Eugene Debs addresses the American Railway Union, 1894 From Eugene Debs. Address of Eugene Debs at the Convention of the American Railway Union, at Chicago, Illinois. June 12, 1894. Terre Haute, Indiana : Moore & Langen, 1894. INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS We meet in convention at a time when the business and industrial conditions of the country are most deplorable. Such prostration, paralysis and wide spread demoralization in financial, commercial and industrial affairs were never before known in American history. It would be surprising if such conditions did not enter into the deliberation of this convention, and cool heads will be required to formulate declarations, which while giving expression to honest convictions, at the same time steer clear of rocks and shoals and reefs, amongst which the ship of state is now sailing, or feeling its way. In the first place, the country is full of men forced into idleness, which, as a general proposition, they did not create and cannot control. Banks break by the hundred, commercial establishments collapse by the thousand, manufacturing establishments suspend operations, and railroads, representing more than a billion of investments, are forced into the hands of receivers. These cyclonic disturbances fall with crushing force upon labor which is powerless to resist their force to an extent which will lessen the burdens it is compelled to bear. . . . COMMONWEALERS Another phase of the deplorable conditions in which workingmen find themselves involved, is the organization of what is known as the "Coxey, or Commonweal armies,:" of which General Coxey, of Ohio, is commander-in-chief. There never was such a continental display of hopeless poverty since time began. Out of work, out of money and without food, ragged, hungry, friendless and homeless, these commonwealers began their march to the capital city of the nation while Congress is in session. It would require the genius of a Milton, or a Dante to describe those Coxey armies. These wretched men heard the cry, "On to Washington!" and they responded, as did the Highland clans of Scotland when the sound of the pibroch [martial music for bagpipe] called them to battle. . . . The cry is on to Washington, where, on the marble steps of the Nation's Capitol, in their rags, and barefooted, they would petition congress to enact laws whereby they might perpetuate their wretched existence by toil--laws that would rekindle the last remaining spark of hope, that their future would be relieved of some of the horrors of hunger and nakedness. It is written that "hope springs eternal in the human breast," and it is also written that "hope deferred maketh the heart sick." The hopes of the Commonwealers have been deferred, aye, crushed, and lie dead at their feet, and the commonwealers are walking upon their graves. Congress has ears, but it will not listen to the tale of their woes; congress has eyes, but it will not look upon rags and wretchedness; congress has tongues, but they do not move when human woes demand words of sympathy and condolence.
The capitol city has a patch of ground where the sun and rain produce grass, now known as "sacred grass," and Coxey and his fellow leaders and now languishing in prison because their unsanctified feet pressed the nation's "sacred grass," and over this "sacred grass" patch floats the nation's starry emblem of liberty and independence. Oh, my fellow representatives of the American Railway Union, were it possible for our THE PULLMAN STRIKE The Pullman strike in the town of Pullman and against the millionaire Pullman, began under the auspices of the American Railway Union on the 11th day of May. Pullman, the town, like Pullman the proprietor, has a national reputation not specially unlike that which Carnegie, Frick, and Homestead enjoy. Whether Carnegie, Frick, or Pullman is the more intimate friend of his satanic majesty, he of the forked tail and cloven foot, it is needless to inquire. All of them go back [to] him on Sundays, but on working days, when the business is to rob and degrade workingmen and women, Pullman and the devil pull together at Pullman as merrily as "Buck and Bright," hitched to a harrow. So devoutly has Pullman robbed the Pullman employees, so religiously has he cut down wages, so piously has he made his retainers economize to prolong starvation, so happily are the principles of Pullman blended with the policy of the proprietor of the lake of fire and brimstone, that the biography of the one would do for the history of the other, and not a change of a letter or a punctuation mark would be required by the severest critic. Pullman, as greedy as a horse leech, saw his employees losing strength, saw them emaciated, but he kept on sucking their life currents. It was work and poverty in Pullmantown, or Pullemdown, until, patience ceasing to be a virtue, and further forbearance becoming treason to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the employees determined to strike to better their conditions. Pullman was very rich; his employees were very poor; but they concluded that the town of Pauperdom was better than Pullmandom, and in a moment of righteous energy, quit work, which simply gave Pullman, the plutocrat with a soul so small that a million of them could dance on the little end of a hornet's stinger, an opportunity, by refusing them fair wages, to suck their blood to the last drop and coin it for the gratification of his pride and the enlargement of his pomp. The Pullman strike, as an object lesson, will, I doubt not, engage the attention of this convention. It is a terrible illustration of corporate greed, and heartlessness, and pharisaical fraud which for years has prevailed in this country, and which has created conditions, in the presence of which, the stoutest hearts take alarm. . . . |
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