_By Stephen Marion Reynolds_
The life of Eugene Victor Debs is so complicated and entwined with the
dominant thought and action of his time, and he has so persistently,
with conscious purpose, touched and impressed it with primal vigor,
integrity and energy as will make a distinct and lasting work, not
merely upon the institutions of this country, but upon the future
welfare and development of all the peoples of the whole world.
This is an age of rare vitality, and of swiftly changing variety of
events.
There is growing every hour a new consciousness of the purposes of
BEING, and there is such healthy, hearty, emphatic enthusiasm in it all
as promises vast changes and uplift for humanity.
The converging streams of races are now neighborly and accessible;
superstitions are being overthrown, and The People are being prepared;
and,
“When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall
appear. I swear to you the architects shall appear without fail. I swear
to you they will understand you and justify you, O Peoples of the Earth!
The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you and encloses all
and is faithful to all. He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall
perceive that you are not an iota less than they. You shall be fully
glorified in them.”
Before the battles for freedom, there have always appeared the writers,
the orators, the artists, and the singers; Rousseau, defining the “Logic
of Liberty;” Tom Paine, calling for freedom from the king; and Patrick
Henry, as large as his times, fearlessly announcing new doctrines to
take the places of decadent ideals; Lincoln and others pleading for the
chattel slave; and in our time, multiplying voices crying aloud for
complete freedom from wage-slavery, subtlest and meanest of all forms of
human bondage.
We could not have had Appomattox without the conditions that made a
Legree and Uncle Tom, and then came Harriet Beecher Stowe to reveal them
to the world. We have had our Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, patriots,
statesmen, abreast the light of their times. Now we have “so-called
statesmen” who “talk” and “fiddle while Rome burns” and the army of the
hungry and unemployed increases.
If we trace the poems and the orations we find the poets and the
orators, and back of them the conditions that filled their souls with
songs and eloquence and gave them power to utter the longings of the
human heart. These poets and the orators, the true advocates that speak
for the people, seem to see from some high mountain a vision in the
lonely hours, when their eyes are unbound, the Deity passing by, leaving
commands to be obeyed. These are those who are lifted above themselves
as witnesses of the panorama of progress that the unseen hand unrolls;
thus only can we account for sweet poems from bitter poets and words of
love from the hateful things in life. We then understand why Jesus drove
the money changers from the temple and said words of doom to the
generation of vipers, and condemned in unmistakable words the greed for
wealth.
Foremost among the architects of the present day, striving to build up
“Industrial Democracy,” to emancipate man from economic servitude,
appears the architect DEBS, knowing that the materials are ready and
consciously serving and building for his brothers, the intended ideal
“Kingdom on Earth” for man to rule and dominate at last for himself
instead of his masters; bribes, menaces, the entreaties of his friends,
all exhausted in the vain endeavor to move him from his firm and
resolute will.
No one now attempts either.
He stands a towering rock of hope to the down-trodden and outcast
workers of the world.
In field, shop, mill, mine and factory, on the railroads and on the
ships of the seas his name is synonymous with devotion, love, sacrifice
and unswerving integrity to the workers and their cause. Even the
outcast rich admire “The Un-purchasable” and fear him with a reverence
that means much for their future, too, if they could but understand how
all-inclusive are his labors to abolish classes and class struggles; for
he appears in this age pointing steadily and with unblinded vision to
the paths of industrial peace, plenty and human brotherhood.
He comes to bring to all that nameless power, that something which one
involuntarily feels when in the presence, actual or ideal, of a genuine,
strong, true, vital man; such a man remains with those he meets and when
he departs leaves the permanent things of life and love with them and
they live forever in the imperishable marks and indications of uplifted
manhood.
The life of such a living, growing man cannot be written by even his
most intimate associates, for he is but an expression of the yearnings
of the people, a voice of the proletariat, an embodiment of their needs.
If his physical life should end the task would be even more difficult.
So tangible and inspiringly vital is his complete physical, mental and
spiritual presence. He has personally touched more lives than any other
living man.
No man has ever written more personal letters, throbbing with the
ascending song of life, clearly revealing the inner and spiritual
processes of growth, than this comrade whose acknowledged conscious
kinship to the manifestations of the universe does not end with the
sponge on the rock, nor with the highest and most perfect forms of human
and God-like life.
Whoever has taken his magnetic hand has never forgotten the experience,
but has, for the time at least, ceased to note any serious or passing
disagreements and has been conscious of standing in the presence of a
fearless searcher for Truth.
The man that comes crying a message in the wilderness and pointing to
the inevitable farther heights to which humanity must ascend, meets
misunderstanding, insult and rejection, but he is “The Darling of
Tomorrow,” when the heights are reached and the risen races run to mark
the fields of battle with the pathetic monuments of regret and of grief.
Some day, when perhaps his letters are published, or when the stories of
his unselfish, loving life are known to the emancipated workers of the
world, their tears of joy and appreciation will wash out the shame of
contemporary ignorance and neglect.
It may be that he will be an exception and yet live to see the summits
reached and “freedom for all” accomplished. This is not improbable, for
he is young and strong, growing and in step with the life-giving growth
in intelligence of the workers. These are the days of quick growth and
development. Electric wires on land and under the seas are everywhere.
The voice may be heard over the distant mountains and even without
wires, the thoughts and feelings of mankind are transmitted. Moreover
there is something wonderful, as yet little understood, in the
illuminating power of “Class Consciousness,” seeming to unify the
intents and purposes of men and simplifying the hitherto strangling
problems of progress; compelling all forces to move resistlessly in the
forward direction of freedom.
Even obstruction and resistance are harnessed for advancement, plainly
revealing that there is an approaching change for better things, that
men recognize, even while they deny and resist.
It is not long ago since he was born—November 5, 1855—in a lowly
cottage,[1] No. 447 North 4th Street, Terre Haute, Indiana. The
Democratic party had only begun its descent into decadence and vain
protest. The now missionless and moribund Republican party had not yet
been born, but there were signs in the Republic of its begetting and
pregnancy. There were signs of impending crises in the affairs of
masters and chattels. The long-continued struggle for the abolition of
chattel slavery, that began with the first chattel slaves in America,
culminated in cruel fratricidal war while he was yet a tender child.
That period had a formative influence upon him, for there was noise and
strife and pain in all this section of Indiana; soldiers encamped and
wounded men in hospitals and prisons, and fierce debates and sounds of
victory and of defeat.
His father, Jean Daniel Debs, and mother, Marguerite Betterich Debs,
natives of Alsace, had many stories to tell to the children at the
fireside of France and her joys, sunshine, shadows and sorrows. The
father was intimately acquainted with all of French history and had a
most complete library of her history. He was upright, loving and
lovable; the mother wise and gentle; both intimate companions of the
children, and were familiarly called “Dandy” and “Daisy.”