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eugene v. debs
Eugene V. Debs, Defender of American Liberty
Released from jail on this day 130 years ago, the great socialist and labor leader delivered a speech we would do well to remember in these perilous times.
Nov 22, 2025
On November 22, 1895, Eugene V. Debs was released from Woodstock Jail, where he had been imprisoned for six months for his leadership of the 1894 Pullman strike. Later that day, before a large crowd of supporters at Battery D in Chicago, he spoke on the topic of “Liberty.”
Debs was a great orator, and “Liberty” is a brilliant speech, powerfully evoking both “the spirit of liberty” heralded by the Declaration of Independence, and the promise of a freedom yet to be redeemed by American workers in thrall to plutocratic government. As Nick Salvatore noted in his classic biography, Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, this speech marked an important moment in the evolution of Debs from a radically republican labor activist to the country’s leading socialist.
Debs notes his own situation, “stripped of my constitutional rights as a freeman and shorn of the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship.” He proceeds to defend the American Railway Union as a necessary and legitimate organization of workers, and the strike as a legitimate means of pursuing justice, which” threw down no gauntlet to courts or armies—it simply resisted the invasion of the rights of workingmen by corporations.”
An adamant defense of worker rights, the speech’s overriding theme is unmistakably the political theme of “liberty” and indeed democracy. This is clear from Debs’s opening words:
Manifestly the spirit of ’76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty and as despisers of despotism. I comprehend the significance of this demonstration and appreciate the honor that makes it possible for me to be your guest on such an occasion. The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.
The entire first half of the speech centers on the theme of “personal liberty; or giving it its full height, depth, and breadth, American liberty, something that Americans have been accustomed to eulogize since the foundation of the Republic.” Paying tribute to the republic’s founding—"For the first time in the records of all the ages, the inalienable rights of man, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ were proclaimed July 4, 1776”—Debs proceeds to wax poetically, for eight long paragraphs, about the enduring resonance of that 1776 proclamation, the indivisibility of liberty, and the “more than satanic crime of stealing the jewel of liberty from the crown of manhood and reducing the victim of the burglary to slavery or to prison.” It is for this crime that he morally indicts the railroad magnates and their federal government allies for breaking the strike and imprisoning its leaders.
Debs insists that it is the labor movement that most embodies “the spirit of ’76”:
To the unified hosts of American working men fate has committed the charge of rescuing American liberties from the grasp of the vandal horde that have placed them in peril, by seizing the ballot and wielding it to regain the priceless heritage and to preserve and transmit it without scar or blemish to the generations yet to come.
The ballot, Debs notes approvingly, “has been called a weapon that executes a free man’s will as lighting does the will of God.” Debs rhapsodizes in almost religious tones about the power of democratic elections:
There is nothing in our government it cannot remove or amend. It can make and unmake presidents and congresses and courts. It can abolish unjust laws and consign to eternal odium and oblivion unjust judges, strip from them their robes and gowns and send them forth unclean as lepers to bear the burden of merited obloquy as Cain with the mark of a murderer. It can sweep away trusts, syndicates, corporations, monopolies, and every other abnormal development of the money power designed to abridge the liberties of workingmen and enslave them by the degradation incident to poverty and enforced idleness, as cyclones scatter the leaves of the forest. The ballot can do all this and more. It can give our civilization its crowning glory—the cooperative commonwealth.
Debs appreciated the rhetorical and the inspirational power of the dissenting American political tradition that hearkened back to the Revolution and its “spirit of ’76,” a tradition that included his heroes Jefferson, Paine, Garrison, Phillips, Lincoln, and Anthony. And he firmly believed that civil liberties and regular democratic elections represented forms of genuine if precarious social progress whose defense and expansion offered real opportunities for the furtherance of social and economic justice. He was, in short, a democrat.
He ended his speech with the hope that “American lovers of liberty are setting in operation forces to rescue their constitutional liberties from the grasp of monopoly and its mercenary hirelings.” That hope was not in vain, even if the Pullman strike was suppressed and Debs twice found himself in prison for refusing to be silenced, in 1895 and then in 1918 when imprisoned for his famous “Canton address,” critiquing WWI. The labor movement he helped to lead played a crucial role in advancing many of the policies—from the 8-hour workday to occupational safety and health regulation to “social security” broadly understood—that most Americans today simply take for granted. Debs was indeed one of the 20th century’s true crusaders for civil liberties and democratic inclusion. And his distinctive vision of a democratic socialism established an enduring legacy whose most recent heir is New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, who indeed quoted Debs in his victory speech.
At a time when the Trump administration is attacking liberty on a daily basis, targeting everyone on the left as a “radical lunatic” and “enemy from within,” and seeking to destroy the very possibility of political dissent and opposition, Debs’s paean to “Liberty” on November 22, 1895—and his commitment to its active promotion—has never been more relevant.Keep ReadingShow Less
Mamdani Won New York City, But the Battle for Winning a Working-Class Agenda Has Just Begun
The battle for a more affordable and egalitarian society is just beginning. Leaders like Zohran Mamdani need to gain even deeper traction with working-class voters, no matter how working class is defined and no matter their racial identity—if they want to win.
Nov 07, 2025
It truly is amazing that a Democratic Socialist has become mayor of the largest city in the United States, and that in the first line of his acceptance speech he quoted Eugene V. Debs, the brave socialist labor leader who was imprisoned in 1985 during the Pullman Strike and again in 1918 for his opposition to WWI:
“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”
Mamdani’s youth, charisma, humor, and incredible organizational skills led to this remarkable achievement. He worked hard and he earned it, and so did the many progressive groups that supported him.
Mamdani may have the abilities and the working-class agenda to become a major transformational political leader. Free buses, free childcare, and a rent freeze are concrete and achievable, but the opposition will be fierce, especially as he intends to increase taxes on the rich and corporations to pay for these programs. And powerful landlords will be up in arms. This is the definition of class struggle.
There will be major battles ahead that won’t be settled by Mamdani’s charisma and negotiating skills alone.
Mamdani is operating in the belly of the beast called runaway inequality. It’s nearly impossible to wrap our minds around the wealth that’s concentrated in New York. There are 123 billionaires living in NYC with a combined net worth more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars. And those numbers are surely an underestimate, given the many who have hidden their purchases of luxurious Manhattan apartments using shell companies.
To succeed against the rich and powerful, Mamdani will need a mass movement behind him, and that movement has to include enthusiastic support and the active participation of New York’s working class and labor unions.
Does he already have it? Is his victory the result of overwhelming support from highly educated liberals? Or has his working-class agenda also excited the working class more broadly, the way Eugene Debs did when he received nearly a million votes in his run for president in 1912?
All we have to go by, right now, are the exit polls, which aren’t really designed to include a clear demographic definition of the working class. But there is some suggestive information.
Let’s start with the standard media definition of working class based on education: You are often counted as being in the working class if you don’t have a four-year college degree. By this definition, Mamdani received most of his support from college-educated voters and ran behind Cuomo among working-class voters.
- New Yorkers are well educated: 58 percent of all the voters in this election had a four-year college degree or higher.
- This highly educated group overwhelmingly supported Mamdani over Cuomo, 57 percent to 37 percent.
- But Mamdani ran behind Cuomo among those who never attended college, 41 percent to 48 percent. One out of five voters are in this group.
The picture becomes blurrier if working-class is defined as having a lower income. New York voters are fairly evenly split between those whose family income is less than $100,000 year (58%), and those with $100,000 or more in family income (42%). And Mamdani’s support was identical between the two groups (51%), an almost exact match with his final vote of 51.5 percent.
But a closer look at the income brackets shows that Mamdani didn’t do as well with those with family incomes under $30,000. That group accounts for 16 percent of all voters. They favored Cuomo 50 percent to Mamdani’s 41 percent. But Mamdani won every other income bracket except those with family incomes of $300,000 or more, which he lost to Cuomo 61 percent to 34 percent. No way was a Democratic Socialist going to do well with the group he promised to tax more heavily to pay for his agenda.
Cutting it up into two income slices, Mamdani did slightly better with upper-income voters than lower-income voters. Those with family incomes of less than $50,000 gave 47 percent of their votes to Mamdani, and those with more than $50,000 supported him with 52 percent of their votes.
Revenge of the White Working Class?
Unlike Debs, Mamdani did not come out of the labor movement. He’s well-educated, an Asian immigrant born in Africa, and Muslim. Was that all too much for the allegedly racist white working-class? The exit polls don’t provide the crosstabs to give us definitive answers, but we can get some clues.
Here’s Mamdani’s support by ethnicity (of all educational and income groups):
- White 46 %
- Black 55 %
- Hispanic 49 %
- Asian 61 %
- Other 51 %
It’s hard to point the finger at white racism when support for Mamdani is almost identical between white voters and Hispanic voters. The big outlier is Asian, Mamdani’s own ethnic group.
The breakdown by gender shows less support among white men, but again the gaps are not gigantic:
- White men 43%
- White women 48%
- Black men 60%
- Black women 52%
- Hispanic men 52%
- Hispanic women 48%
Since we don’t know the income or education levels of these white men it’s not possible to see if working-class white men were less supportive, but that’s probably the case given the overall lower Mamdani numbers among those without four-year college degrees. However, while it’s not possible to tease apart racial identity and class when it comes to working-class voters of all shades, nothing big jumps out to suggest that this contest was about racial identity.
Mamdani needs those working-class voters, no matter how working class is defined and no matter what their ethnicity. He’s developed enormous support among liberal, well-educated New Yorkers, and that’s all to the good. But to take on the world’s richest, most powerful elites, that enthusiasm must spread deeply into the working class, where—even in New York—MAGA festers.
