Written: March 10, 1906
First Published: Appeal to Reason, March 10, 1906
Source: Library of Congress microfilm collection called “Collected Speeches and Writings of Eugene Victor Debs.”
Online Version: E.V. Debs Internet Archive, 2001
Transcribed/HTML Markup: John Metz for the Illinois Socialist Party Debs Archive & David Walters for the Marxists Internet Archive Debs Archive
The latest and boldest stroke of plutocracy, but for the blindness of the people, would have startled the nation.
Murder has been plotted and is about to be executed in the name and under the forms of law.
Men who will not yield to corruption and browbeating must be ambushed, spirited away and murdered.
That is the edict of the Mine Owners’ Association of the Western states and their Standard Oil backers and pals in Wall Street, New York.
These gory-beaked vultures are to pluck out the heart of resistance to their tyranny and robbery, that labor may be left stark naked at their mercy.
Charles Moyer and Wm. D. Haywood, of the Western Federation of Miners, and their official colleagues—men, all of them, and every inch of them—are charged with the assassination of ex-Governor Frank Steunenberg, of Idaho, who simply reaped what he had sown, as a mere subterfuge to pounce upon them in secret, rush them out of the state by special train, under heavy guard, clap them into the penitentiary, convict them upon the purchased perjured testimony of villains, and strangle them to death with the hangman’s noose.
It is a foul plot; a damnable conspiracy; a hellish outrage.
The governors of Idaho and Colorado say they have the proof to convict. They are brazen falsifiers and venal villains, the miserable tools of the mine owners who, themselves, if anybody, deserve the gibbet.
Moyer, Haywood and their comrades had no more to do with the assassination of Steunenberg than I had; the charge is a ghastly lie, a criminal calumny, and is only an excuse to murder men who are too rigidly honest to betray their trust and too courageous to succumb to threat and intimidation.
Labor leaders that cringe before the plutocracy and do its bidding are apotheosized; those that refuse must be foully murdered.
Personally and intimately do I know Moyer, Haywood, Pettibone, St. John and their official coworkers, an I will stake my life on their honor and integrity; and that is precisely the crime for which, according to the words of the slimy sleuth who worked up the case against them, “they shall never leave Idaho alive.”
Well, by the gods, if they don’t, the governors of Idaho and Colorado and their masters from Wall Street, New York, to the Rocky Mountains had better prepare to follow them.
Nearly twenty years ago the capitalist tyrants put some innocent men to death for standing up for labor.
They are now going to try it again. Let them dare!
There have been twenty years of revolutionary education, agitation and organization since the Haymarket tragedy, and if an attempt is made to repeat it, there will be a revolution and I will do all in my power to precipitate it.
The crisis has come and we have got to meet it. Upon the issue involved the whole body of organized labor can unite and every enemy of plutocracy will join us. From the farms, the factories and stores will pour the workers to meet the red-handed destroyers of freedom, the murderers of innocent men and the archenemies of the people.
Moyer and Haywood are our comrades, staunch and true, and if we do not stand by them to the shedding of the last drop of blood in our veins, we are disgraced forever and deserve the fate of cringing cowards.
We are not responsible for the issue. It is not of our seeking. It has been forced upon us; and for the very reason that we deprecate violence and abhor bloodshed we cannot desert our comrades and allow them to be put to death. If they can be murdered without cause so can we, and so will we be dealt with at the pleasure of these tyrants.
They have driven us to the wall and now let us rally our forces and face them and fight.
If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.
They have done their best and their worst to crush and enslave us. Their politicians have betrayed us, their courts have thrown us into jail without trial and their soldiers have shot our comrades dead in their tracks.
The worm turns at last, and so does the worker.
Let them dare to execute their devilish plot and every state in this Union will resound with the tramp of revolution.
Get ready, comrades, for action! No other course is left to the working class. Their courts are closed to us except to pronounce our doom. To enter their courts is simply to be mulcted of our meager means and bound hand and foot; to have our eyes plucked out by the vultures that fatten upon our misery.
Capitalist courts never have done, and never will do, anything for the working class.
Whatever is done we must do ourselves, and if we stand up like men from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf, we will strike terror to their cowardly hearts and they will be but too eager to relax their grip upon our throats and beat a swift retreat.
We will watch every move they make and in the meantime prepare for action.
A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat at Chicago, or some other central point, would be in order, and, if extreme measures are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising.
If the plutocrats begin the program, we will end it.