Comrades,
The glories of democracy mean that you can disagree, as I will in a moment. First, here is an excellent, short video from Israel. Two minutes. View it. Send it on to friends. www.gisha.org/2years
Second, there was a marvelous article in the July 2nd New York Review of Books. Titled "Justice Holmes and the 'Splendid Prisoner'", by Anthony Lewis. It includes a shot of Debs, waving his hat, as he stands in front of the Atlanta penitentiary on Christmas Day, 1921.
The author begins by saying (unhappily he is right) that "Debs is a largely forgotten man today" and then goes on to sketch out how and why Debs helped to bring the First Amendment to life. In the course of the article, as he follows the arrest of Debs and the refusal of President Wilson to pardon him, one can understand the basic hostility many of us have to the Democratic Party.
Eugene V. Debs was, of course, "our leader", our candidate for President five times, and in many ways the voice of American socialism. He is particularly important because he put socialism on the map of American political life before the Russian Revolution. I'd like to urge new members of the SP (and anyone else) to get a copy of Ray Ginger's biography of Debs, The Bending Cross. It is available on Amazon.
Debs' arrest followed his powerful anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio. We have been told that the Second World War was the "good war" everyone supported. Not quite. World War I, as we look back at the record, was a time of deep hysteria in the US, of profound ant-German feeling, and of bitter attacks on any who dared to criticize President Woodrow Wilson. This was "the war to end all wars", the war "to make the world safe for democracy". It took on the passion of a crusade. It was intolerable to Wilson to have Debs say that socialists who had been imprisoned for opposing the war had the courage needed for democracy- as Debs put it, "If it not been for the men and women who, in the past, have had the moral courage to go to jail, we would still be in the jungles".
Debs was given a ten year prison term, which he began in 1919. One of the ironies of the first World War was that the United States did not need to enter it. German U-boats had sunk an American ship (which, contrary to what the US stated at the time, was carrying illicit war materials to Britain). Wilson used this as an excuse to go to war. (Not widely known, Wilson had, not much earlier, been so angry at the British blockade of US ships that he had considered asking Congress for a declaration of war against Britain). Unlike World War II, when the US was attacked by the Japanese (and when Hitler, a few days later, declared war on us), we had not been attacked directly. The war was essentially a trade war between the imperial powers of Europe. The world would not have been much different no matter who won - but it did mean (whether Wilson realized this or not isn't clear) that the US would emerge from the war as a world power.
Wilson would not grant a pardon to Debs, even when the war ended in 1918. Nor did Debs ask for a pardon - he said he didn't know of any crime he had committed. When Lincoln Steffens, the great "muckracker" of the time, wrote an amnesty proposal which was shown to Wilson, he threw it down in a tantrum. As the Wilson administration neared it's end, even the suggestion from Attorney General Palmer for releasing Debs was dealt with by Wilson, now broken by a stroke, with a single word slashed across Palmer's suggestion - "Denied".
But if the imprisonment of Debs showed Woodrow Wilson as the small, meanspirited man he was, Debs had a deep impact not only on the wardens of the two prisons where he served his time, but eventually on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who proved to be one of the great justices of the Supreme Court. Originally, when the case came before the court, Holmes wrote in defense of the imprisonment of Debs. Yet, as time went on, friends of Holmes, including the young British socialist, Harold Laski, continued to press the case, until in the end Holmes shifted his basic position on what constituted the rights of free speech and came to hope for Debs release.
There was a very unexpected end of this story. Warren G. Harding, the Republican whose administration was noted for its corruption, took office in March of 1921. Harding told his attorney general, Harry Daugherty, to look into the cases of those in prison for their wartime speeches.
Daughtery telephoned warden Zerbst at the Atlanta penitentiary to ask about Debs. To quote from Anthony Lewis' article, "Zerbst praised him and suggested, half-seriously, that Daughtery should meet him. Daughtery liked that idea. On March 23rd, Zerbst put [him] on a train to Washington - alone! He talked with Daughtery for several hours, then took a train back to Atlanta."
