If they hang Moyer and Haywood,
they’ve got to hang me.
-Eugene Victor Debs
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday January 27, 1907
From the Appeal to Reason: “We Must Fight! by Eugene V. Debs
THE supreme court and the president of the United States have left us no other alternative. We have got to stand up like men or crawl on our bellies like cravens.
There is no compromise.
The class struggle is as clearly reflected in the supreme court decision and the president’s action as if traced in the skies in letter of fire. All the powers of capitalism, from Standard Oil down, are combined against Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, and find expression along the political line all the way from Ruzvlt [Roosevelt] to McPartland [McParland] and along the judicial line all the way from the supreme court of the United States to a police magistrate in Idaho.
It is not a case of punishing crime that law may be vindicated, but the violation of law that crime may be committed.
The case against our comrades is notorious in court annals for the utter defiance of all law, state and national, statutory and constitutional, that has marked its proceedings from its inception. Indeed, the case, to be properly understood, must be traced back at least as far as the purchase by the mine owners and smelter trust of the legislature of Colorado, at the current Colorado rates per head, thereby defeating the eight-hour amendment which the people of that Guggenheim state by a clear majority of nearly 50,000 votes had commanded these political perverts to enact into law. This was followed by the military despotism of the infamous Peabody and his sodden satraps, who emblazoned the escutcheon of his murderous administration with the immortal shibboleths: “To hell with the constitution,” “To hell with habeas corpus” and “To hell with any court that decides against us.” These are some of the foundation stones of the fabric of law and order which Ruzvlt sent Taft out to Idaho to commend to the people of that state.
This law and order cry issues from the brazen throats of political hirelings, the tools of capitalism, to conceal its own crimes.
When such monsters as Peabody and Gooding and such misshapen degenerates as McPartland talk about law and order in the lurid light of their own crimes, and President Ruzvlt sends his fat special emissary to the scene of these crimes to give them the backing of the national administration, all in the name of law and order, and this in the very shadow of a dungeon in which innocent kidnaped American citizens are guarded by criminal body-snatchers-when it comes to this, then, indeed, has justice fled to brutish beasts, all law is miserable mockery, and even hypocrisy, used as she is to sickening saturnalia, is nauseated and deserts the scene.
That our comrades have been kidnaped and are unlawfully held by legalized brute force is admitted; there is no question about it, not even by the supreme court. That the preconceived purpose is to do them to death, regardless of their innocence, has been apparent from the start.
It is not as individuals that these workingmen are to be murdered, but as the incarnation of class-conscious organized labor that they must be annihilated.
That makes the issue my issue and their cause my cause.
