Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: Debs Denounces Critics of the S. P. A. Committee’s Report on the Investigation into West Virginia Situation

HdLn re WV SPA NEC Investigation Fail, Lbr Str p1, June 13, 1913 —————-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday August 11, 1913
Debs Denounces Critics of Socialist Party’s Report on West Virginia Situation

From the International Socialist Review of August 1913:

Debs Denounces Critics

From the N. Y. Call

Terre Haute, Ind., June 27.-The National Committee of the Socialist party in its regular session in May appointed a committee of three to investigate conditions in West Virginia. That committee, of which the writer was a member, was instructed to work in harmony with the United Mine Workers.

Having completed its investigation the committee has submitted its report, and it is in reference to this report, which has been widely published, that I now have something to say in answer to those who have assailed it.

First of all I want to say that I shall make no defense of the report. It does not need defense. It will answer for itself. But I do want to show the true animus of its critics and assailants, which they have been careful not to reveal in what they have written against it.

Two or three Socialist papers have bitterly condemned the report. Not one of them published it. Each of them suppressed it. They evidently did not want their readers to see it. It was sufficient for them to condemn it.

These Socialist papers have in this instance adopted the method of the capitalist papers with which I have had so much experience. A thousand times a speech of mine has been denounced by a capitalist paper while not a line of the speech was permitted to appear. That is precisely what these Socialist papers have done with our report, and if this is fair to themselves and their readers, I am willing to let it pass.

When our committee was appointed, more than sixty of our comrades were in the bullpen, martial law was in full force, two Socialist papers had been suppressed and there was a terrible state of affairs generally. Within four days after our committee arrived upon the ground every prisoner was released, martial law was practically declared off, the suppressed papers were given to understand that they could resume at their pleasure, and the governor of the state gave his unqualified assurance that free speech, free assemblage and the right to organize should prevail and that every other constitutional right should be respected so far as lay in his power.

[Here Debs neglects to say that when the two papers were “suppressed” equipment was destroyed, for which the papers were never compensated.]

It may be that our committee had nothing to do with bringing about these changes. As to this I have nothing to say. I simply state the facts.

Soon after our arrival it became evident that a certain element was hostile to the United Mine Workers and determined to thwart the efforts of that organization to organize the miners. This is the real source of opposition to our action and to our report.

Let me say frankly here that I do not hide behind the instruction of the National Committee that we work in harmony with the United Mine Workers. I would have done this under existing circumstances without instruction.

In our report to the party, we made a true transcript of the facts as we found them. We told the truth as we saw it.

And yet we have been charged by the element in question with having whitewashed Governor Hatfield and betrayed the party.

The truth is that we opposed Governor Hatfield where he was wrong and upheld him where he was right. But Hatfield is not the reason, but only the excuse in this instance. The intense prejudice prevailing against him has been taken advantage of to discredit our report as a means of striking a blow at the United Mine Workers.

[Here Debs ignores the hardships of Hatfield’s bullpen, where his comrades were held for several months, and the court martial they faced with possible death sentences hanging over their heads. All of which may have been a source of the “prejudice prevailing against him.”]

Had we, instead of doing plain justice to Governor Hatfield, as to everyone else, painted him black as a fiend, our report would have provoked the same bitter attack from the same source unless we had denounced the officials of the United Mine Workers, without exception, as crooks and grafters and in conspiracy to keep the miners in slavish subjection.

That would have satisfied those who are now so violently assailing us. Nothing less would.

For this reason and no other we are being vilified by sabotagers and anti-political actionists, and by those who are for just enough political action to mask their anarchism.

I am an industrial unionist, but not an industrial bummereyite, and those who are among the miners of West Virginia magnifying every petty complaint against the United Mine Workers and arousing suspicion against every one connected with it, are the real enemies of industrial unionism and of the working class.

[“Bummereyite” is an insult directed against the I. W. W., who are, at this time, facing prosecutions and long prison sentences in Ipswich, Paterson, and Little Falls, not to mention fellow workers who have lost their lives in those struggles.]

I am quite well aware that there are weak and crooked officials in the United Mine Workers, but to charge that they are all traitors without exception is outrageously false and slanderous.

The whole trouble is that some Chicago I. W. W.-ites, in spirit at least, are seeking to disrupt and drive out the United Mine Workers to make room for the I. W. W. and its program of sabotage and “strike at the ballot box with an ax.”

[This charge is simply not true. The I. W W. is engaged in its own struggles at this time and in no way attempted to destroy the U. M. W. A., only offering support to those oppressed under the rule of Hatfield’s pro-operator military dictatorship. Rather than listen to local leaders, on the ground in West Virginia, Debs makes a boogeyman of I. W. W., much like the capitalist press.]

To this I was, and am, and shall be, opposed with all my might, and if this be treason, I am guilty without a doubt.

The I. W. W.-ists have never done one particle of organizing, or attemped to, in the dangerous districts of West Virginia. The United Mine Workers have been on the job for years and all that the sabotagers have done is to denounce their officials and organizers as crooks and attempt in every way possible to defeat their efforts.

The United Mine Workers is steadily evolving into a thoroughly industrial union and in time it will certainly become so, but never in a thousand years will the efforts of these disrupters unionize the miners of West Virginia or any other state.

I now want to ask those who are denouncing our report under the false pretense that we have whitewashed Governor Hatfield, if Mother Jones and John W, Brown are also crooks and traitors? Both have been and are today in the employ of the officials of the United Mine Workers.

Will these I. W. W.-ites charge that Mother Jones and John Brown are in the service of crooks and traitors? That is exactly what their charge, stripped of its false pretense, amounts to, but they will not dare to put it in that form.

If President White, Vice President Hayes, Germer, Haggerty, Paul Paulsen, and all the rest of the national, district and local officials of the United Mine Workers, including the numerous organizers who have been slugged and beaten up, are crooks and traitors, as these “strike at the ballot box with an ax” disorganizers would have you believe, then Mother Jones and John Brown, who have been and are in their service, and working hand in hand with them, must certainly know it, and knowing it, must be quite as guilty as those who employ them and pay them their salaries.

There is nothing to be gained but everything to be lost by the mad attempt being made by the anti-political actionists and physical forcists to disrupt and destroy the United Mine Workers. I am not at all in harmony with its entire program and there is much in it that I would change, but I believe that properly encouraged and rightly directed it can within the near future be made a thoroughly revolutionary industrial union, one of the greatest in the world, the ”Hallelujah-l’m a Bum” element to the contrary notwithstanding.

The charge has been directly made that our committee betrayed its trust. If there is even the shadow of a foundation for this charge, then not only should the report of the committee be repudiated, but the committee itself be expelled from the party.

Let those who have made this charge against us produce their proof and make their appeal to the party for a referendum vote.

So far as I am concerned the report stands. I have no apology for a word in it. During the two weeks our committee was in Charleston we worked day and night with painstaking care to conscientiously perform our duty, and I am more than willing that the party shall decide whether we did it or whether we betrayed our trust.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]