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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday February 27, 1919
Terre Haute, Indiana – Eugene V. Debs on Deportations of Working Men
From The Butte Daily Bulletin of February 21, 1919:
Debs Brands Plot to Deport
Radicals “Crime of Crimes”
—–Recalls Lincoln’s Birthday. Says Rail Splitter Was
Murdered by the Ruling Class, that Same Power That
Today Is Shipping Men Overseas Like Cattle Because
They Are Protesting Against Wage Slavery.
—–By EUGENE V. DEBS.
Terre Haute, Ind., Feb. 12.-This is Lincoln’s birthday. It is a day rich with memory and dark with tragedy. Lincoln was and is the sweetest product of American soil. Like the Nazarene, he loved the poor, sympathized with the lowly, and was hated, vilified and finally murdered by the ruling class of his time.
The birthday of the immortal rail splitter is being celebrated in part by deportation from the land he loved of the men of honest toil, who, like himself, hated the money power and believed in government of and by and for the people. This is one of the beautiful ironies of capitalism. Its vaunted love of freedom is but the velvet cloak which conceals its iron-fisted despotism.
These men are charged by the ruling class and its prostitute press with being enemies of the government. Precisely the same charge that is being brought against these men today under capitalist despotism was brought against Abraham Lincoln by the slave power of his day. Lincoln was murdered by same power that is now tearing our brothers from their families and friends and shipping them over the wide seas like cattle for the crime of protesting against wage slavery and aspiring to walk the earth free men.
They are charged with being anarchists, bolshevists and I. W. W. I care not what they are. I know only that they are human beings and my brothers, and that I love them and am ready to share their lot. Look at their hands, and then look at the hands of their deporters. This will tell the story. The hands of these workingmen at Ellis Island, penned up like hogs awaiting shipment, are the bruised, deformed hands that have dug up the gold, hewn down the forests and gathered the crops of the plutocratic pirates and parasites that are now having them driven from the country for daring to think that they are entitled to more consideration than beasts of burden.
What do I think of this deportation? It is the crime of crimes and the infamy of infamies, and a foul and indelible blot upon the present administration. No words of mine are sufficient to express my loathing and detestation of this outrage by the ruling powers upon the working class. It is of a piece with the program of Wall street to make this country safe for democracy by putting the iron heel on everything that ventures to oppose the thief rule of the profiteering pirates now in the saddle.
Whom do I blame for this atrocious exhibition of capitalist despotism? Chiefly Gompers and his scabbing and strikebreaking craft unions, which are simply auxiliary to the Wall street power. They have broken the strike in Seattle, and are now breaking the strikes in the east. The same gang have had an underground alliance with the chamber of commerce in San Francisco in the conspiracy to murder Tom Mooney. Without the sanction and support, open and covert, of these corrupt and reactionary elements which wear the union badge but to traffic in it, to betray and disgrace it, the master class would not dare to embark in the wholesale deportation of men whose only crime is their self-respect and their manly purpose to be free.
The union men marked for deportation are as true to the principles of real unionism as are those false to it who, in the name of organized labor, are in league with the exploiters of labor to keep the working class in slavery. Every labor union, every socialist local and every other body of liberty-loving people should join at once in nation-wide protest against the perpetration of this outrage upon American soil. Let it be made clear to the world that America is not going to begin where old Russia left off.
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[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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SOURCE
The Butte Daily Bulletin
(Butte, Montana)
-Feb 21, 1919
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045085/1919-02-21/ed-1/seq-1/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045085/1919-02-21/ed-1/seq-3/
IMAGE
EVD, Bstn Glb p3, Sept 13, 1918
https://www.newspapers.com/image/430811654
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Monday February 24, 1919
The Red Special, Part I: “A Train Under Heavy Guard..Passed Swiftly Across the Continent from Seattle”
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday February 25, 1919
The Red Special, Part II: 54 “Agitators” Reach New York on Deportation Train; Held Incommunicado at Ellis Island
Tag: Seattle General Strike of 1919
https://weneverforget.org/tag/seattle-general-strike-of-1919/
Re: “strikes in the east,” Debs may have been referring to ongoing in Lawrence, Patterson, and Passaic, see newsclip:
“Strikers to Picket by Nationalities” from Boston Globe of Feb 15, 1919
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/22983800/the_boston_globe/
And for further study:
A Tale of Three Cities:
Labor Organization and Protest in Paterson, Passaic, and Lawrence, 1916-1921
-by David J. Goldberg
Rutgers University Press, 1989
https://books.google.com/books?id=9s11QgAACAAJ
Tag: Mooney-Billings Case
https://weneverforget.org/tag/mooney-billings-case/
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