Hellraisers Journal: From the Appeal to Reason: “War? If the masters want blood, let them cut their own throats.”

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Quote Pres Wilson Seeds of War, St Louis Sept 5, 1919—————

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 25, 1914
General Death and Private Suffering Stride over Europe

From the Appeal to Reason of August 22, 1914:

War?
If the masters want blood,
let them cut their own throats.
—————

DRWG War Scourge of the Earth by Ryan Walker

Once more over Europe stride General Death and Private Suffering. About the feet of the great commander bloom, like flowers around the skirt of spring, white human skulls; the foliage before him grows red with brother gore; song birds turn to vultures; and fleecy white clouds are transformed into smoke curling from charred ruins. Everybody salutes you, General Death.

Though muffled in a military cloak, your face wears an unlipped smile. Though the sword in your bony fingers drips with blood, there is a something familiar in the terrifying personage. I know you now. You are the old Taskmaster, commanding to grimmer toil. But your fangs show, and the blood-tipped sword is a pen transformed. The burdensome flesh has dropped away, and I see the death’s-head of-CAPITALISM.

But the spirit-I see it now. At one time I believed your spirit-grim Capitalism with the lying smile, General Death the Hyde of the two-in-one-was wholly fiendish and deformed; but now I know it to be merely the concentrated spirit of the workers themselves. It is their own subserviency, their own ignorant imaginings, that give power to the whip-hand of the respectable and force to the sword-hand of the upbraided. Being that you materialize to the world. Should the workers change their own servile manner, change of conditions would immediately follow.

A change of spirit, and capitalism would disappear. He who has been materialized as General Death would cease both uniformed race-war and dress-suit class-war. Instead of the warrior and the slave, there would stand the Happy Worker, with glad wife and child by his side. Instead of skulls at his feet there would be flowers and fruit. For the vultures, birds of peace would throat carols of joy. Smoke of destruction would give place to placid skies. The bloody sword would be transformed into the tool that with a touch would pile before him beauty and abundance.

The lipless mouth of General Death, made to live through the spirit of the workers themselves, opens in prophecy. It bites this wisdom into dull ears:

“Evil is of your own making. The rivers of blood that shame the earth come from your own veins, from the blind strokes you yourselves dealt. Some day you will see and know. When you discern the truth, war will be forever at an end; the master will disappear; poverty and ignorance will vanish away; and then the hands that have slain shall make beautiful and good and joyous all the hills and valleys of earth, while fingers clasp across the borders that now are battlefields.”

LINCOLN PHIFER

[The Appeal warns that the U.S. may yet get involved in this war:]

International War May Involve the United States

Eight nations are now involved in the European war. Fifteen million soldiers are in the field, with prospect that twenty millions will be marching ere long. The loss in life exceeds already a hundred thousand. The situation, with big navies and aircraft taking part for the first time in the struggle of powerful nations, is appalling. Already starvation faces nations. The greatest calamity of all time threatens the world.

There is strong possibility that even America may be drawn into the war. The new Panama canal is a point of danger. If some navy should be permitted to use that short cut, then other navies would protest. A hundred possibilities suggest complications that might bring war.

The situation is extremely grave. Capitalism is on the verge of collapse all over the world, and in its effort to continue its existence is ready to drag to ruin all peoples and all advancement. This is the immediate threat.

Of course, beyond that is glorious possibility as well. The world will sicken of war. Autocracy will condemn itself. Capitalism is committing suicide. Just beyond the terrific crisis lies the beginning of the Co-operative Commonwealth. Socialists have everything to hope for, and are the only people on the earth who can see light in the darkness. We may congratulate ourselves on the tremendous sentiment that is already developing against war and against autocracy in industry. It is coming by leaps. The nations will be forced to Socialism in order to save themselves and civilization.

[Emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: Eugene Debs Describes the Shipping of the Special Judiciary Edition of the Appeal to Reason

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Quote EVD, Law ag Working Class, AtR p1, Apr 29, 1911—————

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday May 15, 1912
Girard, Kansas – Eugene Debs on Shipping Special Edition of the Appeal

From The Coming Nation of May 11, 1912
-April 22nd, Shipping the Special Judiciary Edition of April 27th:

AtR Judiciary Ed Apr 27, Ship Apr 22, Cmg Ntn p 14, May 11, 1912

A view of part of the great record-breaking edition of the Appeal to Reason, at the railroad station, Girard, Kansas

The photographer’s lens was not wide enough to catch all of the piles of the special Judiciary Edition of the Appeal to Reason which were delivered to one single train. The total edition was over 3,000,000.

From the Appeal to Reason of May 4, 1912:

Greed Kills Titanic etc, AtR p4, May 4, 1912

April 22, 1912, at Girard

BY EUGENE V. DEBS.

SITTING at my desk at the APPEAL office, I hear the whirl and roar of the mammoth press. The Judicial Edition is racing through it-20,000 copies an hour. “Old Chap,” the veteran pressman, is pitted against his own record.

At the rate of a quarter of a million a day it will take twelve days to turn out this marvelous edition the greatest ever issued by any paper, in any nation, since the printing art was born.

“Old Chap” and the boys are standing by the racing, roaring old leviathan to win the wager that “she will not make it” and she does not miss a throb of her swift-beating heart in all the twenty-four hours of the day and night.

All about the APPEAL today the boys and girls are tense with trial-“drinking in the breath of their own swiftness”-making the record that is to stand against the world.

There is no night in Girard this week-there is but one long day-the day of Wayland, Warren and Phifer’s defiance to Pollock, Hook and Bone-the day of the APPEAL triumphant over the criminal courts of capitalist America. 

* * *

IT is now ten-thirty in the morning. I am near the depot platform and I gaze upon a mountain raised by human hands and human hearts and human brains-in sweet and sympathetic social alliance-the like of which the eyes of man never saw before.

Piled high enough to hide the depot and extending far enough to tower like a range of mountain peaks, the APPEAL,-a thousand pouches and a million copies-is awaiting transportation. And this is but the first installment of the fabulous edition.

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Hellraisers Journal: From Appeal to Reason: Debs Special Paints the Coast Red-California, Oregon and Washington

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Quote EVD Nature's Bounty, Girard, May 16, 1908
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday October 7, 1908
The Red Special Paints a Crimson Streak Up the Pacific Coast States

From the Appeal to Reason of September 26, 1908:

EVD re Red Special West Coast, AtR p4, Sept 26, 1908

—–

San Bernardino.

T, AtR p4, Sept 26, 1908HE first evening meeting after the crimson flyer left Salt Lake City was held at San Bernardino, California, September 8. For the purpose a large park pavilion had been secured and the largest attendance at any political gathering in the history of the city greeted the speakers from the train and the veteran Comrade N. A. Richardson, well known wherever the Appeal is read as the author of that mighty little pamphlet, “The Introduction to Socialism.”

Excursion trains were run in from neighboring points; and, after 4,000 people had crowded the great auditorium, hundreds were turned away because it was physically impossible to find room for one more. Although the train arrived a half hour ahead of time several hundred were at the station to meet it and listen to the concert by the band which pleased even those benighted brethren whose minds were yet befogged with capitalistic teaching.

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