Eugene V. Debs

“ The time has come for you to open your eyes and to stand erect and to realize that you have a head as well as hands; that you can think as well as work; and if you will but unite and think and act in accordance with your intelligence, you need no longer to deform your hands in the interest of the parasites that hold you in contempt. They are an insignificant minority and yet they rule in every department of this Government, and they rule through your ignorance, and the Socialist is frank enough to tell you that you are ignorant that you may become intelligent. ”

“ This is capitalism under which an insignificant minority of our people own and control the Nation’s industries—all the sources and means of our common life. They would if they could own the sunlight and have a meter on every sunbeam. They have taken possession of about everything else. You are at their mercy. When you work it is by their consent; when you work it is for them; when you work it is primarily to produce profit for them; not to enable you to support your wife and children; that is purely incidental.
Under this system you workers white and black are scarcely above the animal plane. ”

“ It is this class regardless of color that creates and supports all civilization; this class that in all the ages of the past, throughout history, in every nation on earth has been the lower class; for the badge of Labor has always been the symbol of servitude and upon the brow of Labor there has always been the brand of social inferiority. ”

“ We will improve our minds and develop our capacity to think and act together. We shall get closer and closer in touch day by day, increasing the store of our knowledge, dispelling the darkness of ignorance, and moving steadily toward the light.
You and I and all of us are comrades; we are brothers and sisters. Let us get into perfect unity with each other and stand upon one common basis of equality with the high aspiration to emancipate ourselves from the degrading thraldoms of past ages. Let us as workers organize industrially so that we may be fitted to take control of all industry. ”

“ They are not permitted to know what life is in its larger, nobler and diviner meaning. They are never thrilled with those higher and holier emotions that put them in touch with all that lifts up and elevates men and women until they can, from the loftiest altitudes, sing to the stars. They do not know what music is. And the capitalists themselves are not very much better off. How wholly undeveloped they are in that higher intellectual, moral and spiritual sense! I have met many of them. I have been amazed at their ignorance. ”

“ The aristocracy of idleness has perished from the earth. I can see a world without a slave; man at last is free. Nature’s forces have by science been enslaved. Lightning and light, wind and wave, frost and flame and all the secret, subtle forces of earth and air are the tireless toilers for the human race. ”

“ Now, if you still persist—you colored people—in remaining in either the Republican or the Democratic party, you are stultifying yourselves; you are insulting your race; you are barring the door in your own faces—the door that leads to emancipation. The time has come for you to realize what your position is in these capitalist parties. They are both alike. I challenge anybody anywhere to show me the slightest difference between them from the working man’s point of view.
I am speaking for the workers to-night. ”

“ You never hear much about the people in history. You read about the exploits of the murderous military chieftains. All history glorifies them, but about the common people—the people who alone make history, how little reference is made to them! McMaster made a departure in his history and for the first time you now read about the lives of the common people in American history. Hitherto their achievements have not been deemed of sufficient importance to place upon record.
We come down to the final development of the institution of chattel slavery which culminated in the terrible war. ”

“ Under chattel slavery, the colored man seized with the aspiration to be free, ran away from his master. You do not run away from yours; when you run it is not away from but toward the factory whistle; you are afraid you won’t get there soon enough. You work for your master and he becomes rich, and he does not know you; and why should he? He belongs to the upper class; you are in the lower class. He is useless and that is why he is in the upper class. ”

“ I appreciate all these heroes and martyrs, including Lincoln, who was vilified as no other American statesman ever was by that cruel and relentless power that organized the Ku Klux Klan after the war, and which is now seeking to revive that fanatical institution for the persecution of the Negro.
I am on the colored man’s side as against all those that are attempting to keep him in servitude. (Applause.) And I am glad that the colored people are exercising self-restraint and facing this persecution with intelligence, which is commanding more and more respect. ”

“ That was the blind stupidity of the great majority. Here let it be observed that the minorities have made the history of this world. The popular and reactionary majorities have perished in oblivion in their own ignorance.
In every age there have been a few men and women with new ideas—ideas in conflict with the established order of things. The class in power have always insisted upon perpetuating that power; they want no change; they combat every idea that suggests a change ”

“ The race question as we come to understand it, resolves itself into a class question. At bottom it is a class question. The capitalist cares no more about the white worker than about the black worker. What he wants is labor power—cheap labor power; he does not care whether it is wrapped up in a white skin or a black skin.
Has he one bit more consideration for the white slave than he has for the black slave? No, not at all; they are all the same to him regardless of color; they are all in the working class; they are his legitimate prey. He owns the natural resources; he owns the tools ”

“ That is the season of the year when their politicians come before you white and black workers. They do not discriminate against you colored people then. On the contrary they are glad to look into your intelligent faces and tell you that the beads of honest sweat that glisten on your manly brow are more precious than the jewels that blaze and flash in the coronet of a queen. (Laughter.) That is the one kind of jewelry—the one monopoly you absolutely control. They tell you that they are so greatly impressed by your intelligence and so proud to stand in your presence. ”