There will be major battles ahead that won’t be settled by Mamdani’s charisma and negotiating skills alone. That will require a mass movement in support of the progressive ideas the city’s new mayor campaigned on, the kind of movement New York hasn’t seen since the 1930s. Let’s hope Mamdani can reach even more deeply into the working class to strengthen his support. He’s going to need them.
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Labor Day, Chicago, and Presidential Despotism Then and Now
Trump is poised to commemorate Labor Day this week by reenacting on the streets of Chicago one of the most dictatorial and violent acts of federal repression in U.S. history.
Sep 01, 2025
On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday.
Five days later, on July 3, 1894, Cleveland dispatched two thousand U.S. Army troops to Chicago, Illinois to suppress the Pullman strike, over the objections of the city’s mayor and the state’s governor.
Much separates that situation from the very situation facing Chicago, and the entire country, today in the face of Donald Trump’s threats to militarize our cities. Yet the parallels are striking. And so, this Labor Day, it is worth revisiting that earlier ignominious episode, to be reminded that conflict, violence, and repression are central features of U.S. history, and to remember that there have always been Americans willing to stand up to the repression, even at the risk of their jobs, their liberties, and their very lives.
The strike, which had begun in May 1894 as a wildcat action by workers at the Pullman Company’s Chicago factory, had within weeks snowballed into an enormous boycott, organized by the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU), that involved approximately 250,000 workers spread across over twenty states. The boycott brought interstate rail transport to a standstill. At the instigation of Attorney General Richard Olney, working in tandem with Pullman managers and allies, the federal government responded by obtaining a federal court injunction against the union and its boycott, and then mobilizing federal troops, along with thousands of other U.S. marshals and state militia, to enforce the injunction. Within weeks the strike was broken, the union offices ransacked, and upwards of a dozen people were killed and over fifty wounded by the violent escalation caused by the military deployment. In addition, six union leaders, most famously ARU President Eugene V. Debs, were arrested; convicted of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act; and sentenced to prison terms of up to six months for their role in organizing the boycott.
The suppression of the strike, a major episode in U.S. history, is inextricably linked to the history of the federal Labor Day holiday that Americans celebrate every year.
“As Americans, we have boasted of our liberties and continue to boast of them. They were once the nation’s glory, and, if some have vanished, it may be well to remember that a remnant still remains.” —Eugene V. Debs
It was also a turning point in the evolution of Debs, who emerged from prison radicalized both as a labor leader and as an increasingly vocal public figure, who went on to be a founder and unrivalled leader of the Socialist Party of America, and who eventually ran for U.S. president five times as that party’s candidate. Debs’s speech, “Liberty,” given on November 22, 1895 upon his release from Woodstock Jail, is one of the great speeches in American history. It is a speech that ought to be revisited every Labor Day, but it has a special resonance this year, in the face of Donald Trump’s very public plans to once again deploy armed federal forces on the streets of Chicago, Boston, and other cities.
Debs began his speech by invoking America’s revolutionary origins:
Manifestly the spirit of ’76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty and as despisers of despotism. I comprehend the significance of this demonstration and appreciate the honor that makes it possible for me to be your guest on such an occasion. The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.
He then proceeded to describe the government’s suppression of the Pullman strike as a “flagrant violation of the Constitution, the total abrogation of law and the usurpation of judicial and despotic power” that stripped the ARU leadership, and by extension all strikers, of their “constitutional rights . . . [and] the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship.” He then outlined the more general significance of the repression in ways that have clear current relevance:
. . .[T]he defeat of the American Railway Union involved questions of law, constitution and government which, all things considered, are without a parallel in court and governmental proceedings under the Constitution of the Republic. And it is this judicial and administrative usurpation of power to override the rights of states and strike down the liberties of the people that has conferred upon the incidents connected with the Pullman strike such commanding importance as to attract the attention of men of the highest attainments in constitutional law and of statesmen who, like Jefferson, view with alarm the processes by which the Republic is being wrecked and a despotism reared upon its ruins. . .
The ways that the suppression of the strike influenced Debs have been analyzed in a number of classic biographies, and they deserve sustained attention.
But here I want to shift the focus from Debs to another protagonist of the Pullman drama, the man that Debs admired and eulogized as “the Liberator”: John Peter Altgeld, the liberal Democratic Governor of Illinois who strongly opposed Grover Cleveland’s deployment of federal troops, and remained an outspoken critic of the deployment and what it represented. As Debs put it:
In the railroad strikes in 1894 he expanded to his true proportions. There he proved to be the fearless champion of the people. He stood upon the boundary line of Illinois and protested against the military usurpation of the President, and though overwhelmed, he proudly vindicated his high honor, and he, more than any other man, retired Grover Cleveland and his pirate crew from American politics.
Altgeld, to be clear, was no labor activist, as Debs well knew. In his capacity as Governor, he had on occasion deployed state troopers to quell strike-related violence, and had unabashedly justified such deployments, in circumstances that warranted them, as part of his job as Governor and chief law enforcement officer of the state. But the way that he approached his executive authority, and publicly articulated his commitment to upholding the law, made him, for Debs, “in the highest sense a statesman.”
When the strike broke out, Altgeld publicly criticized the exploitative conditions at Pullman that had precipitated the strike. And as Pullman and its allies began accusing the striking workers of stopping rail traffic by force, laying the grounds for the strike’s violent suppression weeks later, Altgeld insisted that the vast majority of the strikers were law-abiding citizens; that the primary reason rail traffic was halted was an insufficient number of workers willing to cross a picket line; and that the best way for rail traffic to be restored was for the workers’ demands to be heard.
Altgeld was ignored, overridden by President Cleveland’s military deployment, and eventually defeated in his bid for re-election. But he was unbowed.
In 1896, he gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York City entitled “Federal Interference in the Chicago Strike” (the most important primary documents related to the strike are collected in an extraordinary book edited and introduced by Colston E. Warne, entitled The Pullman Boycott of 1894: The Problem of Federal Intervention, and published in 1955 by D.C. Heath). The speech presented a withering critique of Grover Cleveland’s deployment of federal troops that centered on respect for the rule of law and the “spirit of the laws” in a democracy.
Altgeld began by observing that as Governor he had always adhered to a simple rule—if local law enforcement officers requested assistance, he would offer it, within the limits of the law. This policy had on his account proven quite successful. Until June of 1894 in Chicago, when “five days in advance of any trouble,” Olney and Cleveland “decided to reverse the policy and practice of the government and take an entirely new departure by setting a precedent of having the President interfere at pleasure and having the . . . United States government take the corporations directly under their wings . . . in order to have the American people submit to the violation of the Constitution and the laws of the land as well as of every principle of self-government. . . the trouble at Chicago was, by systematic effort and deliberate misrepresentation, so magnified as to make it seem that we were bordering on anarchy, and that consequently federal interference was necessary.”
In his speech, Altgeld quoted from his direct appeal to President Cleveland on July 5 to withdraw the troops, in which he reiterated that there was little serious disorder in Chicago, and that the state was ready and able to keep the peace, and needed no federal intervention. Altgeld observed in the appeal that “the newspaper accounts have in many cases been pure fabrications, and in others wild exaggeration,” and insisted that there was no national emergency that could possibly justify deploying the U.S. army in an American city, and that “local self-government is a fundamental principle of our Constitution.”
Altgeld’s letter to Cleveland minced no words: “As Governor of the State of Illinois, I protest against this, and ask the immediate withdrawal of the federal troops from active duty in this state.”
Cleveland rebuffed Altgeld in a terse reply, to which Altgeld then responded with a long, point by point rebuttal, reproduced in his speech. Its central argument was clearly stated. If the President:
has the legal right to order Federal troops into any community of the United States . . . whenever there is the slightest disturbance . . . without regard to the question as to whether that community is able to and ready to enforce the law itself . . at his pleasure, and can keep them [the troops] there as long as he chooses . . [then] the principle of self-government either never did exist in this country, or else has been destroyed, for no community can be said to possess local self-government, if the executive can, at his pleasure, send military forces to patrol its streets under pretense of enforcing some law. The kind of local self-government that could exist under these circumstances can be found in any of the monarchies of Europe, and it is not in harmony with the spirit of our institutions.
In short, two years after the fact, Altgeld was saying quite clearly that President Cleveland’s decision to ignore the most reliable accounts of the facts on the ground, and to supersede the explicit appeal of the Governor, represented nothing less than a tyrannical violation of the U.S. Constitution that threatened not simply the striking workers or the city of Chicago but every citizen in the entire country.
That was then, and this is now.
As this year’s “No Kings!” demonstrations emphasized, in the half-year since assuming office, President Trump has every day acted more and more like a monarch or a dictator. In recent weeks the Trump administration has federalized the National Guard, and deployed U.S. military personnel, in Los Angeles and in Washington, DC, overriding the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. Last week, Trump signed an executive order creating “specialized” National Guard units under the direct command of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to be deployed “to deal with public order issues” in a range of American cities.
And by all accounts, Trump plans in the coming week to deploy such federal armed forces on the streets of Chicago, over the strong objections of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has now signed an executive order denouncing the militarization of his city; calling on Trump to “stand down”; pledging that city police will not cooperate with the deployed federal forces; and directing all city officials to “pursue all available legal and legislative avenues to resist coordinated efforts from the federal government” that violate the rights of Chicagoans.