When Daughtery spoke about the secret meeting with Debs, he was denounced by the New York Times. But Harding commuted Debs sentence effective Christmas Day, 1921. Lewis reports that "When he walked out of the prison, Debs was cheered by most of the two thousand inmates, who had been given permission to press against the windows. Then Debs got on a train to Washington to see Harding - at the President's invitation!"
The visit to the Oval Office lasted thirty minutes. Lewis quotes Harding as greeting Debs by saying, "I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally".
We leap forward to President Roosevelt, another in the pantheon of liberals, and remember that it was under Roosevelt that the Japanese on the West Coast were sent to concentration camps and that the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyists) were put on trial for publicly opposing the Second World War. We can move forward to Harry Truman's Administration (a man for whom I confess a grudging respect) and, again, the Smith Act Trials against the Communist Party began under Truman, the loyalty oaths and subversive lists began under the liberals.
So while there are differences between the two parties (sometimes one needs a micro-scope to see them), what radicals remember is that it was a liberal Democratic President who put Debs in prison and a Republican President who let him out.
Third, one of the great advantages of being in a democratic socialist movement is that one is free to tell the National Committee that there are times when it acts like an ass, as it did at its meeting this past weekend in Florida where it withdrew from support of the broad coaltion "United for Peace and Justice" (known as UFPJ).
Party members can read the debate between Eric Chester and myself in Hammer and Tongs. The SP's NC, in one of its sadder moments of sectarianism, voted unanimously to withdraw. Now in other socialist groups, once the debate was over (Hammer and Tongs) and once the National Committee voted, no member would dare raise a voice. But the Socialist Party, shaped by men like Debs, is a democratic organization. And so I dissent.
The NC did worse that withdrawing from UFPJ - it has decided to explore connections with the "Cleveland Conference" people, a small group heavily influenced by Trotskyists from Socialist Action, and with very little real support within the peace movement.
Realizing that, having retired from active work in the peace movement, I should check with some who were, I sent an email to an old friend who holds a key position in the American Friends Service Committee. Of the Cleveland Conference group he said "I think you're right on the Cleveland Conference group. Most of us in AFSC have been keeping outside of it as a gathering of sectarians".
On UFPJ, my friend noted that while there were serious financial problems and the fate of UFPJ was uncertain, the charges that UFPJ was some kind of Communist front didn't hold water. (This was a position argued by some on the SP's NC - and not argued, I should stress, from the old fashioned anti-Communism of others years, but because the revolutionists [sic] on the SP's NC felt the Communist Party wasn't really radical enough. At this time the American Friends Service Committee, and virtually all the mainstream nonviolent peace groups are working in UFPJ. Including War Resisters League. The A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, which owns the building which rents space to the War Resisters League and to the Socialist Party, is a fiscal sponsor for UFPJ.
I would have found it sad if the SP's NC had voted by a narrow margin to withdraw, but am baffled that it voted so unanimously. Fortunately there is a convention coming up, and a chance either to confirm the sectarians in office, or remove them.
Meantime, having come tonight from a board meeting of the Muste Institute I looked at the list of grants and fiscal sponsorships the Institute handles and among those groups - which are involved in genuine peace and disarmament work in the US and abroad - were the following:
AFSC chapter in San Francisco, Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center in Cincinnati, Indigenous Youth Sovereignty Project in Denver, Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice in Madison, Arise for Social Justice in Springfield, Mass., Historic Peace Churches of Columbus, Ohio, Peace and Justice Center in Burlington, Vt., Washington state Area Truth in Recruiting, and peace and justice groups in Nicargua, Chile, Argentina, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Costa Rica, Korea, Israel, and beyond.
At the moment, the Socialist Party has cut itself off from the peace movement, which is a tragedy. In this case because of the "revolutionists" on the National Committee, as a generation ago, under the control of more reactionary forces, the Socialist Party played absolutely no role in the resistance to the Vietnam War.
Fortunately individual members of the Socialist Party were active then, and are active now. National Committees do not a movement make.
Let us take heart from the life and example of Eugene Victor Debs and move straight ahead. SP members who want to be active in the peace movement can find UFPJ by googling, and they can also get in touch with the War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Fraternally,
David McReynolds