“The Sower,” by Art Young
This is one of the best known sketches of
Debs by the famous cartoonist Art Young
Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 40, 4 October 1948, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
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The following speech was broadcast to the workers of Canton, Ohio, by Farrell Dobbs, SWP presidential candidate, over the Mutual network station WHKK on Friday, Sept. 24 from 4:45 to 5 p.m. The speech, delivered on the thirtieth anniversary of Debs’ conviction for his Canton speech, demonstrates how the SWP continues the traditions of the famous socialist agitator. |
Introduction by Ted Selander, Ohio State Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party:
Friends of the radio audience:
The Socialist Workers Party is conducting this year its first presidential campaign. Our presidential candidate, Farrell Dobbs, has come to Canton to honor Eugene V. Debbs on the thirtieth anniversary of Debs’ famous Canton speech.
Like Debs, our presidential candidate comes from the ranks of the working class, is a nationally known strike leader and was jailed for his socialist opposition to war.
It is my privilege to introduce to you the Socialist Workers Party candidate for president of the United States, Farrell Dobbs:
Working People of Canton!
Thirty years ago, during the first world war, Eugene V. Debs told the truth about capitalist wars in a historic speech at NimiSilla Park here in Canton.
On that June day in 1918 the population of the United States had been whipped into a patriotic frenzy by the Wall Street warmakers under the deceitful slogan that it was a war “to make the world safe for democracy.”
It took great courage and firm conviction to stand up and speak the truth in the face of such mass hysteria. Debs knew the truth and he had the courage to proclaim it to the world. He did so with full knowledge of the probable consequences to himself.
Debs told the workers that
“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder ... The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”
President Woodrow Wilson ordered immediate prosecution of Debs for his Canton speech. He was convicted in the federal courts and locked up in the Atlanta penitentiary with a ten-year sentence. It proved to be a death sentence for the aging socialist warrior.
History demonstrates that Wilson, the servant of capitalism, who persecuted Debs, deceived the American people and betrayed their hopes. Debs, the great champion of the working people, has been proven right in his predictions and his socialist program by events of the past thirty years.
That is why Debs remains enshrined in the hearts of the workers, while all the capitalist politicians of his day are forgotten.
I have come here to Canton, as the first presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party, to reaffirm the socialist anti-war program of Eugene V. Debs and to defend this, sterling revolutionary against detractors like Norman Thomas who seek in Debs’ name to betray the working people into support of the capitalist masters in a third World War.
The Socialist Workers Party is the only continuation in America of the struggle for Socialism to which Debs dedicated his life. We represent a union of American “revolutionary tradition with the principles of scientific socialism set forth by Marx and Engels and carried into action by Lenin and Trotsky.
Debs too was an internationalist. He demonstrated this in his Canton speech when he saluted the Russian revolution in these words:
“Our hearts are with the Bolsheviks of Russia. Those heroic men and women, those unconquerable comrades have by their incomparable valor and sacrifice added fresh lustre to the fame of the internationalist movement.”
Dobs referred, of course, to the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky. Had he lived to see Stalin betray the world working class, we are confident that Debs, the international socialist, would have supported the Trotskyist movement in our 25-year struggle against Stalinist treachery to the workers.
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“The Sower,” by Art Young |
Debs’ great mission was to raise the American workers to the level of socialist class consciousness and to imbue them with the spirit of international working class solidarity.
The Socialist Workers Party represents the organized expression of class consciousness and class solidarity as taught by Debs and translated into living form by Lenin and Trotsky.
We are not “peacetime socialists” of the Norman Thomas variety who climb on the military bandwagon when the Shooting starts. Like Debs, we are socialist anti-war fighters before, during and between wars.
The Socialist Workers Party’s record in World War II proves we are socialists of the deed as well as the word.
We denounced the conspiracy of American monopoly capitalism to drag the country into the second world War.
We exposed the lie that it would be a war against totalitarianism.
We predicted that the American capitalists would use their victory to prop up kings and military dictators abroad and to undermine the freedom of the working people here in America.
We said the war would not bring peace to the world.
We acted in the spirit Debs described in his Canton speech when he said, “And now for all of us to do our duty! The clarion call is ringing in our ears and we cannot falter without being convicted of treason to ourselves and to our great cause.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered prosecution of the Socialist Workers Party for our anti-war stand. In 1941, eighteen leaders of the party, including my running mate, Dr. Grace Carlson, and myself, were convicted under the Smith “Gag” Act and sentenced to prison. The Supreme Court refused to hear our appeal and we were railroaded to the penitentiary on New Years Day 1944.
EUGENE V. DEBS |
History will record that just as Debs told the workers the truth about war in 1918, the Socialist Workers Party told the truth about war in 1941.
We predicted that monopoly capitalism would use the power gained through the war to try to strangle the trade unions. The Taft-Hartley Act is the first step toward that objective.
The Socialist Workers Party predicted that the capitalists Would try to load the costs of war onto the working people. Billions in profits for the monopoly corporations and the staggering rise in living costs for the working people bear out our prediction.
We said that native fascism with its brutal persecution of the Negro people Would be an inevitable consequence of the war. And how the new “White Supremacy” Dixiecrat Party, spawned by the Democratic party, shows an ominous drift in that direction.
The Socialist Workers Party predicted that the power-drunk Wall Street gang would seek to introduce permanent militarization of the American youth. Drafting is now under way for the conscript army of World War III.
We reaffirmed Debs’ prediction that there will be endless wars until capitalism is abolished. Today the whole world is holding its breath expecting an explosion in Berlin.
The American people are being plunged headlong toward war by the bi-partisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans, who represent the interests of a small clique of power-drunk bankers and industrial barons.
But the American workers, the farmers and the little people, who continues the same uncompromising struggle today On the brink of the third world war.
We carry on the battle for the great Socialist goal described by Debs in these inspiring Words spoken to the workers of Canton in 1918:
“When we unite and act together on the industrial field and when we vote together on election day we shall develop the supreme power of the one class that can and will hiring permanent peace to the world ...
“We shall conquer the public power. We shall then transfer the title deeds of the railroads, the telegraph lines, the mines, mills and great industries to the people in their collective capacity ...
“We shall be a free nation whose government is of, by and for the people ...
“Yes, in good time we are going to sweep into power in this nation and throughout the world.
“We are going to destroy all enslaving and degrading capitalist institutions and re-create them as free and humanizing institutions.
“The world is daily changing before our eyes.
“The sun of capitalism is setting; the sun of socialism is rising.”
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