Last week, Trump issued a Labor Day “Proclamation” calling upon “all public officials and people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that honor the contributions and resilience of working Americans.” He surely knows little if anything about the working class history that he invokes, just as he cares little about the public and private sector workers whose unions he seeks to weaken and destroy, including the millions of immigrant workers he seeks to harass, detain, and deport. But on the basis of what Altgeld called “pure fabrications” and “wild exaggerations,” i.e., lies, Trump is poised to commemorate Labor Day this week by reenacting on the streets of Chicago one of the most dictatorial and violent acts of federal repression in U.S. history.
In his 1895 “Liberty” speech, Debs noted that: “As Americans, we have boasted of our liberties and continue to boast of them. They were once the nation’s glory, and, if some have vanished, it may be well to remember that a remnant still remains.” That remnant, which at key moments in the 20th century seemed to expand, seems now to be shrinking by the day. Whether it will survive the next few years is an open question.
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On Imprisoning Presidential Candidates: From Eugene Debs to Donald Trump
It is hard to imagine Trump serving even any time in prison for the alleged felonies he has committed, let alone anywhere near the 2.5 years served by Debs, the American socialist leader imprisoned for speaking out against war and in favor of civil liberties like free speech. How's that for justice?
Jun 03, 2024
Now that a New York jury convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal hush money paid to a porn star and to evade campaign financial regulations, speculation has begun about his sentencing. Even though his outrageous behavior towards and slander of the district attorney, the judge, the witnesses, and the jury should warrant a punitive sentence, up to and including prison, it is highly unlikely that he will spend any time in jail.
However, for those who argue this is a first-time offense for a white-collar crime, this neglects the whole pattern of lying and fraud for which he and his business associates have already been convicted in a civil case. Moreover, given the credible allegations of rape, and the guilty judgment in the E. Jean Carroll defamation and sexual abuse case, Trump clearly is a serial offender against a whole host of individuals and institutions.
As much as Trump rails against a “rigged” justice system, he has been treated with the kind of latitude and privilege befitting a wealthy white member of the ruling elite.
It is, of course, Trump’s political crimes that constitute other egregious felonies for which he has already been indicted. Unfortunately, through delay and the intervention of a politically compromised U.S. Supreme Court, the Orange Blob has avoided wearing the Orange Suit of a jailed prisoner. In addition, because of the feckless Merrick Garland, Trump’s incitement to insurrection and efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election were not immediately prosecuted. Thus, it may be that Trump avoids going to prison for any of these political crimes.
As much as Trump rails against a “rigged” justice system, he has been treated with the kind of latitude and privilege befitting a wealthy white member of the ruling elite. However, over a century ago, another presidential candidate was not as fortunate when it came to what passed for justice during World War One. While there may be some oblique reference in the mainstream media to the 1920 presidential candidate of the Socialist Party sitting in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, it is important to recount the context in which Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to a ten-year prison term.
Debs, like the majority of the members of the Socialist Party of the United States, opposed the U.S. participation in WWI and denounced conscription as a vehicle for providing “cannon fodder” for the slaughter-fest. The presumption of a constitutional right to free speech, however, was contravened by the passage in 1917 of Espionage Act and in 1918 of the Sedition Act. Under these acts, the Wilson Department of Justice arrested hundreds of prominent opponents of the war and conscription. Indeed, when Debs came to Canton, Ohio in June 1918 to address the Ohio Socialist Party convention, three of its leaders were already serving sentences and being tortured in jail for antiwar speeches.
Addressing the thousands gathered to hear his talk on June 16, 1918, Debs defended the right to free speech during wartime even as he attempted to lay out a carefully constructed criticism of conscription. Nonetheless, there was enough in the address for a Cleveland federal grand jury on June 29, 1918 to indict Debs for alleged violations of both the Espionage and Sedition Acts. During the September 1918 trial, he reminded a jury composed of well-to-do residents of rural and small Ohio towns that “the right of free speech” should be upheld “in war as well as in peace.” Debs did not try to obscure the fact that he opposed the war precisely because it was the “ruling classes that make war upon one another, and not the people.”
Unmoved by Debs’s arguments, the jury found him guilty on all the charges and the judge then sentenced him to ten years in prison. Released on $10,000 bail (nearly a quarter of a million in today’s dollars), he began an appeal process that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Writing for the unanimous decision of the Court on March 10, 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. re-affirmed that Debs’s Canton speech was “seditious.” A little more than one month later, Debs was sent to a maximum-security prison before being transferred to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on June 14, 1919. It was in that facility that Debs received over 900,000 votes in the 1920 presidential election.
Upon being sent to prison, there were requests from progressive and liberal voices, including from AFL union members, for President Wilson to pardon Debs. All those appeals were rebuffed. When Warren Harding took over the presidency in 1921, there was even a louder chorus urging a general amnesty for all those languishing in prison as a consequence of their vocal opposition to WWI. Although rejecting a general amnesty, Harding pardoned Debs in December 1921, commuting the reminder of his ten-year sentence.
It is hard to imagine Trump serving even any time in prison for the alleged felonies he has committed, let alone anywhere near the two and a half years served by Debs. Moreover, if Trump manages by hook or crook (and the arcane electoral college is definitely an antidemocratic hook) to recapture the White House, one can imagine self pardons for federal crimes and the overturning of state crimes. Finally, given Trump’s avowed intentions to punish his political opponents, round up and deport migrants, and to shape his own “Justice” Department, any prospect of a Trump presidency must be viewed with alarm.
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Romance Is the New Realism: Eugene Debs and the Age of Corona
In this pandemic-era, it has become increasingly clear that we are only as healthy as the least insured—hence the poorest—in our society.
May 01, 2020
I was first exposed to Eugene Victor Debs through Kurt Vonnegut novels. That sci-fi social critic was a lifelong fan and referenced Debs in several of his books. Since then, mine has been a whirlwind historical love affair. The passion and eloquence of this former worker turned labor leader, and eventual five-time Socialist candidate for president is undeniable. His work and example have spoken to me in different ways at various points in my life--but never before has Debs seemed more relevant.
"While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
His lifelong fight for social justice, and an end to war, did not come without costs. It rarely does. In 1918, Debs was arrested under the Sedition Act--a recent statute that criminalized constitutionally-protected speech--after he delivered peaceful oratory opposed to America's entry into World War I. Later, just after he'd been sentenced to a decade in prison, Debs proclaimed before a Cleveland federal court that:
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Sounds a bit like something Christ might reputedly have said in the early Synoptic Gospels, no? Of course, Debs has always been a secular saint, of sorts, in progressive left and nascent antiwar circles. Still, my love for Debs--and personal penchant for plastering this particular quote on t-shirts and social media--has struck many critics as naive. That is, until now.
Corona's empathy-gift amidst the mass of lonely death is that it demonstrates--in a rather concrete sense--that none are better than the "meanest" (or "sickest") among us. Even the prosperous cannot forever hide, or wall themselves off, from the inequities of the global system. After all, it is often forgotten that Debs, and the socialists of his day, had a distinctly international vision that transcended the illusory boundaries, and "imagined communities," crafted by the powerful.
In this pandemic-era, it has become increasingly clear, per another Debs-enthusiast, Bernie Sanders, that we are only as healthy as the least insured--hence the poorest--in our society. The same may be said of those recently released from behind (domestic) bars or the prison-like boundaries of America's cruel worldwide sanctions-stranglehold regime. For ours is a technologically mobile world in which the virus respects no borders and "speaks" Mandarin just as well as Italian or English.
America's--and the world's--corona response will be put to this "Debs-test," and heaven forbid it be found wanting.
A Lower Class
The COVID-19 outbreak has exposed the liability of carrying a permanent domestic underclass--particularly given the peculiar, ineffectiveness of America's employer-based healthcare system. These under- or un-insured folks also tend to serve the food, pump the gas, and pack the boxes for online delivery that the more privileged in society have come to expect with immediacy. Workers are, so to speak, no longer invisible. The poor can infect and spread disease just as (perhaps more) rapidly as the rich.
What's more, corona has laid bare the immense leverage of the working class--especially those in the service industry--over the bourgeois and wealthy stratums in society. Moving forward, the potential power of a general service strike could be profound. Sure, Jeff Bezos and his--or others'--bureaucratic "company men" can immediately fire Christian Smalls, a strike leader at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse, but his indecently superfluous billions can't counter the moral and rational weight of the striker's position. One wonders if that genie can ever be stuffed back into what was always a rather narrow nozzle of the proverbial bottle.
Can the U.S. afford to continually don the blindfold, bow to the Pentagon fiction that endless war has any other real enemy than the fear of falling military-industrial-complex profits, and ignore the human costs of unnecessary American conflicts of choice?
So too for the foreign indigent in countries and societies utterly unprepared for pandemic. In Africa, for example--where 85 percent of the population still survives on less than $5.50 a day--many national governments are turning to overt civil liberties squelching because, in addition to being power-opportunists, they know implicitly that they are unprepared for even a modest outbreak. Will the obscene global wealth distribution--whereby the richest 10 percent possess 85 percent of the total, and the bottom half claim barely one percent--seem sustainable if and when shattered societies produce refugees on a scale that puts those from the "Arab Winter" to shame?
Furthermore, war, of course, has shown its true colors as history's great epidemic exacerbation device. Can the U.S. afford to continually don the blindfold, bow to the Pentagon fiction that endless war has any other real enemy than the fear of falling military-industrial-complex profits, and ignore the human costs of unnecessary American conflicts of choice? After all, in this moment--though one must question the long-term sincerity--even the very "meanest" among the world's states, the theocratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has called a corona-induced ceasefire to its American-complicit terror war on Yemen. There has never been a better--or more imperative--time for the U.S. to deescalate its own countless far-flung wars, scale-down its national security posture, and prioritize diplomacy and humanitarianism.
