From The Pen Of Howard Zinn- Eugene V. Debs And The Idea Of Socialism

Eugene V. Debs and the Idea of Socialism

By Howard Zinn

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Written: January, 1999
First Published: 1999
Source: The Progressive magazine
Online Version: E.V. Debs Internet Archive, 2008
Transcribed/HTML Markup: David Walters, 2008

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We are always in need of radicals who are also lovable, and so we would do well to remember Eugene Victor Debs. Ninety years ago, at the time The Progressive was born, Debs was nationally famous as leader of the Socialist Party, and the poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote of him:

“As warm a heart as ever beat

Betwixt here and the Judgment Seat.”

Debs was what every socialist or anarchist or radical should be: fierce in his convictions, kind and compassionate in his personal relations. Sam Moore, a fellow inmate of the Atlanta penitentiary, where Debs was imprisoned for opposing the First World War, remembered how he felt as Debs was about to be released on Christmas Day, 1921: “As miserable as I was, I would defy fate with all its cruelty as long as Debs held my hand, and I was the most miserably happiest man on Earth when I knew he was going home Christmas.”

Debs had won the hearts of his fellow prisoners in Atlanta. He had fought for them in a hundred ways and refused any special privileges for himself. On the day of his release, the warden ignored prison regulations and opened every cell-block to allow more than 2,000 inmates to gather in front of the main jail building to say good-bye to Eugene Debs. As he started down the walkway from the prison, a roar went up and he turned, tears streaming down his face, and stretched out his arms to the other prisoners.

This was not his first prison experience. In 1894, not yet a socialist but an organizer for the American Railway Union, he had led a nationwide boycott of the railroads in support of the striking workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company. They tied up the railroad system, burned hundreds of railway cars, and were met with the full force of the capitalist state: Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer, got a court injunction to prohibit blocking trains. President Cleveland called out the army, which used bayonets and rifle fire on a crowd of 5,000 strike sympathizers in Chicago. Seven hundred were arrested. Thirteen were shot to death.

Debs was jailed for violating an injunction prohibiting him from doing or saying anything to carry on the strike. In court, he denied he was a socialist, but during his six months in prison he read socialist literature, and the events of the strike took on a deeper meaning. He wrote later: “I was to be baptized in socialism in the roar of conflict.... In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed.”

From then on, Debs devoted his life to the cause of working people and the dream of a socialist society. He stood on the platform with Mother Jones and Big Bill Haywood in 1905 at the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World. He was a magnificent speaker, his long body leaning forward from the podium, his arm raised dramatically. Thousands came to hear him talk all over the country.

With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 and the build-up of war fever against Germany, some socialists succumbed to the talk of “preparedness,” but Debs was adamantly opposed. When President Wilson and Congress brought the nation into the war in 1917, speech was no longer free. The Espionage Act made it a crime to say anything that would discourage enlistment in the armed forces.

Soon, close to 1,000 people were in prison for protesting the war. The producer of a movie called The Spirit of ’76, about the American revolution, was sentenced to ten years in prison for promoting anti-British feeling at a time when England and the United States were allies. The case was officially labeled The US. v. The Spirit of ’76.

Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio, in support of the men and women in jail for opposing the war. He told his listeners: “Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... And that is war, in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” He was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison by a judge who denounced those “who would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in defending herself against a foreign and brutal power.”

In court, Debs refused to call any witnesses, declaring: “I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone." Before sentencing, Debs spoke to judge and jury, uttering perhaps his most famous words. I was in his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana, recently, among 200 people gathered to honor his memory, and we began the evening by reciting those words-words that moved me deeply when I first read them and move me deeply still: “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.”

The “liberal” Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking for a unanimous Supreme Court, upheld the verdict, on the ground that Debs’s speech was intended to obstruct military recruiting. When the war was over, the “liberal” Woodrow Wilson turned down his Attorney General’s recommendation that Debs be released, even though he was sixty-five and in poor health. Debs was in prison for thirty-two months. Finally, in 1921, the Republican Warren Harding ordered him freed on Christmas Day.

Today, when capitalism, “the free market,” and “private enterprise” are being hailed as triumphant in the world, it is a good time to remember Debs and to rekindle the idea of socialism.

To see the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a sign of the failure of socialism is to mistake the monstrous tyranny created by Stalin for the vision of an egalitarian and democratic society that has inspired enormous numbers of people all over the world. Indeed, the removal of the Soviet Union as the false surrogate for the idea of socialism creates a great opportunity. We can now reintroduce genuine socialism to a world feeling the sickness of capitalism- its nationalist hatreds, its perpetual warfare, riches for a small number of people in a small number of countries, and hunger, homelessness, insecurity for everyone else.

