Here, in Terre Haute, where “Gene” Debs lives, everybody admires him.
All who know him personally love him. He has no personal enemies; he has
enemies, but they do not know him. He has none in Terre Haute. Many here
would like to hang his ideas, but the man, the strong personality, the
gentleness and cordiality of his greeting when he meets his neighbors
and fellow-citizens, disarm all prejudice. Politicians here, as
elsewhere, fear him, for they know that his intrepid soul knows and
permits no intellectual fears, stoops to no intellectual prostitution.
He is as open and fearless when called upon for an opinion upon any
matters of local interest as he is when he assails the capitalist
system.
I remember first seeing him in the editorial office of the Locomotive
Firemen’s Magazine. I was struck by his alertness and the unhesitating
speed of his work, whether engaged in writing or arranging the details
of printing, mailing or distributing the great magazine among the
thousands of workers who read and had profitable enjoyment from its
pages. I next remember his home-coming after the A. R. U. had won the
Great Northern strike. An immense throng met him at the depot with the
Ringgold Band, drum corps and torchlights. They had a carriage for him,
but he protested and took his place in the ranks with the men,—only a
look of joy shone on his face, nothing of exultation; he was as
unconscious of himself then as he seems ever to be and is. The shouts of
“Welcome Home” seemed only to elate and inspire his soul to do more for
the cause of labor. Then I remember (I was a Republican at the time)
reading of the awful strike begun in Chicago in 1894. I shared with
others in my ignorance in condemnation of the things reported from
Chicago. I commiserated his confinement in jail at Woodstock but
believed, as millions equally as ignorant as I was then believed, that
the laws had been upheld. I know now the details of the wrongs that in
the name of Law and Order were heaped upon the cause of labor then and
understand the superb courage and patience of labor’s greatest and most
far-seeing leader,—Debs.
When he came from Woodstock Jail to Terre Haute it had been raining all
day. Mr. Debs’ train arrived at 7:00 o’clock. There were several hundred
people at the depot, among them 200 miners with the Coal Bluff Band.
Escorted by the band he walked to his home, a few squares from the
depot. There he found his aged father and mother, and they clung to him,
kissing him again and again. After he had had his supper he was escorted
to the Armory through the rain, along the route blazing with Roman
candles. After the enthusiastic cheering and greeting had subsided, Mr.
Debs made a short speech to the audience and afterwards he was kept busy
shaking hands with his friends.
I do not know much of those long, fallow years when he went deep into
the movement of things. I became a Socialist in 1899, entirely
uninfluenced and alone. I emerged and found myself and a new life, a new
outlook, and stand now serenely, knowing that the end of capitalism is
in sight and the day of better things is certain.
I feel yet the throb of his heart in his great, strong hand when I told
him I had taken my place on the side of the Barricades, where the cause
of labor must soon entrench itself. From that time I have seen him
intimately at all hours of the day, under all circumstances, and found
him always sure in knowledge of the future, with unlimited faith in
humanity and never once faltering. I know unnumbered things he has done
for the “A. R. U. Boys,”—know he has gone to their personal assistance,
not only with inspiring sympathy but with substantial help. His mail
often brings him words of courage and good cheer from those who have
come into the light with him, and these are the things that go deepest
to his heart. He keenly suffers with the workers in all their industrial
battles, but sees now only the greater lesson to them he himself learned
in the A. R. U. strike. In that strike he learned that labor was
powerless with the courts, the laws, police, the military and every
power of government in the hands of capital, and always ready to weaken,
if not destroy, unions, unionism and union leaders. He often speaks of
Woodstock jail as the greatest school where he learned to study and
understand the value of the only weapon by which labor can ever come to
its own,—“The Ballot.”
He loves to tell the stories of his childhood experiences and the
experiences of his early manhood as Town Clerk and as a member of the
Indiana Legislature one term, his five years’ experience in Hulman’s
Wholesale Grocery House, of his joy in firing a locomotive on the
Vandalia Railroad, and of his grief because his aged mother could not
sleep when he started out with the engine, fearing something might
befall him, and how, to make her happy, he quit the job.
