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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday October 20, 1908
Eugene V. Debs: “Childhood! What a holy theme!”
The story, published in yesterday’s Hellraisers, about Comrade Debs bringing the Red Special to a halt in order to meet with the school children of Trenton, Michigan, brought to mind the following article from the September 1908 edition of The Socialist Woman:
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CHILDHOOD.
—–EUGENE V. DEBS.
What emotion the recollection of childhood inspires, and how priceless its treasured memories in our advancing and declining years!
Laughing eyes and curly hair, little brown hands and bare feet, innocent and carefree, trusting and loving, tender and pure, what an elevating and satisfying influence these little gods have upon our maturer years!
Childhood! What a holy theme! Flowers they are, with souls in them, and if on this earth man has a sacred charge, a solemn obligation, it is to these buds and blossoms of humanity.
Yet how many of them are prematurely plucked, fade and die and are trampled in the mire. Many millions of them have been snatched from the cradle and stolen from their play to be fed to the forces that turn a workingman’s blood into a capitalist’s gold, and many millions of others have been crushed and perverted into filth for the slums and food for the pottersfield.
Childhood is at the parting of the ways which lead to success or failure, honor or disgrace, life or death. Society is, or ought to be, profoundly concerned in the nature of the environment that is to mold the character and determine the career of its children, and any remissness in such duty is rebuked by the most painful of penalties and these are inflicted with increasing severity upon the people of the United States.
Childhood is the most precious charge of the family and the community, but our capitalist civilization sacrifices it ruthlessly to gratify its brutal lust for pelf and power, and the march of its conquest is stained with the blood of infants and paved with the puny bones of children.
What shall the harvest be?
The millions of children crushed and slain in the conquests of capitalism have not died in vain. From their little graves all over this fair land they are springing up, as it were, against the system that murdered them and pronouncing upon it, in the name of God and humanity, the condemnation of death.
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On May 16, 1908, the town of Girard, Kansas, celebrated their most famous resident, Eugene Debs, in honor of his nomination by the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. E. N. Richardson made the following remarks:
Every child in this city knows and loves the man whom we have gathered here today to honor and congratulate; every homeless cur finds a friend in this man; no tramp or jobless man ever appealed to this man in vain. And, friends, you need never be afraid to put your confidence in a man whom the children and the dogs love.
Only the other day I heard a little 4-year-old boy say; “Gee! but I wish Mr. Debs was my papa.” And this little boys’s papa was not grieved; on the other hand his heart was filled with joy that we had in our midst a man who could inspire such sentiments in our children. My own dear little girl just the other day said to me: “Papa, Mr. Debs is the best man in all the world, isn’t he?” And I said, “Yes.”
What greater tribute could be paid any man than the love and confidence of the little children.
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SOURCE & IMAGE
The Socialist Woman
[Later-The Coming Nation]
-March-Dec 1908
July 1908 = last issue at Chicago, Illinois
August 1908 = first issue at Girard, Kansas
https://books.google.com/books?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ
SW: Vol. II, No. 16-Sept 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA2-PA1
“Childhood” by Debs
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA2-PA12
Hellraisers Journal – Monday October 19, 1908
The Red Special Heads East, Debs Speaks to School Children
Hellraisers Journal, Monday May 25, 1908
Town of Girard Honors Eugene Debs, Socialist Party Nominee for President of United States
See also:
Rebel Against Injustice: The Life of Frank P. O’Hare
-by Peter H. Buckingham
University of Missouri Press, 1996
(for more on E. N. Richardson, search: “finnegan stories”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=bL0nEURJmRs
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We will sing one song of the children in the mills,
They’re taken from playgrounds and schools,
In tender years made to go the pace that kills.
In the sweatshops, ‘mong the looms and the spools.
-Joe Hill