Here in the United States we should recall that enthusiasm for socialism-production for use instead of profit, economic and social equality, solidarity with our brothers and sisters all over the world- was at its height before the Soviet Union came into being.

In the era of Debs, the first seventeen years of the twentieth century-until war created an opportunity to crush the movement-millions of Americans declared their adherence to the principles of socialism. Those were years of bitter labor struggles, the great walkouts of women garment workers in New York, the victorious multiethnic strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the unbelievable courage of coal miners in Colorado, defying the power and wealth of the Rockefellers. The I.W.W. was born-revolutionary, militant, demanding “one big union” for everyone, skilled and unskilled, black and white, men and women, native-born and foreign-born.

More than a million people read Appeal to Reason and other socialist newspapers. In proportion to population, it would be as if today more than three million Americans read a socialist press. The party had 100,000 members, and 1,200 office-holders in 340 municipalities. Socialism was especially strong in the Southwest, among tenant farmers, railroad workers, coal miners, lumberjacks. Oklahoma had 12,000 dues-paying members in 1914 and more than 100 socialists in local offices. It was the home of the fiery Kate Richards O’Hare. Jailed for opposing the war, she once hurled a book through a skylight to bring fresh air into the foul-smelling jail block, bringing cheers from her fellow inmates.

The point of recalling all this is to remind us of the powerful appeal of the socialist idea to people alienated from the political system and aware of the growing stark disparities in income and wealth-as so many Americans are today. The word itself “socialism” may still carry the distortions of recent experience in bad places usurping the name. But anyone who goes around the country, or reads carefully the public opinion surveys over the past decade, can see that huge numbers of Americans agree on what should be the fundamental elements of a decent society: guaranteed food, housing, medical care for everyone; bread and butter as better guarantees of “national security” than guns and bombs; democratic control of corporate power; equal rights for all races, genders, and sexual orientations; a recognition of the rights of immigrants as the unrecognized counterparts of our parents and grandparents; the rejection of war and violence as solutions for tyranny and injustice.

There are people fearful of the word, all along the political spectrum. What is important, I think, is not the word, but a determination to hold up before a troubled public those ideas that are both bold and inviting-the more bold, the more inviting. That’s what remembering Debs and the socialist idea can do for use.

*From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- The Shay Rebellion In American History

Click on the headline to link to a "Renegade Eye" entry for the Shay Rebellion in American history.


Markin comment:

The Shay Rebellion, like all those other inconvenient events down at the base of society in American history that are under-reported or not reported on at all, got short shrift in my American history classes back in the day. And this is an event that occurred right here in Massachusetts. As I mentioned recently in reviewing the late radical historian Professor Howard Zinn's little book, "A People's History Of The United States", it took much time, effort and trolling through many sources for me to put together the American plebeian and working class story in my youth. The Shay Rebellion, by the way, is one of the stories that the good professor wrote about, as well.

*Memories Of The Late Radical Activist Howard Zinn From "The Oleo Strut" G.I. Coffeehouse Days At Fort Hood, Texas

Click on the title to link to an appreciation of the recently departed radical activist, Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, from a staff member of the old "Oleo Strut" Coffeehouse at Fort Hood, Texas during the Vietnam War days.

Markin comment:

Listen up- read this one for the information given, and the inspiration imparted.

*On The Late Professor Howard Zinn- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a "United For Justice And Peace" Website political and personal tribute from Paul Shannon for long-time radical activist and Boston University Professor Howard Zinn who recently passed away.

*Leftist Political Activist And Historian Professor Howard Zinn Passes Away

Click on the title to link to an "American Left History" blog entry, dated January 28, 2009, reviewing a documentary on Professor Howard Zinn, "A View From The Old Radical Tradition- Howard Zinn".

Markin comment:

See linked article for my take on the importance of Howard Zinn to the local Boston left scene.

Historian-activist Zinn dies
Globe Staff / January 28, 2010

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist whose books such as “A People’s History of the United States” prompted a generation to rethink the nation’s past, died yesterday in Santa Monica, Calif., where he was traveling. He was 87, and lived in the Newton village of Auburndale. His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he had a heart attack.

“He’s made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture,” Noam Chomsky, the activist and MIT professor, said last night. “He’s changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can’t think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect.”

Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn’s writings “simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation.”

“He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant,” Chomsky said. “Both by his actions and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers - many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out - but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994): “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and John Silber, former president of Boston University. Dr. Zinn, a leading critic of Silber, twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.”

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped.

In 1997, Dr. Zinn slipped into popular culture when his writing made a cameo appearance in the film “Good Will Hunting.” The title character, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns when growing up.Continued...