A Criminal Element
All too often America is--per its long-standing claims--exceptional, only in all the wrong ways. No other country wages as many aggressive overseas wars, or imprisons quite so much of its own population, as the USA. Seen in this decidedly inconvenient light, Uncle Sam is as criminal as any other nation. The COVID-moment, however, is a time for rare self-awareness, an historical knowledge of national self. As South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission illustrated, only an honest accounting of past crimes opens a clear path to future redemption.
Victim and victimizer become inextricably linked in the folly of foreign war and domestic repression. To channel that Nazarene stoic again, the U.S. must place its own past and present house in order before it "casts stones" of dispersion at even the most flawed "enemy" states. Allow the great corona-equalizer to establish and hold our government to account through a sort of humanitarian litmus test, and one finds the U.S. doesn't stack up so well against Cuba, for example.
Nor, according to the United Nations, and just about every human rights or medical organization, does Washington's "economic warfare" sanctions regime--which is quite literally killing innocents--live up to America's promise. Finally, lest we forget that unnecessary, aggressive wars of choice--which no nation today wages with the alacrity and consistency of the United States--are, according to the postwar Nuremberg Principles (which Washington had a decisive hand in molding), the supreme "crime against peace."
Our Souls in Prison
Even with America's uniquely draconian-sentences, inmates usually return to society, bringing with them the scars of institutional violence, mental health deterioration, the scarlet letter of employment barriers, and now, potentially, the coronavirus.
Prisoners eventually come home. Even with America's uniquely draconian-sentences, inmates usually return to society, bringing with them the scars of institutional violence, mental health deterioration, the scarlet letter of employment barriers, and now, potentially, the coronavirus. It can be distinctly difficult to socially-distance while incarcerated, and so terrifying is the likelihood of an outbreak in these prison petrie-dishes that many inmates nation and worldwide are literally going "over-the-walls" because it is a living nightmare--or "death sentence"--inside.
What can be said about a nation that embarks on a self-proclaimed "Freedom Agenda" abroad whilst simultaneously locking up a higher proportion of its population at home than any other country in the world--including such "enemies" as Russia, China, and Cuba? The hypocrisy is so stark it provokes pure bewilderment. That the U.S. incarcerates at such insane rates leaves the rational man or woman with the stark realization that either there's a uniquely American predisposition to crime, or, far more likely, that the nation's criminal justice system largely invents "criminals" and inherently lacks "justice."
Nor does the United States of Incarceration end at the ocean's edge. The prison-industrial-complex is a two-way street. Mass incarceration is the "empire come home," and vice versa. The Islamic State was largely conceived in America's Iraqi prison farm, and U.S. detainee abuse in Saddam Hussein's old jails helped make "terrorists" out of countless Arabs and Muslims from West Africa to Central Asia. So, in these pandemic times, let us finally admit that Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are Riker's Island, and the police murder of Eric Garner is the military murder of Diluwar of Yakubi at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.
Finally, as Americans ponder the implications of coronavirus's spread within their jails, and in the carceral state that is the world under U.S. military hegemony, it's long past time to consider--per Dostoyevsky--exactly what "the degree of civilization in" American society "can be judged" to be after "entering its prisons."
A "Kinship with All Living Beings"
Eugene Debs lived out, quite literally, the second and third stanzas of his oft-quoted courtroom declaration. Official branded a "criminal element," for a time he was "not free." He'd ultimately serve three years of his ten year sentence in Illinois, West Virginia, and Atlanta's Federal Penitentiary. Nevertheless, in 1920, with a certain ironic flair unique to the man, Debs ran, again--this time from the inside of a cell--on the Socialist ticket for president of the country that jailed him. His campaign buttons sported a photo of a weathered Debs clothed in prison garb in front of his ubiquitous cell bars. The caption read: "For President, Convict No. 9653."
So beloved was this "caged bird's" song, that he still received over 900,000 votes--during the height of the First Red Scare--when it was genuinely dangerous to support such "radical" figures. It was the highest vote tally in U.S. history for a Socialist Party presidential candidate.
Yet today, as a deadly pandemic--that respects neither class nor imaginary national boundaries--rages and exposes the systemic rot of America's domestic structures, and puts the lie to the absurd fiction that far-flung forever war ensures homeland security, my guess is a new Eugene Debs would garner millions more votes. Bernie Sanders may have disappointed his movement--in the interest of not ending up like Ralph Nader--by endorsing the former "senator from MBNA," Joe Biden, and left Americans with the paltry choice between a billionaire race-baiting demagogue and a corporate stooge.
Still, call me crazy, but precisely a century after he had the temerity to run from prison, this moment--and the future--may belong to Eugene Debs.
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These Are A Few Of My Favorite Jews
Dec 27, 2019
Like the Passover story, the celebration of Hanukkah reminds us that people can overcome great obstacles and achieve great things if they have a vision of a better society and build movements that challenge the conventional ideas of their day.
Election results and public opinion polls reveal that among white Americans, Jews have consistently been the most liberal and progressive ethnic and religious group. In 1920, when only 3 percent of Americans voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president, Jews gave him 38 percent of their votes. In 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover for president with 57 percent of the popular vote, 82 percent of Jews supported FDR. In 1960, John F. Kennedy squeaked out a victory over Richard Nixon, getting barely more than 50 percent of all votes, but among Jews, it was no contest, with JFK garnering 82 percent of their votes. In 2008, Barack Obama bested John McCain by a 53-46 margin, but he won the Jewish vote 78-22.
Despite the prominence of a small number of Jews in the Trump administration - including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and policy aide and alter-ego Stephen Miller - only a small number of Jews are conservatives or Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote against Donald Trump by 48 to 46 percent, but Jews favored Clinton by 71 to 23 percent. In the 2018 midterm elections that swept in a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, Jews led the "blue wave," giving Democrats 79 percent of their votes.
A 2012 survey found that 81 percent of Jews, compared with only 48 percent of all Americans, favored same-sex marriage should be legal. In the same survey, 93 percent of Jews believed that abortion should be legal in contrast to 53 percent of all Americans.
More than most other demographic groups - particularly among white Americans - Jews overwhelmingly disapprove of President Donald Trump's handling of most policy issues, including family separations at the Mexican border (78 percent), treatment of DACA recipients (74 percent), guns (74 percent), the Mueller Report (73 percent), building the border wall (71 percent), taxes (70 percent), Supreme Court nominations (69 percent), health care (69 percent), and banning immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries (66 percent). percent). Seventy-one percent of Jews disapprove of Trump's handling of the upsurge of anti-Semitism in America, a trend that Trump himself has provoked by consistently expressing anti-Semitic stereotypes and encouraging the rise of white nationalist hate groups.
Voting is the most basic of political activities, but social change happens only when people participate in activist movements that influence how people think and vote. Throughout American history, Jews have played and continue to play a disproportionately large role in the key social justice movements - as organizers and activists, politicians and jurists, and thinkers, artists, journalists, playwrights, poets, and novelists.
In 1900, anyone who advocated for women's suffrage, laws protecting the environment and consumers, an end to lynching, the rights of workers, a progressive income tax, or old-age insurance was considered a dangerous dreamer or a dangerous radical. Today such ideas are taken for granted. The radical ideas of one generation have become the common sense of the next.
Jews were among leaders and rank-and-file activists in all the great movements of the past century -- labor, civil rights and civil liberties, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and the crusade against militarism - that have made America a more humane, democratic and inclusive country.
Consider Rose Schneiderman, a fiery socialist union organizer. She was on the front lines of the Progressive Era battles against slums and sweatshops. So were settlement house pioneer Lillian Wald, Rabbi Stephen Wise and lawyer Louis Brandeis (later a Supreme Court justice), whose writings and legal activism helped tame the growing power of corporate monopolies. Victor Berger, an Austrian immigrant and in 1910 the country's first Socialist congressman, introduced the first bill to provide old-age pensions. Eventually, the idea was adopted in 1935 when President Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security.
Jewish social activism helped spearhead the early civil rights movement as well. In 1909, Joel Spingarn was a founder and then long-term president of the NAACP. Julius Rosenwald of Sears & Roebuck was a pioneer in the new field of progressive philanthropy. He endowed Jane Addams' Hull House and Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute, funded more than 5,000 schools for African Americans in the rural South, and supported the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee-based training center for labor and civil rights activists.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, labor leaders Sidney Hillman, David Dubinsky, Rose Pesotta, and Ralph Helstein led battles for workers' rights and economic reform, while composers Yip Harburg ("Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" and "Over the Rainbow") and Aaron Copland ("Fanfare for the Common Man"), artist Ben Shahn and playwright Clifford Odets ("Waiting for Lefty") gave shape to radical ideas that caught the public's imagination.
During the 1960s, Allard Lowenstein, along with African-American organizer Bob Moses, created the Freedom Summer project, which brought more than 1,000 college students to the South to register black voters. About half of the white volunteers were Jews. Many of them -- including Barney Frank, Heather Booth and Vivian Rothstein -- pursued careers in activism and reform that have lasted into the 21st century. Two of them - Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman - died at the hands of extremist segregationists.
Lowenstein, along with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, journalist I.F. Stone, critic Noam Chomsky and other Jews, gave voice to the rising tide of anti-Vietnam War sentiment. Jews constituted at least one-third of the early leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, the leading campus anti-war organization.
Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Judy Chicago, and Andrea Dworkin were at the forefront of second-wave feminism. San Francisco activist Harvey Milk, poet Alan Ginsberg, scientist Frank Kameny, writer Larry Kramer, and Edie Windsor (plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage) helped catalyze the gay rights movement. A 1970 Time cover story called scientist Barry Commoner the "Paul Revere of ecology." Saul Alinsky inspired several generations of community organizers. Jews in the arts and the academy -- including playwright Arthur Miller, filmmakers Sidney Lumet and Stanley Kramer, TV producer Norman Lear, folksingers Bob Dylan, Peter Yarrow, Theo Bikel, and Phil Ochs, writers Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich and Studs Terkel, and social critics like writer Paul Goodman, Lenny Bruce, historian Howard Zinn, and Harvey Kurtzman (founder of MAD magazine) -- gave voice to movements of dissent.
Today, when Jews represent less than two percent of the nation's population, a new generation of Jewish progressives is extending this activist tradition. The individuals listed below are deeply rooted in today's movements for social justice. Some of them are directly involved in the Jewish community, but most of them work for unions, community organizing and environmental groups, and other issue advocacy organizations, or serve in public office as allies and activists within government.
I have focused on organizers and activists, rather than writers, journalists, entertainers, artists, musicians, and academics, even though they make critically important contributions to progressive movements. Any history of contemporary progressivism would be incomplete without reference to opinion-shapers like Kate Aronoff, Dick Flacks, Eric Foner, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Michelle Goldberg, Amy Goodman, Jacob Hacker, Janis Ian, Sarah Jaffe, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Kozol, Paul Krugman, Tony Kushner, Robert Kuttner, Sarah Leonard, Nelson Lichtenstein, Harold Meyerson, Phranc, Francis Fox Piven, Sarah Silverman, Jill Soloway, George Soros, Jon Stewart, Evan Rachel Wood, and David Zirin.
I don't pretend this is a comprehensive list. These are people I know, or know about. They represent a wide spectrum of activism, but there are tens of thousands of other Jews who could be included on others' lists. These are a few of my favorite Jews:
1. Nan Aron is founder and president of the Alliance for Justice, which fights for federal court appointees who respect civil rights and civil liberties
2. Ady Barkan, a veteran activist and publicist for progressive causes, has become well-known as a fighter for Medicare for All after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S.), a disease that slowly takes away nearly every physical function while keeping the mind intact, and confined to a wheelchair. Politico called him "the most powerful activist in America."
3. Jeremy Ben-Ami is president of J Street, the leading organization within the American Jewish community committed to challenging Israel's rightward shift.
4. Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange and founder of the women-led peace group Code Pink that uses create civil disobedience and humor to challenge corporate and government decision-makers around issues of militarism and the environmental crisis.
5. Rabbi Sharon Brous founded IKAR, a progressive Los Angeles synagogue, in 2004, to attract unaffiliated Jews alienated from the mainstream Jewish community. Brous and IKAR have helped spark a revival of interest in Jewish spirituality, inter-faith ties, and political activism.
6. Heather Booth has been an organizer since the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War and women's movements of the 1960s. She created JANE, an underground abortion service started before Roe, and founded the Midwest Academy, a training center for social change leaders and organizers. She has been a key strategist and activist in movements immigrant rights, voting rights, bank reform, marriage equality, tax reform, and health care reform. She is the subject of the recent documentary "Heather Booth: Changing the World."
7. Dan Cantor was described in New York magazine as the "model of a grassroots political boss" for his role as Executive Director of the Working Families Party (WFP) of New York, a progressive third party established in 1998. Under his leadership, WFP led successful campaigns to reform New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws, maintain access to affordable mass transit, and raise New York's minimum wage. The WFP has helped elect progressive mayors, state legislators, city council members and members of Congress.
8. Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, led a major transformation of the union into a more militant, inclusive, and effective organization. Under his leadership, UTLA won major educational victories in 2019 following a week-long strike that catalyzed widespread support by building bridges with community and faith-based groups, parents and students in the country's second-largest school system.
9. Donald Cohen, founder of In The Public Interest, which works with unions, community groups, and local governments to challenge privatization, develop progressive policy ideas, and improve the effectiveness of progressive government
10. Stosh Cotler is the CEO of Bend the Arc, a Jewish social justice group, which has led the Jewish resistance to the Trump administration.
11. Janice Fine, spent more than 20 years as a community, labor, and electoral organizer before joining Rutgers University's labor studies faculty. She is a co-convenor of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, and works closely with many national and local immigrant rights, labor, and community organizing groups.
12. Lew Finfer, a Boston-based community and tenants rights organizer since 1970, is currently executive director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, a network of faith-based community organizations that has won significant victories around economic, housing, and racial justice. He has led successful campaigns around rent control, redlining, health care, paid family leave and the minimum wage.
13. Jacob Frey served on the Minneapolis City Council before being elected Mayor in 2017. A college track star and a lawyer by training, Frey provided legal aid to tenants who lost their homes after a tornado struck Minneapolis in 2011. The next year he organized the first Big Gay Race, a 5K charity race to raise money for Minnesotans United for All Families, a political group organizing for marriage equality. On the City Council, he drafted the city's minimum wage law and paid sick leave ordinance, led an effort to require landlords to provide tenants with voter registration information, and sponsored an ordinance requiring polluters to pay fees based on the amount of pollution they produce in order to fund green jobs. As mayor, he has dramatically increased city funding for affordable housing and pushed for a comprehensive zoning reform plan to allow three-family homes in the city's residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors, making Minneapolis the first major city to end single-family zoning and confront the city's segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl.
14. Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers union, along with local union president Armando Robles led 240 workers to illegally occupy their Chicago workplace in 2008 after their employer, Republic Windows and Doors, abruptly told them that it was shutting down the factory, denying employees severance and vacation pay they had earned. The workers formed and incorporated New Era Windows, a worker-run cooperative, and raised the funds needed to buy the machinery from their former employer and keep producing windows under the new arrangement. It remains open for business.
15. Andrew Friedman is co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of local and state community organizing groups with 53 affiliates in 34 states that organize campaigns to advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice policy agenda nationwide.
16. Marshall Ganz, the son of a rabbi, joined the Southern civil rights movement before serving as the organizing director for the United Farm Workers union. He teaches community organizing at Harvard, serving as a guru for activists around the world. He was the architect of Obama's 2008 grassroots election campaign
17. Jackie Goldberg's activism started with the Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley in 1964. After teaching in public schools, she won seats on the LA school board, LA City Council, and California state legislature, serving as an effective advocate for progressive causes, including spearheading battles for a living wage and responsible development. After a decade hiatus in public office, she was elected to the school board again in 2019.
18. Robert Greenwald, an award-winning TV and movie director, founded the nonprofit Brave New Films in 2000 to use documentary films to educate and mobilize for progressive causes. Its films have tackled such topics as Fox News, immigration, mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, Walmart, the NRA, the Koch brothers, racism, and voter suppression.
19. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin co-founded Indivisible soon after Trump was elected president in 2016. Their on-line handbook for progressives soon mushroomed into a nationwide movement of volunteer activists, with over 6,000 chapters, devoted to mobilizing voters around progressive issues and candidates.
20. Ilyse Hogue, CEO of NARAL-Pro-Choice America, a leading women's rights organization. She previously worked at MoveOn.org, the Rainforest Action Network, and Media Matters for America.
21. Eddie Iny is the organizing director for OUR Walmart, a nationwide grassroots organization of Walmart employees, which has successfully pushed the nation's largest private employer to raise based pay from $7.25 to $11 an hour, institute paid family leave, and improve conditions for pregnant employees.
22. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T'ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which raises awareness and engages in direct action to protect human rights in the United States and Israel.
23. Madeline Janis, organizer and founder of the LA Alliance for a New Economy and Jobs to Move America, has for over 35 years, been on the inside and outside of local and state government, working to create high road, equitable economic development.
24. Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the tragic shooting in 2018 at Marjory Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is a founder of March for Our Lives and Never Again MSD, organizations that advocate for stronger gun control.
25. Larry Kramer is an iconic gay rights activist, playwright, and co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis. He helped start the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987, an influential direct action protest organization that is widely credited with raising awareness of HIV and AIDS-related diseases. Among his many plays are The Normal Heart (1985) and The Destiny of Me (1992).
26. Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum is the spiritual leader of New York's Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the largest LGBTQ synagogue in the country. She joined CBST in 1992, at the height of the AIDS crisis, and has become a powerful voice on social justice issues within the Jewish and LGBTQ communities.
27. Larry Krasner, a veteran radical defense attorney, won a surprise victory to become Philadelphia's District Attorney with a mission to end mass incarceration and the criminal justice system's racism.
28. Sheila Kuehl, a former child actress (Zelda on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"), co-founded and served as managing attorney of the California Women's Law Center. In 1997, she became the first woman to be named Speaker pro Tempore of the California State Assembly, just three years after becoming the state's first openly gay legislator. In the legislature, she sponsored successful bills to establish paid family leave, protect victims of domestic violence, establish nurse to patient ratios in hospitals, and prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of gender and disability and led the campaign for a statewide single-payer health care system.She is currently one of five elected members of the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors which serves over 10 million people, where she has fought to reduce homelessness and to establish LA County's first affordable housing trust.
