuted colony; the trusted keeper of
the tented village. He was loved by every man, woman and child, and
feared only by the fanged wolves and hyenas that threatened to ravage
the flock.
Strong as a giant yet gentle as a child; utterly fearless yet without
bravado, this great and loving soul cast his lot with the exiled slaves
of the pits and kept his vigil over the defenseless women and children
of the village as a loving mother might over the fledglings of her
brood.
Is it strange that they loved him, trusted him, and that in the hour of
their deadly peril they looked to him to shield them from their brutish
ravishers?
In this tragic hour Louis Tikas measured up to the supreme stature of
his noble manhood. He knew his time had come and with a smile upon his
lips and without a tremor in his sinews, he faced his cruel fate. He
asked no quarter for himself, but only begged that mothers and babes be
spared; and with this touching plea upon his lips and the love of his
people in his soul and beaming from his eyes, he was struck down by the
hired assassins of the Arch-Pharisee and passed to martyrdom and
immortality.
THE LITTLE LORDS OF LOVE.
Progressive Woman, December, 1910.
The children are to me a perpetual source of wonder and delight. How
keen they are, how alert, and how comprehending!
The sweet children of the Socialist movement--the little lords of light
and love--keep my heart warm and my purpose true. The raggedest and
dirtiest of them all is to me an angel of light. I have seen them, the
proletarian little folks, swarming up out of the sub-cellars and down
from the garrets of the tenements and I have watched them with my heart
filled with pity and my eyes overflowing with tears. Their very glee
seemed tragic beyond words.
Born within the roar of the ocean their tiny feet are never kissed by
the eager surf, nor their wan cheeks made ruddy by the vitalizing
breezes of the sea.
Not for them--the flotsam and jetsam upon the social tides--are the rosy
hours of babyhood, the sweet, sweet joys of childhood. They are the
heirs of the social filth and disease of capitalism and death marks them
at what should be the dewy dawn of birth, and they wither and
die--without having been born. Their cradle is their coffin and their
birth robe their winding sheet.
The Socialist movement is the first in all history to come to the rescue
of childhood and to set free the millions of little captives. And they
realize it and incarnate the very spirit of the movement and shout aloud
their joy as it marches on to victory.
The little revolutionists in Socialist parades know what they are there
for, and in our audiences they are wide awake to the very last word.
They know, too, when to applaud, and the speaker who fails to enthuse
them is surely lacking in some vital element of his speech.
At the close of a recent meeting in a western state the stage was
crowded with eager comrades shaking hands and offering congratulations.
My hand was suddenly gripped from below. I glanced down and a little
comrade just about big enough to stand alone looked straight up into my
eyes and said with all the frankness and sincerity of a child: "That
was a great speech you made and I love you; keep this to remember me
by." And he handed me a little nickle-plated whistle, his sole tangible
possession, and with it all the wealth of his pure and unpolluted
child-love, which filled my heart and moved me to tears.
In just that moment that tiny proletaire filled my measure to
overflowing and consecrated me with increased strength and devotion to
the great movement that is destined to rescue the countless millions of
disinherited babes and give them the earth and all the fulness thereof
as their patrimony forever.
The sweetest, tenderest, most pregnant words uttered by the proletaire
of Galilee were: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come
unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven."
THE COPPOCK BROTHERS: HEROES OF HARPER'S FERRY.
Appeal to Reason, May 23, 1914.
"O, patience, felon of the hour!
Over thy ghastly gallows-tree
Shall climb the vine of Liberty,
With ripened fruit and fragrant flower."
So wrote William Dean Howells, then a rising young poet and author in
Columbus, Ohio, in November, 1859, on the eve of John Brown's execution
at Charleston, Va. In the month before, on the night of October 16th,
John Brown, at the head of twenty-one men, sixteen of whom were white
and five black, marched on Harper's Ferry and delivered the attack that
sent his body to the gallows and his soul to immortal glory.
The heroic blood of old Brown himself flowed in the veins of all his
twenty-one intrepid young followers. There was not a coward among them.
Three of them were Brown's own sons and two others were near relatives.
Brown was fifty-nine; his adjutant general twenty-four. All his
followers were young men, some of them barely of age.
When Colonel Richard J. Hinton, who followed John Brown in Kansas, heard
of the intended raid on Harper's Ferry, he said to Kagi, the stripling
adjutant general: "You'll all be killed." "Yes, I know it, Hinton," was
the ready reply, "but the result will be worth the sacrifice."
Kagi was said to resemble "a divinity student rather than a warrior,"
and when taunted by an adversary, he answered, "We will endure the
shadow of dishonor, but not the stain of guilt."
"These words of John Henry Kagi," wrote Hinton, "expressed the spirit of
John Brown's men and, in an especial sense, the character of the young
and brilliant man who fell riddled with bullets into the Shenandoah.
Thirty miles below, the blood-tinged stream flowed through the lands of
his father's family."
Spartan souls were these who marched on Harper's Ferry that fateful
night, there to strike a blow at the cost of their lives that was
destined to make Harper's Ferry more famed than Waterloo--a blow that
was to emancipate a race and change abruptly the whole current of
American history.
"Down the still road, dim white in the moonlight, and amid the chill of
the October night, went the little band, silent and sober."
The twenty-one young heroes who followed old John Brown on that historic
night were of the exalted type that Emerson described: "When souls reach
a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and motive
without selfishness."
It is related that when Garibaldi was organizing his army of liberation
in Italy, he was asked what inducements he had to offer to new recruits.
Promptly the rebel chieftain answered: "Poverty, hardships, battles,
wounds, and--victory!"
That was all Captain Brown had to offer his devoted followers, with
crushing defeat instead of victory at the end, and yet they enlisted
with a zeal that could not have been surpassed if the world's most
coveted prizes had been their promised reward.
Think of the utter abnegation, unselfishness and loftiness of purpose of
that valiant little band who marched deliberately into the jaws of hell
that October night to break the fetters of a despised and alien race!
How many of their detractors and persecutors were animated by motives so
pure and exalted?