Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
-- Sept. 18, 1918. Debs' Statement to the Court, upon his conviction for protesting U.S. entrance into World War I.
Gene Debs
Remembered
By Meridel LeSueur
When you think that Debs in 1908 got millions of votes, and that women were not voting yet, it becomes even more remarkable.
They had the Red Special, a train that went across the country and along the way people gathered in the thousands.
My father was on that train and told how people would be on both sides of the track.
Debs was one of the most wonderful believers in the people's beauty and power and poetry and the necessity of that staying alive in people under great duress.
Debs influenced me more than anyone because of his love and care for people.
He was the first person that kissed people that I ever saw.
This may seem a small thing to you, but kissing was not a popular thing in the middle west, amongst the Puritans.
There was a kind of legend that 8 little girls always went up in white dresses with one red rose apiece when Debs spoke and handed him the red roses.
He would come over very seriously and lift up your face and kiss you.
And he also embraced men; my father even criticized him for that.
He was really the first social person I ever saw who loved people.
He really saw this human vision of love and comradeship and relationship. I interviewed workers who remembered what Debs said to them fifty years before; what he said and how he looked and how he embraced them.
We should read his writings now because they're part of our culture, our great, warm human culture.
Remarks by
Meridel LeSueur at a conference held in Kansas City, Missouri in 1985. Reprinted in
Talkin' Union, December 1986.
Eugene V. Debs kissing Theodore, his brother.
In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.
-- Gene Debs
As the standard-bearer for the Socialist Party, Debs ran for president five times. In the election of 1912 - which was won by Democrat Woodrow Wilson - Debs received 6% of the vote.