29. Brad Lander spent over a decade as a community organizer and neighborhood planner before being elected to the NY City Council, where he co-founded its Progressive Caucus. He has fought successfully to protect freelancers from wage theft, give fast-food workers a fair workweek, and make sure Uber/Lyft drivers earn a living wage, improve public transit, challenge the NYPD's discriminatory practices, combat school segregation, and expand affordable housing. Through #GetOrganizedBK, he brought Brooklyn residents together to stand up to the Trump administration's bigotry, corruption, and injustice. He serves as chair of Local Progress, a national network of over 800 progressive local elected officials in 45 states.
30. Stephen Lerner has spent three decades unionizing hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, garment workers, and other low-wage workers. He was the architect of SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign, a nationwide campaign that led to dramatic improvements in the wages and conditions of mostly immigrant service workers. He is currently a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative and working with unions and community organizing groups to expose and change the lax regulations and unsustainable practices of private equity firms.
31. Rabbi Joshua Levine-Grater served congregations in the greater New York and Los Angeles for 17 years before shifting gears and become the executive director of Friends in Deed, a local, religious-based non-profit addressing homelessness and poverty in Pasadena. He serves on the board of T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
32. Yonah Lieberman, Emily Mayer, and Simone Zimmerman are founders of If Not Now, a movement to end the American Jewish community's support for Israel's occupation of Arab territories, including their criticism of Birthright tours of Israel for young American Jews.
33. Ruth Messinger is a former NY City Council member and Manhattan borough president, who served as president of (and current ambassador for) the American Jewish World Service, which has provided about $400 million to support thousands of social justice organizations in the developing world to reduce poverty, amplify the voices of poor and persecuted minorities, defend the land and water rights of indigenous communities most affected by climate change, and advance sexual health and rights for women, girls and LGBT people.
34. Karen Nussbaum co-founded 9to5, an organization to address the concerns of women office workers in 1973. That group inspired the 1980 film "9 to 5" starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin. She founded a vision of SEIU devoted to organizing office workers and during the Clinton administration directed the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau. She is the founding director and now a board member of Working America, the community organizing arm of the AFL-CIO, dedicated to giving non-unionized workers a voice in such issues as raising the minimum wage, paid family leave, and health care reform.
35. Eli Pariser, was executive director of MoveOn from 2004-2009 and has been a pioneer in figuring out how technology can be utilized to promote progressive movements. He is currently a fellow at New America.
36. Rabbi Jonah Pesner is director of Reform Judaism's Religious Action Center, which mobilizes Jews around immigration, health care, voting rights, gun control, civil rights, poverty, Islamophobia, LGBTQ equality, environmental justice and other social justice issues.
37. Jane Ramsey, for over three decades, led the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, leading struggles against poverty, racism and anti-Semitism in partnership with Chicago's diverse communities.She is now a consultant to nonprofit advocacy groups and a member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
38. Cong. Jamie Raskin served in the Maryland state legislator before his 2016 election to Congress. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe called Raskin, who taught law at American University for a quarter-century, "the best constitutional lawyer in all of Congress." In 2008 he started Democracy Summer, a program to teach political activist skills to 16-to-22-year olds. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he's played an important role in the current impeachment fight.
39. Hillary Ronen was an immigrant rights lawyer before being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where she's been a strong advocate for tenants' rights, public transit, and environmental justice. She led the successful fight for a tax on big business to fund affordable housing, a ballot measure approved by 60% of the voters.
40. Steve Rosenthal has been described by the New York Times as one of the Democratic Party's "smartest and most influential strategists" and by the Washington Post as, "one of the party's best-known voter turnout specialists." He began is career in the labor movement as an organizer with the Communication Workers of America, served as Associate Deputy Secretary of Labor under Secretary Robert Reich in the Clinton administration, founded America Coming Together (one of the largest voter mobilization campaigns in Democratic Party history), and served as political director of the AFL-CIO. He is currently president of The Organizing Group, which works with unions and other progressive organizations to increase voter turnout.
41. Amy Rutkin, chief of staff for Cong. Jerrold Nadler, has been a key behind-the-scenes architect of the Democrats' impeachment strategy.
42. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has sparked a grassroots upsurge and changed the national debate with his two presidential campaigns, putting democratic socialism on the political map.
43. Cong. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) has been one of the most progressive members of Congress since she was elected in 1998, after serving for eight years in the Illinois State Assembly. During the previous 20 years, she was a community organizer, serving as program director of Illinois Public action and director of the Illinois State Council of Senior Citizens. In Congress, she has been deeply involved in the fight to protect women's reproductive freedom, supports a single-payer health care system, opposed the Iraq war, and has been a leader on issues of consumer safety, opposition to U.S. military, and LGBT equality.
44. Amy Schur, the organizing director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, spearheaded the successful campaign for statewide rent control and just-cause eviction law in 2019, and building the power of the tenants rights movement
45. Marilyn Schneiderman, longtime union organizer, is currently director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University, which conducts research and sponsors workshops to strengthen the influence of community organizations, worker centers, and labor unions. She previously directed the National AFL-CIO's Department of Field Mobilization and served as executive director of AVODAH, a national Jewish social justice organization.
46. Leah Simon-Weisberg has been on the front lines of the housing crisis for over a decade. She is the Directing Attorney of the Tenant Rights Program at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, working closely with community organizers to fight rent increases and evictions. She's worked with Tenants Together, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and other groups to challenge bank foreclosures and predatory lending, drafted rent control and other laws for Bay Area cities, and serves as an elected member of Berkeley's Rent Board.
47. Daniel Sokatch is CEO of the New Israel Fund, the largest funder of grassroots activist groups in Israel that promote Arab-Jewish cooperation, human rights, LGBT rights, and democratic change and oppose the Occupation and violation of Palestinian rights.
48. Gloria Steinem is a feminist icon and founder of MS magazine, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the National Women's Political Caucus.
49. Becky Wasserman is the director of Government Relations for the Service Employees International Union. She previously worked for J Street and the American Jewish World Service and was President of the United States Student Association for two years. She serves on the boards of Local Progress and the Center for Community Change.
50. Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers since 2008, has pushed to improve education standards, raise teachers' salaries, and challenge efforts to allow teachers to carry guns in schools.
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Eugene Debs and the Kingdom of Evil
TERRE HAUTE, Ind.--Eugene Victor Debs, whose home is an infrequently visited museum on the campus of Indiana State University, was the most important political figure of the 20th century. He built the socialist movement in America and was eventually crucified by the capitalist class when he and hundreds of thousands of followers became a potent political threat.
Jul 17, 2017
TERRE HAUTE, Ind.--Eugene Victor Debs, whose home is an infrequently visited museum on the campus of Indiana State University, was the most important political figure of the 20th century. He built the socialist movement in America and was eventually crucified by the capitalist class when he and hundreds of thousands of followers became a potent political threat.
Debs burst onto the national stage when he organized a railroad strike in 1894 after the Pullman Co. cut wages by up to one-third but did not lower rents in company housing or reduce dividend payments to its stockholders. Over a hundred thousand workers staged what became the biggest strike in U.S. history on trains carrying Pullman cars.
The response was swift and brutal.
"Mobilizing all the powers of capital, the owners, representing twenty-four railroads with combined capital of $818,000,00, fought back with the courts and the armed forces of the Federal government behind them," Barbara W. Tuchman writes in "The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914." "Three thousand police in the Chicago area were mobilized against the strikers, five thousand professional strikebreakers were sworn in as Federal deputy marshals and given firearms; ultimately six thousand Federal and State troops were brought in, less for the protection of property and the public than to break the strike and crush the union."
Attorney General Richard Olney, who as Tuchman writes "had been a lawyer for railroads before entering the Cabinet and was still a director of several lines involved in the strike," issued an injunction rendering the strike illegal. The conflict, as Debs would write, was a battle between "the producing classes and the money power of the country."
Debs and the union leaders defied the injunction. They were arrested, denied bail and sent to jail for six months. The strike was broken. Thirty workers had been killed. Sixty had been injured. Over 700 had been arrested. The Pullman Co. hired new workers under "yellow dog contracts," agreements that forbade them to unionize.
When he was in jail, Debs read the works of socialist writers Edward Bellamy and Karl Kautsky as well as Karl Marx's "Das Kapital." The books, especially Marx's three volumes, set the "wires humming in my system."
"I was to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of the conflict. ... [I]n the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed," he writes. "This was my first practical lesson in Socialism."
Debs came to the conclusion that no strike or labor movement could ultimately be successful as long as the government was controlled by the capitalist class. Any advances made by an organized working class would be reversed once the capitalists regained absolute power, often by temporarily mollifying workers with a few reforms. Working men and women had to achieve political power, a goal of Britain's Labour Party for workers at the time, or they would forever be at the mercy of the bosses.
Debs feared the rise of the monolithic corporate state. He foresaw that corporations, unchecked, would expand to "continental proportions and swallow up the national resources and the means of production and distribution." If that happened, he warned, the long "night of capitalism will be dark."
This was a period in U.S. history when many American Christians were socialists. Walter Rauschenbusch, a Christian theologian, Baptist minister and leader of the Social Gospel movement, thundered against capitalism. He defined the six pillars of the "kingdom of evil" as "religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit (being 'the social group gone mad') and mob action, militarism[,] and class contempt."
Debs turned to the Bible as often to Marx, arguing "Cain was the author of the competitive theory" and the "cross of Jesus stands as its eternal denial." Debs' fiery speeches, replete with words like "sin" and "redemption," were often thinly disguised sermons. He equated the crucified Christ with the abolitionist John Brown. He insisted that Jesus came "to destroy class rule and set up the common people as the sole and rightful inheritors of the earth." "What is Socialism?" he once asked. "Merely Christianity in action." He was fond of quoting the poet James Russell Lowell, who writes:
He's true to God who's true to man;
Whenever wrong is done.