“ There were only a few who said: “We do not need a king; we can govern ourselves”; and they persisted in their odious agitation until they finally aroused the colonists and then came the war and the king was overthrown; the divine right to rule was trampled under foot with contempt; the foundations of the Republic were laid; the immortal Declaration was issued, and for the first time in history, politically speaking, men stood forth clothed to a limited extent with sovereignty. ”

“ But here is one whose greatness the world is now beginning audibly to acknowledge, before death shall have silenced his song-seeped soul. Here is a man that is loved, honored and revered in every section of the civilized world where the brutal hands of capitalism and tyranny rule and where the common people hunger for liberty and life. ”

“ There was a time in my life, before I became a Socialist—when I was still young and had the vanity of youth and the ambition and enthusiasm of a boy—when I permitted myself as a member of the Democratic party to be elected to a State Legislature. ”

“ If you are going to cast your vote for either of these corrupt capitalist parties and if you are going to give your support to those candidates who are committed to keep you in servitude how can you look yourselves in the face on the day following election without a blush of shame?
Sever your relations with these capitalist parties that are of the past. They disgrace the memory of Jefferson and Lincoln. Sever your relations with them and join this new party, this party of the future, especially you young people. It is vain to appeal to some of the older ones; they are petrified ”

“ Then there is the daily “Leader,” a Labor paper published in New York. The “Leader” ought to have the support of the workers. We have got to build up a press of our own. It is vitally important because everything depends upon education.
It is a tremendous struggle. It is going to take time and what most people call sacrifice. There is no sacrifice, however, so far as I am concerned, because what I can give the cause I give with joy and it comes back to me in riches untold. I have made no sacrifice for Socialism. I would sacrifice only if I refused the privilege of serving it. ”

“ They are both his parties; both stand for his system; for the private ownership of this nation’s industries; for the exploitation of the working class; for wage-slavery, and 15if that is what you want, stay with them; they will fulfill that program to your heart’s content.
But have you not within you the holy spark of freedom, the glowing aspiration to be a man?—not a slave but a MAN! You must know what that is—a being with a soul that throbs with a desire and aspiration to know life. The working class do not know life. They are absorbed in maintaining an existence and that is not life ”

“ I never knew of any distinction on account of the color of the flesh of a human being. Indeed, when I think of what the colored people have been made to suffer at the hands of their supposedly superior race, every time I look a colored brother in the face I blush for the crimes that my race has committed against his race. ”

“ I can see a world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music’s myriad voices thrilled while lips are rich with words of love and truth. A world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns—upon which the shadow of the cruel gallows no longer falls. ”

“ As I thought of Sam Moore and of the environment and conditions under which he had been reared and had to suffer and struggle, I made allowance accordingly, and he was the last inmate I saw when I left that prison.
There were almost three thousand human beings there. The prison is the poor man’s institution; the rich don’t go there, no matter what crime they may commit. ”

“ Everywhere the awakening workers are lifting their bowed bodies from the earth—these toiling and producing masses who have been the mudsills of society through all the ages past. They are learning at last how to stand erect and hold up their heads and press forward toward the dawn, keeping step to the inspiring heart throbs of the impending Social revolution. ”

“ The Soviet Republic has stood for five years against the combined capitalisms 29of the world; vilified and misrepresented shamefully, but they still hold the fort. The reason we do not recognize their Republic is because for the first time in history they have set up a Government of the working class; and if that experiment succeeds, good-bye to capitalism throughout the world! (Applause.) That is why our capitalist Government does not recognize Soviet Russia. ”

“ I am not unmindful of the heroic part that William Lloyd Garrison took, or Theodore Parker, or Gerrit Smith who was driven insane by their brutal persecution; or Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Maria Childs, or any of those magnificent women who were in the forefront espousing the cause of their sex and at the same time the cause of the disfranchised Negro; who faced insult and persecution through many years. ”

“ A great majority of the colonists in their ignorance believed that God had anointed a king from on high to rule over them, and to question the divine authority of that king was treason, and he who was guilty must be punished without mercy. ”

“ In the ancient world your ancestors were slaves, owned by their masters, whipped by their masters, put to death by their masters the same as other domestic animals. In the Middle Ages for a thousand years the serfs were not allowed to own an inch of soil; they could work only on condition that they produced for the benefit of the idle, aristocratic lord and baron who owned the land and who rioted in the luxury wrung from their sweat and misery. ”

“ I return my thanks to the dear little children whose floral offerings so enrich and reward me for the little that I have been able to do in the service of this great cause. The one regret of my life is that I have so little to give in return for all that is given me. ”

“ We were not too proud to recognize the Czar nor to have intercourse with Russia whilst Siberia was in existence and human beings were treated like wild beasts; when women were put under the lash and sent to Siberia and brutalized and dehumanized. ”