Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of AppreciationsDebs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
History
Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of Appreciations
Debs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
Socialism -- United States; Socialist Party (U.S.)
To verify this statement it is not necessary to refer to the
unorganized, unskilled and poorly-paid employes; on the contrary, let a
dozen engineers and the same number of conductors, picked at random, be
put upon the stand and catechized from a primer on economics and see
what percentage of them can give even a definition of the term. They
know how to run engines and trains and, as a rule, that is practically
the limit of their knowledge. That is all the corporations want them to
know, and, from their point of view, all they are fit to know.
* * * * *
It is true that they read journals published by their unions in which a
five-column account is given of a reception to some “noble grand chief,”
and as many columns more about babies born and brothers buried, but
which may be searched in vain for a line of revolutionary economics to
nourish their brain, open the eyes, give cheer to the heart or
aspiration to the soul of a corporation slave.
* * * * *
The several unions of railway employes, considered in any militant
sense, are not labor unions at all. Warren S. Stone, grand chief of the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, worthy successor of the late P. M.
Arthur, is on record as having pledged his word to a well known railway
manager that the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers should never go out
on strike while he was its executive head. The same grand chief is on
record as threatening John J. Hannahan, grand master of the Brotherhood
of Locomotive Firemen, with keeping his engineers at work on the
Northern Pacific system, virtually scabbing on the firemen, if the
latter went out on strike.
If the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was a bona fide labor union
instead of the fossilized tool of railway corporations its grand chief
would be peremptorily impeached for treason to the working class.
* * * * *
The _Civic Federation Review_ loves to print the portrait of Mr. Stone
and idealize him as a “leader of labor” worthy to sit at the feast with,
and at the feet of, August Belmont, Andrew Carnegie, Archbishop Ireland
and other millionaire labor exploiters who regard workingmen as sheep to
be sheared and skinned and slaughtered, and asses to be harnessed and
worked and whipped, and, from that point of view, the engineers and the
rest of the railway unions are to be congratulated upon their astute
leadership.
It is not that Mr. Stone is personally dishonest and corrupt; he may be,
and I think he is, perfectly conscientious in what he says and does, and
the same is doubtless true of the grand officers of the other railway
unions, but that is not the question.
If workingmen are betrayed and defeated and made to suffer, it makes
little difference if their misfortunes are due to dishonest, or ignorant
and incompetent, leadership.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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