To the humblest and the weakest,
'neath the all-beholding sun.
That wrong is also done to us,
And they are slaves most base,
Whose love of right is for themselves
And not for all the race.
It was also a period beset with violence, including anarchist bombings and assassinations. An anarchist killed President William McKinley in 1901, unleashing a wave of state repression against social and radical movements. Striking workers engaged in periodic gun battles, especially in the coalfields of southern West Virginia, with heavily armed company goons, National Guard units, paramilitary groups such as the Coal and Iron Police, and the U.S. Army.
Debs, although a sworn enemy of the capitalist elites, was adamantly opposed to violence and sabotage, arguing that these actions allowed the state to demonize the socialist movement and enabled the destructive efforts of agents provocateurs. The conflict with the capitalist class, Debs argued, was at its core about competing values. In an interview conducted while he was in jail after the Pullman strike, he stressed the importance of "education, industry, frugality, integrity, veracity, fidelity, sobriety and charity."
A life of moral probity was vital as an example in the face of capitalist exploitation, but that was not enough to defeat the "kingdom of evil." The owners and managers of corporations, driven by greed and a lust for power, would never play fair. They would always seek to use the law as an instrument of oppression and increase profits through machines, a reduction in wages, a denial of benefits and union busting. They would sacrifice anyone and anything--including democracy and the natural world--to achieve their goals.
Debs, if he could hear today's proponents of the "free market," self-help gurus, positive psychologists, talk show hosts and the political class as they exhort Americans to work harder, get an education, follow their dreams, remain positive and believe in themselves and American exceptionalism, would have scoffed in derision. He knew that corporate power is countered only through organized and collective resistance by workers forced to fight a bitter class war.
Debs turned to politics when he was released from jail in 1895. He was one of the founders of the Socialist Party of America and, in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or "Wobblies." He was the Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. presidency five times in the period 1900 through 1920--once when he was in prison--and he ran for Congress in 1916.
Debs was a powerful orator and drew huge crowds across the country. Fifteen thousand people once paid 15 cents to a dollar each to hear him in New York City's Madison Square Garden. In his speeches and writings he demanded an end to child labor and denounced Jim Crow and lynching. He called for the vote for women, a graduated income tax, unemployment compensation, the direct election of senators, employer liability laws, national departments of education and health, guaranteed pensions for the elderly, nationalization of the banking and transport systems, and replacing "wage slavery" with cooperative industries.
As a presidential campaigner he traveled from New York to California on a train, called the Red Special, speaking to tens of thousands. He helped elect socialist mayors in some 70 cities, including Milwaukee, as well as numerous legislators and city council members. He propelled two socialists into Congress. In the elections of 1912 he received nearly a million votes, 6 percent of the electorate. Eighteen thousand people went to see him in Philadelphia and 22,000 in New York City.
He terrified the ruling elites, who began to institute tepid reforms to attempt to stanch the growing support for the socialists. Debs after the 1912 election was a marked man.
On June 18, 1918, in Canton, Ohio, he denounced, as he had often done in the past, the unholy alliance between capitalism and war, the use of the working class by the capitalists as cannon fodder in World War I and the Wilson administration's persecution of anti-war activists, unionists, anarchists, socialists and communists. President Woodrow Wilson, who had a deep animus toward Debs, had him arrested under the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" or to "willfully urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of the production" of anything "necessary or essential to the prosecution of [a U.S. war, in this case against Germany and its allies]."
Debs did not contest the charges. At his trial, he declared: "Washington, Paine, Adams--these were the rebels of their day. At first they were opposed by the people and denounced by the press. ... And if the Revolution had failed, the revolutionary fathers would have been executed as felons. But it did not fail. Revolutions have a habit of succeeding when the time comes for them."
On Sept. 18, 1918, minutes before he was sentenced to a 10-year prison term and stripped of his citizenship, the 62-year-old Debs rose and told the court:
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions. ...
Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change--but if possible by peaceable and orderly means. ...
Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day, and from that time until now my heart has been with the working class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison. ...
I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.
In this country--the most favored beneath the bending skies--we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child--and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity. ...
I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned--that industry, the basis of our social life, instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all. ...
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic and political movement that spreads over the face of all the earth.
There are today upwards of sixty millions of Socialists, loyal, devoted adherents to this cause, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color, or sex. They are all making common cause. They are spreading with tireless energy the propaganda of the new social order. They are waiting, watching, and working hopefully through all the hours of the day and the night. They are still in a minority. But they have learned how to be patient and to bide their time. The feel--they know, indeed--that the time is coming, in spite of all opposition, all persecution, when this emancipating gospel will spread among all the peoples, and when this minority will become the triumphant majority and, sweeping into power, inaugurate the greatest social and economic change in history.
In that day we shall have the universal commonwealth--the harmonious cooperation of every nation with every other nation on earth. ...
Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.
I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to 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, 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 lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.
Three years later, Debs' sentence was commuted by President Warren Harding to time served, and, in broken health, he was released from prison in December of 1921. His citizenship was not restored until five decades after his 1926 death. The labor movement and socialist party he had struggled to build had been ruthlessly crushed, often through violent attacks orchestrated by the state and corporations and mass arrests and deportations carried out during the Palmer Raids in November 1919 and January 1920. The government had shut down socialist publications, such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses. The "Red Scare" was used as an ideological weapon by the state, and especially the FBI after it was established in 1908, to discredit, persecute and silence dissent.
The breakdown of capitalism saw a short-lived revival of organized labor during the 1930s, often led by the Communist Party, and during a short period after World War II, and this resurgence triggered yet another prolonged assault by the capitalist class.
We have returned to an oligarchic purgatory. Wall Street and the global corporations, including the fossil fuel industry and the war industry, have iron control over the government. The social, political and civil rights won by workers in long and bloody struggles have been stripped away. Government regulations have been rolled back to permit capitalists to engage in abuse and fraud. The political elites, along with their courtiers in the media and academia, are hapless corporate stooges. Social and economic inequality replicates the worst excesses of the robber barons. And the great civic, labor and political organizations that fought for working men and women are moribund or dead.
We have to begin all over again. And we must do so understanding, as Debs did, that any accommodation with members of the capitalist class is futile and self-defeating. They are the enemy. They will degrade and destroy everything, including the ecosystem, to get richer. They are not capable of reform.
I walked through the Debs home in Terre Haute with its curator, Allison Duerk. It has about 700 visitors a year. Rarely do these visits include school groups. The valiant struggle by radical socialists and workers, hundreds of whom were murdered in labor struggles, has been consciously erased from our history and replaced with the vacuity of celebrity culture and the cult of the self.
"Teaching this kind of people's history puts a lot of power in working-class people's hands," Duerk said. "We all know what that threatens."
The walls of the two-story frame house, built by Debs and his wife in 1890, are covered with photos and posters, including pictures of Debs' funeral on the porch and 5,000 mourners in the front yard. There is the key to the cell in which he was held when he was jailed the first time. There is a photo of Convict No. 9653 holding a bouquet at the entrance to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta as he accepts the nomination from leaders of the Socialist Party to be their 1920 presidential candidate. There are gifts including an intricately inlaid wooden table and an ornately carved cane that prisoners sent to Debs, a tireless advocate for prisoner rights.
I opened the glass panel of a cherry wood bookshelf and pulled out one of Debs' books, running my fingers lightly over his signature on the front inside flap. I read a passage from a speech he gave in 1905 in Chicago:
The capitalist who does no useful work has the economic power to take from a thousand or ten thousand workingmen all they produce, over and above what is required to keep them in working and producing order, and he becomes a millionaire, perhaps a multi-millionaire. He lives in a palace in which there is music and singing and dancing and the luxuries of all climes. He sails the high seas in his private yacht. He is the reputed "captain of industry" who privately owns a social utility, has great economic power, and commands the political power of the nation to protect his economic interests. He is the gentleman who furnishes the "political boss" and his swarm of mercenaries with the funds with which the politics of the nation are corrupted and debauched. He is the economic master and the political ruler and you workingmen are almost as completely at his mercy as if you were his property under the law.
I leafed through copies of Appeal to Reason, the Socialist party newspaper Debs edited, which once had almost 800,000 readers and the fourth highest circulation in the country.
Debs, like many of his generation, was literate. He read and reread "Les Miserables" in French. It was his father's bible. It became his own. His parents, emigres from Alsace, named him after the French novelists Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. His father read Sue, Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Dumas and other authors to his six children. Debs found in Hugo's majestic novel the pathos of the struggle by the wretched of the earth for dignity and freedom. He was well aware, like Hugo, that the good were usually relentlessly persecuted, that they were not rewarded for virtue and that those who held fast to truth and justice often found their way to their own cross. But there was no other choice for him: The kingdom of evil had to be fought. It was a moral imperative. It was what made us human.
"Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement," Hugo writes in an appendix to "Les Miserables." "Knowledge is a viaticum; thought is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light."
Originally published by TruthDig.
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Eugene V. Debs and the Urgent Need for a New Anti-War Movement
While in prison, Eugene Debs became a socialist.
Sep 22, 2016
While in prison, Eugene Debs became a socialist.
After being arrested for his leadership role in the Pullman Strike of 1894 -- for which he was deemed "an enemy of the human race" in the New York Times -- Debs took to studying intensely the classics of socialist thought, from the utopian vision of Edward Bellamy to the analytical works of the influential Marxist Karl Kautsky.
