Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of Appreciations

by Eugene V. Debs

To conclude: The United Mine Workers of America has been struck by lightning.

Eugene V. Debs.

This letter was answered by Mr. John Mitchell and his colleagues in a communication which appeared in the same paper on May 21, 1904, as follows:

MR. MITCHELL AND HIS COLLEAGUES.

Indianapolis, Ind., May 7, 1904.

Editor Social-Democratic Herald:

In your issue of April 9 you publish an article over the signature of Eugene V. Debs containing a mass of misstatements with the apparent purpose of making your readers believe that the officials of the United Mine Workers of America, and particularly President Mitchell, have betrayed the trust reposed in them by their constituents by using their official position for the benefit of the employers instead of for the welfare of the employes.

Mr. Debs’ knowledge of mining affairs is limited, by virtue of his lack of time and opportunity for personal investigation, and must of necessity be general and superficial. He has not sufficient knowledge of the mining industry to be a competent critic of our trade politics, and yet, if he had confined himself to a criticism of those policies, they might have passed unchallenged, so far as we are concerned. But when, without investigation of the facts, he takes an Associated Press dispatch, distorts it to suit his own purpose and jumbles it up with a number of other things that never existed except in his own diseased imagination, in order to prove that the officials of the United Mine Workers are dishonest, we believe that justice to ourselves and the organization we represent demands that his statements shall be refuted and his purpose laid bare.

Men of experience in the labor movement usually pass by, unheeded, the insinuations circulated by the paid agents of capital for the purpose of destroying their influence and weakening the power of resistance of their organization, but, when those insinuations are uttered and circulated by a man who for years has leaned upon the sympathies of the wage workers as the crucified martyr of a lost cause, the halo of glory he has painted about himself cannot shield him from the contempt of honest men. What is this wonderful press dispatch around which Mr. Debs’ imagination has built such a magnificent net work? We reproduce it from his own article:

“Pittsburg, Pa., March 6, 1904.