I find him very often, even in these days of pressing work, reading all
alone to his old father, who is eighty-three years of age and almost
blind. It is good to see this man, who is known in more countries and to
more human beings than any other living man, surrendering himself
completely to his friends when they call upon him. Three weeks ago he
and his comrade wife, Katherine Debs (he calls her “Kate”), came to
spend the evening with my family. We had many neighbors with us and the
precise hour agreed upon “Gene” came down the street on his bicycle and
went to the kitchen and without assistance prepared the supper. You,
comrades, who have seen this man of heart and soul poised like a panther
when he steps upon the platform and hurls the words that scorch and
flash like fire, should have seen the gleam of domestic pleasure and
joyous comradeship when he stood in the long apron and enthusiastically
cooked a good supper in the kitchen of the “Old Red House” on Sixth
Street, where so many “Soapbox Travelers and Apostles of Truth” have
found shelter and food and repaired their raiment. And then after
supper, until after midnight, we saw his soul aflame upon his face as he
recited the wrongs of labor in Colorado and told of the heroism of the
outraged comrades and workers in accursed Telluride.
Again, he loves best, I am sure, to go out into the country. We often go
together. The last time we drove ten miles under the trees along the
Wabash and when his quick eye saw a Kentucky cardinal in the woods, he
stopped the horse and sat listening to the clear falling notes of this
sweet whistler, and when we heard a mocking bird, like a child, he
clasped his hands together and was lost as long as the song lasted in
worshipful adoration of the wondrous music that stirred the still
atmosphere into responsive vibration. After our dinner at a farmhouse we
sat on a fallen “naked sycamore” on the “Banks of the Wabash,” and there
I saw deeper into the soul of this great comrade and brother. The
universality of his vision was revealed and he poured forth, as though
inspired, an analysis of world conditions, a forecast of things certain
to occur, that made almost the waters in the river stop, listen and
applaud. He described with great particularity the Chicago Republican
convention (it was before it occurred, sometime in early May), its
certainty to be a dull, apathetic, heartless proceeding, and the St.
Louis convention marking the disintegration of a great political
party,—Bryan’s dying struggle to save the Democracy and the utter
impossibility of preventing the coming together of capitalists, powers
and influences, the effect upon the minds of the workers, the revelation
of the true position of Capital vs. Labor and the tremendous and
resistless growth of the Socialist movement. If he had had ten thousand
workers before him, he could not have uttered more polished sentences,
more words of deep significance, more prophetic epigrams than I heard
alone, sitting on the fallen sycamore. But such things are not lost; he
has uttered as great things to men who seemed as trees, but some day
these same men will move as though a tornadic wind was upon them and
then they will remember when and where they heard the first great words
that inspired them.
It was near six o’clock when we came home and the toil-stained workers
were going in all directions to their cottages, huts, hovels,
boat-houses and tents. I shall never forget the look of compassionate
understanding that came into his face as he reiterated some of the
things he had so eloquently uttered in their behalf to the Wabash
sycamore that afternoon, but now his words find open ears and go clear
and welcome to hungry hearts. The words of this great comrade are
finding lodgment and bearing fruitage, and the time of emancipation is
not far off.
You comrades do not mistake the significance of events.
I know a million men and women are alive in America today, and millions
more will soon be ready to help create the Co-operative Commonwealth,
where men and women, great in soul and mind and strong in bodies and
sure in life, shall be industrially free and realize the beneficence and
uplifting power of Industrial Democracy. In that day we can know more of
and better understand “Debs at Home,” for now he is tireless and
literally a wandering agitator, an apostle of truth, an awakener of the
dead in spirit.
What would humanity be without such men, produced from their longings
and aspirations? When you see him, give him the best love of your heart;
inspire and encourage him for yet better efforts in your behalf. His
life is of yours, ye toilers; his heart, his brain, his body, his soul
are aflame with truth in your cause. Go the journey with him for your
own sake. He is bone and marrow, flesh and blood of and for you. You
will not soon see his like again. There are everywhere now, in all
countries of the world, other great comrades, but nature will not soon
conspire again to produce another Debs.