But, of course, the critical groundwork for Debs's conversion was already laid; as he recounted in an essay detailing his ideological transformation, the brutality with which striking workers were treated by the forces of the state in defense of the capitalist class was "his first practical lesson in Socialism" -- "in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle," he wrote, "the class struggle was revealed."
While still in prison, Debs granted interviews to multiple news outlets, making his newfound ideas known while skewering the then widespread faith in what he termed "the competitive system."
"The competitive system has had its day," he told a correspondent for the Cincinnati Enquirer. "[I]t has blotted out all the stars of hope; filled the world with groans and reduced humanity to slavery. The strong have devoured the weak. The highways of the centuries are strewn with the bones of countless victims."
Almost immediately upon his release, Debs began his rise within the ranks of America's radical circles, a rise that coincided with the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World and America's Social Democratic Party, which shortly thereafter became the Socialist Party.
The fact that Debs would, in the next two decades, launch several failed yet still prominent presidential runs deserves less attention -- as he himself emphasized -- than his role as America's conscience in the midst of a class structure that seemed unshakable. As Debs acknowledged in 1898, "The few have come in possession of all, and the many have been reduced to the extremity of living by permission."
Child labor was commonplace through the early years of the twentieth century; workers toiled in dangerous conditions, to which Upton Sinclair called attention in his novel The Jungle; and public policy was dictated by the interests of capital.
Debs also confronted what he saw as an inevitable outgrowth of the expansion of industrial capitalism: Military conflict.
"Wars and rumors of wars are of universal prevalence," Debs wrote in 1900, pointing to America's brutal occupation of the Philippines. "The picture, lurid as a chamber of horrors, becomes complete in its gruesome ghastliness when robed ministers of Christ solemnly declare that it is all for the glory of God and the advancement of Christian civilization."
The picture would become infinitely more gruesome in the coming years with the onset of the First World War.
Debs believed that the United States should stay out of the conflict -- and so, at least at first, did Woodrow Wilson, who was reelected on a platform of peace in 1916. The very same Wilson would, just two years later, ensure Debs's imprisonment for the crime of defending that platform, a fact whose irony Debs didn't miss.
The beginning of America's involvement in the war coincided with a swift crackdown on dissenting voices; it became, thanks to the Sedition Act of 1918 (an extension of the Espionage Act of 1917), a crime to speak out against the war effort, or to speak in any way that smacked of "disloyalty." Debs lamented in a speech in Canton, Ohio, "that it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world."
Two weeks after the Canton remarks, Debs was arrested.
This past Sunday marked the 98th anniversary of what would become Debs's most famous speech, delivered after he was convicted on ten counts of sedition -- a conviction that carried a ten-year prison sentence.
"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence," Debs told the court. "This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis."
By highlighting the injustices of the capitalist order at home and the destruction wrought by war abroad, and by making clear the connections between the two, Debs established a framework of thought that would guide the radicalism of future decades.
In his protests against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. decried a system that let the poor die in the streets and sent the children of struggling families to die overseas.
"I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube," Dr. King said in 1967. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
But observing the radicalism of Debs and King also forces us to come to grips with the fact that the tradition they upheld -- one of principled and persistent opposition to war -- has faded rapidly in recent years.
When historian Michael Kazin asked in 2015, "Why is there no antiwar movement?" the necessity of the question was plain: There is no mass, mobilized, and militant anti-war movement in the United States, and that fact should trouble us all.
While the Vietnam War era was characterized by mass discontent and rebellion, the post-Vietnam War era has been shaped by a sprawling and increasingly secretive national security apparatus, complete with private militias and drones that do the dirty work of empire with little to no oversight and scattered opposition.
"In the last six decades, the American national security state has succeeded strikingly at only one thing (other than turning itself into a growth industry): it freed itself of us and of Congress," summarizes Tom Engelhardt. "In the years following the Vietnam War, the American people were effectively demobilized, shorn of that sense of service to country, while war was privatized and the citizen soldier replaced by an 'all-volunteer' force and a host of paid contractors working for warrior corporations."
The "sense of service to country" to which Engelhardt refers is not the blind, reactionary patriotism of the American right; rather, it is the sense that one has the duty to combat injustices, particularly those perpetrated by one's own supposed representatives.
But as Engelhardt also notes, Americans have increasingly come to view -- with copious supporting evidence -- government as an entity entirely separate from the will of the public at large. Just as Debs excoriated a system under which a "few have come in possession of all," scholars today have documented the extent to which economic elites dominate decision-making, pushing "ordinary" people out of the process altogether.
Americans have, in the years following the financial crisis, organized in an effort to combat this reality, one characterized by soaring inequities of influence, both political and economic. Occupy emerged and changed the national conversation; Fight for $15 is leading the way for higher wages; the nation's democratic socialists have used the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders to expand their influence.
We have also seen the growth and expansion of crucial movements responding to police killings, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and systemic racism -- most notably Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives.
The same cannot be said of anti-war efforts. Though the consolidation of power among foreign policy officials and the impenetrable walls behind which they operate have resulted in devastating invasion after devastating invasion, the public has not responded with the proportionality necessary to cultivate effective resistance.
Resistance during the Obama administration has arguably weakened further, as Democratic partisans remain silent in the interest of proper political etiquette and as the anti-war left remains marginalized, without a voice in the mainstream.
This is so even as drones continue to maim and murder civilians, even as the war on whistleblowers is sustained, even as military efforts proceed in Iraq and Afghanistan and spill over into Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.
To say that the efforts of the entrenched foreign policy establishment have failed to make the world safer would be an outrageous understatement; the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan sparked the rise of ISIS and other affiliated groups, which are using the chaos initiated by decades of intervention and occupation to spread terror.
Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton offer anything resembling an alternative; indeed, as Matthew Hoh has observed, "both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are unabashed militarists, seeing no shame or dysfunction in America's wars overseas, and seemingly promising to escalate current wars or begin new ones."
But no matter who is elected in November, our hopes cannot remain tethered to presidential politics; the changes that are necessary to take on a military-industrial complex that has extended its reach beyond what Eisenhower could have envisioned cannot come from the top-down.
Like all democratic projects of the past, the formation of a far-reaching and sustainable anti-capitalist, anti-war movement will take years of mass organization and mass action. The question of whether the creation of such a movement is practical is less important than whether such a movement is necessary. If Debs's words are any guide, the answer is clear.
An egalitarian project, as Debs understood, cannot proceed in the midst of perpetual war. A government willing to sanction the bombing and subjugation of innocents abroad will not hesitate to exploit the most vulnerable at home.
"I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice," Debs said in 1918. "I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own."
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Super Tuesday: Sanders Defeats Debs
Mar 03, 2016
Every American on the left knows that when labor leader Eugene Debs ran for President in 1920 as a socialist, he got a million votes.
I don't know if Howard Zinn would approve this message, but by this standard, Team Sanders is arguably kicking Debs' butt. Bernie Sanders has more than a million campaign contributors. A campaign contribution, for an ordinary person of modest means, is like a vote with a little bit of extra blood on it. You mean business. It costs you something. You have skin in the game.
Every member of Team Sanders knows that the average contribution to Team Sanders is twenty-seven dollars. This is a regular theme of Sanders' speeches. When Sanders says, "...and the average contribution to this campaign is ..." the crowd shouts, "Twenty-seven dollars!"
And of course, Eugene Debs did not win New Hampshire, Colorado, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Minnesota, like Sanders just did. As a Midwest nationalist, I am especially happy about the Minnesota result. Eugene Debs was from Indiana. Emma Goldman is buried in Chicago with the Haymarket martyrs who died fighting for the eight-hour workday. Mother Jones is buried in Mount Olive, Illinois alongside miners who died in the Battle of Virden. People from the Midwest know these things.
I went to a Sanders appearance at the Minneapolis Convention Center the day before the caucus. The "warm-up acts" were as impressive as the main speaker. Lisa Bender, a member of the Minneapolis City Council, talked about local issues. Winona LaDuke talked about protecting our environment from corporate greed. Keystone XL isn't the only oil pipeline we need to stop, she said; we need a government that will build infrastructure for people, not oil companies. Keith Ellison talked about the right to tuition-free public college. If the UK can do it, if Denmark can do it, we can do it too, Ellison said. More than talking about Bernie Sanders, each was giving their own version of The Speech.
Regardless of what happens at the Democratic convention, Lisa Bender, Winona LaDuke and Keith Ellison will still be with us, and this will be Sanders' lasting legacy, helping to mobilize a wave of progressive activists to engagement and challenge in the political system, and establishing a culture of primary challenges to the establishment on the left like the one that which now exists on the right. The right has more influence in the Republican Party than the left has in the Democratic Party because the right has mastered the weapon of the primary challenge. When the left masters the primary challenge weapon, the left will have more influence.
The establishment hates contested primaries because they hate competition. In the establishment's ideal election, the establishment would anoint the candidate and everyone else would accept without question the establishment's choice. But making the establishment happy by avoiding contested primaries is terrible for democracy, and terrible for people who want to talk about issues that the establishment doesn't want to talk about.
We're building an army for the long march through the institutions. With the right campaigns, voting and encouraging others to vote can be like Zuccotti Park without the tear gas: occupy Schoolhouse Rock. One, two, three, many Keith Ellisons, as the Argentine doctor might have said.
Just as every American has the right to health care, just as every high school student who applies themselves has the right to tuition-free public college, so every American has the right to participate in this movement, even if they aren't so fortunate as to live in Minnesota. Count every vote.
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