Friday's Labor Folklore 
Con Carbon, Minstrel of the Mine Patch
Gene Debs
Remembered
By Meridel LeSueur 

 

When you think that Debs in 1908 got millions of votes, and that women were not voting yet, it becomes even more remarkable.  They had the Red Special, a train that went across the country and along the way people gathered in the thousands.  My father was on that train and told how people would be on both sides of the track.  Debs was one of the most wonderful believers in the people's beauty and power and poetry and the necessity of that staying alive in people under great duress.

 

Debs influenced me more than anyone because of his love and care for people.  He was the first person that kissed people that I ever saw.  This may seem a small thing to you, but kissing was not a popular thing in the middle west, amongst the Puritans.  There was a kind of legend that 8 little girls always went up in white dresses with one red rose apiece when Debs spoke and handed him the red roses.  He would come over very seriously and lift up your face and kiss you.  And he also embraced men; my father even criticized him for that.  He was really the first social person I ever saw who loved people. 
  
He really saw this human vision of love and comradeship and relationship. I interviewed workers who remembered what Debs said to them fifty years before; what he said and how he looked and how he embraced them.  

 

We should read his writings now because they're part of our culture, our great, warm human culture.

 

Remarks by Meridel LeSueur at a conference held in Kansas City, Missouri in 1985. Reprinted in Talkin' Union, December 1986. 
________________
  
The Eugene V. Debs
Home in Terre Haute is an official National Historic Landmark.  The home is maintained by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, a non-profit organization.
Please join by clicking here.
  
In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Foundation is offering Anniversary Pens  at $10 for 5 pens ($2 shipping); write to Debs Foundation, P.O. Box 9454, Terre Haute, IN,
47808; 812-237-3443.
  
  

 

DebsFace
Eugene V. Debs
Union leader, political activist and social justice advocate.
1855-1926

 

 

DebsPoster
"While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free"  -- 1918, after being sentenced to prison for opposing World War I.
DebsKissing
Gene Debs kissing his brother.

 

DebsBook
"I would rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don't want and get it. "

 

DebsHome
Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana; his parents 
were French immigrants.  In 1875 he joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen; in 1893 he founded the American Railway Union. In 1905 he joined with Bill Haywood and Mother Jones to found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
He ran as the Socialist Party's candidate for the presidency in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920, the last time from his prison cell.

  

February was African American

 History Month and some local unions participated  by showing At the River I Stand, the award-winning labor history documentary.  To view the trailer

click here.