I have no country to fight for;
my country is the earth;
I am a citizen of the world.
-Eugene Victor Debs
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Hellraisers Journal, Saturday September 7, 1918
Terre Haute, Indiana – John Reed and Art Young with Debs on July 4th
From The Liberator of September 1918:
With Gene Debs on the Fourth
By John Reed
[Part I]
—–
“WHAT’LL it be, Mr. Sparks?” asked the drug-clerk, with the familiarity of common citizenship in Terre Haute, Indiana, and the respect due to a successful politician.
“Gimme a nut sundae, George,” said the lawyer, who lived around the corner on Sycamore street. Sparks is not his real name. He was dressed up in a new grey suit, adorned with a small American flag, buttons of the First and Third Liberty loans, and a Red Cross emblem. “Reg’lar Fourth o’ July weather, hey George?”
Through the windows of the drug-store Eighth Street looked extremely animated; with families trooping toward the center of the town, flags aslant in children’s hands, mother and pa in holiday attire and sweating freely; with patriarchal automobiles of neighboring farmers, full of starched youngsters and draped with bunting. Faintly came the sound of an occasional fire-cracker, and the thin strains of martial music from the parade. A hot, sticky wind blew occasional puffs of yellow dust up the street.
“Yes, we got a spell of heat all right,” responded George. “We’re going to close the store pretty soon and go up town to see the p’rade.” He scooped ice-cream and went on gossiping. “They say Gene Debs has got arrested up to Cleve-land….”
Everyone in the place stopped talking and looked up.
“Yes,” said the lawyer in a satisfied tone. “Ye-e-es, I guess from what the papers say Gene stepped over the line this time. I guess they’ll shut him up now.”
An old man in a stiff white shirt, with grey whiskers sticking out of a shrewd, smooth-shaven face, looked up from a table in the corner.
“Do ye think they’re agoin’ to put Gene in jail?” he queried, a little anxiously.
“Hell have to pay the penalty of breakin’ the law just the same as other folks,” answered Sparks, virtuously. “If he’s agoin’ to make trouble for the Gov’ment, trouble is what he’ll get. This ain’t any time to talk Socialism….”
George paused in his concoction of a milk-shake. “You know Hank, the policeman; well he was in here last night, and he says Gene Debs ought to ben locked up twenty-five years ago.”
There were mutters of approval at this.
“It’s bad for the town,” announced Sparks. “Why with all the money Gene Debs has made out on the Chautauqua, he ain’t bought a single Liberty bond. …”
A raw-boned, brick-colored youth who sat with two giggling girls in muslin finery, spoke out fiercely:
“I bet the Kaiser would give him the Iron Cross if he ever heard about Gene Debs!”
The old man with the chin-whiskers mildly intervened.
“We-e-ell, that’s goin’ a leetle strong,” he remarked. “Everybody knows Gene Debs. He ain’t no traitor, Gene ain’t. Only jest a trifle flighty, that’s all’s a matter with Gene Debs….”
—–
Everybody knows Gene Debs in Terre Haute. Sixty-two years ago he was born in Terre Haute, of parents who came to America from Alsace. Gene’s father was of upper middle-class family, and owned mills in Colmar. He fell in love with a girl who worked in one of his mills, and renounced his heritage to marry her. They came to Indiana as immigrants, and lived through hells of poverty….
This was all before 1870. But old man Debs never admitted that Alsace could be German. On his tomb-stone he had engraved, “Born at Colmar, Alsace, FRANCE.”
Gene, his father and his mother went through their political and economic evolution together. Together Gene and his father voted for the Greenback Party, then for the Populists…and that way, the characteristically American way, Gene Debs and his father and mother came to Socialism….
Terre Haute is a rich little country town in the Hoosier land, where Eugene Field came from, and James Whitcomb Riley and a whole raft of novelists and poets. Going through that country on the train I can never resist the feeling that after all, this is real America. Trim villages, white farm-houses set in trees, fields of tasselled corn; shallow rivers flowing between earthen banks, little rolling hills spotted with lazy cows, bare-legged children; the church-spires and grave-yards of New England, transported hither by Protestant folk, mellowed and grown more spacious by contact with the South and West; rural school-houses, and everywhere hideous and beloved monuments commemorating the Civil War; locusts jarring in the sycamores, an almost overwhelming fertility rioting in the black earth, steaming in the procreative heat of flat-country summer, and distilling a local sweetness that is distinctively American-sentimental and humorous.
The Middle West, with its tradition of settled, country-living folk, and behind that, the romance of the Civil War, and still further back, the epos of the race moving West and conquering….
Here lives Gene Debs, authentic kin of Field and Riley, American, Middle Western, shrewd, tender-hearted, eloquent and indomitable. When I was a small boy my conception of Uncle Sam was just what I found Gene Debs to be-and I’m not at all sure my instinct was wrong.
[ Part I of II, to be continued.]
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SOURCE & IMAGES
The Liberator
(New York, New York)
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/
-September 1918
Page 7: “With Gene Debs on the Fourth”
-by John Reed
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1918/07/v1n07-sep-1918-liberator.pdf
See also:
Tag: USA v Debs 1918
https://weneverforget.org/tag/usa-v-debs-1918/
The Education of John Reed: Selected Writings
-with bio by John Stuart
(“With Debs” on page 186)
International Publishers, 1955
https://books.google.com/books?id=4wFHAAAAYAAJ
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