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

by Eugene V. Debs

It was while in exile, in 1864, that Hugo wrote:

“The transformation of the crowd into the people—profound task! It is to this labor that the men called Socialists have devoted themselves during the last forty years. The author of this book, however insignificant he may be, is one of the oldest in this labor. If he claims his place among these philosophers, it is because it is a place of persecution. A certain hatred of Socialism, very blind, but very general, has raged for fifteen or sixteen years, and is still raging most bitterly among the influential classes. Let it not be forgotten that true Socialism has for its end the elevation of the masses to the civic dignity, and that, therefore, the principal care is for moral and intellectual cultivation.”

If, as we are quite ready to believe, the twentieth century realizes the prophecy of the French poet and “bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of time,” as the century of humanity, it will be the denouement of the socialist agitation that began in the preceding century—the fruition of the international socialist movement.

In the closing years of the last century, following in the wake of the French revolution, the tendencies in Europe were unmistakably toward what has since developed into modern socialism. Of course the early stages were nebulous and vague, and the trend was not yet strongly marked or clearly disclosed.

But as the inventive genius of man asserted itself in the industrial world; as the use of steam as motive power expanded and machinery was introduced and its application to industry became more general, with its inevitable effects upon artisans, laborers and small tradesmen, the movement was accelerated in varying forms, chiefly utopian, until many years afterward, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was crystallized by the genius of Marx, Engels, Lassalle and others, who caught the revolutionary current, clarified it and sent it circling around the globe on its mission of freedom and fraternity.

The earliest traces of socialism in the United States had their origin in the stream of immigration that flowed from the old world to the new and bore upon its bosom the germs of discontent warmed into life in the effete feudalism of European civilization.

We shall not here undertake to chronicle the many attempts, covering more than half a century, or until about 1840, to spread socialism or semi-socialistic doctrine among the American people and thus turn the tide of labor agitation in that direction. The times were fruitful of industrial and social unrest and the many schemes and plans that were proposed, utopian, impractical, impossible though they undoubtedly were, were at the same time the signs and symptoms of social gestation, the fore-runners of the mighty change that was laying hold of governments and institutions and destined to revolutionize them all and level the human race upward to the plane of an all-embracing civilization.

Almost eighty years ago Robert Owen, dreamer, enthusiast and humanitarian, came from England to America, to make the new continent blossom with utopian splendor. His series of experiments in communism, doomed to disappointment and failure, are an interesting study in the early years of the American movement; and although in the light of our present knowledge of industrial evolution his undertaking may seem visionary and foolish to some, he rendered invaluable service in clearing away the brush and dispelling the fog; and the history of Socialism cannot be written without his name.

Decidedly less utopian and more practical and promising were the developments in the forties when what is known as Fourierism played its interesting and historic role in America.

Many of the most intellectual men and women of the day were attracted to the movement.