“Howard had a great mind and was one of the great voices in the American political life,” Ben Affleck, Damon’s longtime friend and his costar in “Good Will Hunting,” said in a statement. “He taught me how valuable, how necessary dissent was to democracy and to America itself. He taught that history was made by the everyman, not the elites. I was lucky enough to know him personally, and I will carry with me what I learned from him - and try to impart it to my own children - in his memory.”

Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, “The People Speak,” which ran on the History Channel in 2009, and he narrated a 2004 biographical documentary, “Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”

“Howard had a genius for the shape of public morality and for articulating the great alternative vision of peace as more than a dream,” said James Carroll, a columnist for the Globe’s opinion pages whose friendship with Dr. Zinn dates to when Carroll was a Catholic chaplain at BU. “But above all, he had a genius for the practical meaning of love. That is what drew legions of the young to him and what made the wide circle of his friends so constantly amazed and grateful.”

Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he met Roslyn Shechter.

“She was working as a secretary,” Dr. Zinn said in an interview with the Globe nearly two years ago. “We were both working in the same neighborhood, but we didn’t know each other. A mutual friend asked me to deliver something to her. She opened the door, I saw her, and that was it.”

He joined the Army Air Corps, and they courted through the mail before marrying in October 1944 while he was on his first furlough. She died in 2008.

During World War II, he served as a bombardier, was awarded the Air Medal, and attained the rank of second lieutenant. After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman. He worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and a lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were novelist Alice Walker, who called him “the best teacher I ever had,” and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children’s Defense Fund.

During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.

Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.

The focus of his activism became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at many rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, another leading antiwar activist, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.

Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience and ” (1968). He had previously published “LaGuardia in Congress” (1959), which had won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Prize; “SNCC: The New Abolitionists” (1964); “The Southern Mystique” (1964); and “New Deal Thought” (1966).

In addition to his daughter, Dr. Zinn leaves a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaughters; and two grandsons. Funeral plans were not available.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

*A Voice From An Old Radical Tradition- Professor Howard Zinn

Click on the title to link a January 28, 2010 "The Boston Globe" obituary for Professor Howard Zinn who passed away at 87.

DVD REVIEW

Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train, Howard and Roz Zinn and others, Moving Train Productions, 2004

In a lifetime of leftist political work I have run into precious few professors or other intellectual workers who have been committed to a long term radical perspective on American society, much less a call for radical change. The subject of this documentary, Boston University's Professor Emeritus Howard Zinn, is an exception. Although there has been for a long time a vast political gulf between the good professor and this reviewer in terms of how we see the organization of political change occurring we both share fundamentally the same radical critique of American imperialism.

This short documentary flushes out Professor Zinn's early New York City working class upbringing, his military service as a pilot in World War II and his later reflections on his part in that experience that began to lead him to a more radical perspective. The film also details his political perspectives over a lifetime of activism beginning with the early civil rights movement down in the South, where he taught at historically black Spelman College, in the 1950's and early 1960's, centrally around the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, which he wrote an important and informative book about). Much time is spent on Zinn's very visible role as an active oppositional voice in the central experience of my generation, Vietnam. Then, fast forward, onto the struggles in Central America in the 1980's in defense of the Sandinistas and others and then to the most recent fight against the war in Iraq started by President Bush and his coterie in 2003 and that continues to this day.

Just listing the fights Zinn has participated in tells something about our society as well as about the tenacity of the professor. Additionally, Zinn's highly literate historical works are considered here, especially the very useful "People's History of The United States" (which deserves a separate review of its own that I will do in the future in this space) that is a bible of sorts for identifying a progressive alternative interpretation of the development of American capitalist society and is something of Zinn's crowning glory.

Howard Zinn is clearly the star of this documentary, as he should be (with cameos by wife and companion Roz, and other academic leftists such as Francis Fox Piven and Staughton Lynd). However, I got the distinct feeling while viewing this film that he was presented as something of an old radical gadfly spurring everyone on to "keep up the good fight". And that is fine, as we certainly need those radical academic voices to spur on the youth. I also note that Zinn's influence seems to be far greater on my generation than on latter ones. That is hardly his fault. Each generation needs to come to a progressive social perspective in its own way. As a son of the very poorest layer of the working class from the generation after Zinn's I could relate to his upbringing but that compelling life story, as the current usage goes, might not be so to the Obama generation.

What is brother Zinn's "fault" is, however, except for that very strong sense of personal witness on his part against the injustices of the world, that he has no idea about how one would effectively organize the resistance to the American state. That in the final analysis was the weakness of one of his heroines, the fiery anarchist Emma Goldman, and it is his as well. One hardly needs to be a Leninist, although that might help, to know that moral suasion is not enough to go up against the monsters that run this society. And win.

We can fight that question out at another time. But here let me go back to that first sentence of the last paragraph about the strong sense of social justice and the need to bare the inequities of this society. For that, Professor Zinn, all honor to you.