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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday September 6, 1899
Eugene V. Debs on Current Events: Honest Workingmen Held in Idaho Bullpen
From the Social Democratic Herald of September 2, 1899:
CURRENT EVENTS PASSED IN REVIEW
—–MINERS’ “VICTORIES” SO-CALLED
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Thirteen-Dollars-a-Month Patriotism
-“Bull Pens” and Socialism-Justice in France
in Spite of Hell and the French Army
-Cleveland Boycott
—–By Eugene V. Debs, Terre Haute, Ind.
[Part II of II.]
Idaho.
The “bullpen” of Idaho is the joint product of Republican, Democratic, and Populistic administration. The pictures drawn of this hellhole by reliable correspondents are enough to make decent devils blush with shame. The Democratic Populistic Governor Steunenberg and the Republican General Merriam, monsters of degeneracy, constitute the tsars of this domain. Here hundreds of honest workingmen, without a charge against them, are corralled like cattle, starved like outlaws, and shot like mad dogs, and while the outrages are being perpetrated in the name of “law and order” their wives are made victims of the lust of their brutal keepers.
We often hear that violent revolution is close upon us, but this is only bluster, for if there were but the faintest revolutionary spirit abroad, the Idaho “Bullpen” would fan it into flame like a cyclone and such fiends as Steunenberg, Merriam, and other degenerate tools of the Standard Oil Company would be hung higher than Haman.
Some of these miners may remember what I told them nearly three years ago about coming events, about voting with the old parties and about socialism. They were not ready for socialism then, but now that their unions are broken up, their homes desolate, and themselves prisoners or exiles, and all this by the capitalist system which they have supported by their own votes, they will be compelled to realize that through socialism alone is there escape from the tyranny of capitalist rule and the atrocities of the wage system.
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