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.)
When Ex-President Grover Cleveland violated the constitution and
outraged justice by seizing the state of Illinois by the throat and
handcuffing her civil administration at the behest of the crime-stained
trusts and corporations, Theodore Roosevelt was among his most ardent
admirers and enthusiastic supporters. He wrote in hearty commendation of
the atrocious act, pronounced it most exalted patriotism and said he
would have done the same himself had he been president.
And so he would and so he will!
How impressive to see the Rough Rider embrace the Smooth Statesman!
Oyster Bay and Buzzard’s Bay! “Two souls with but a single thought, two
hearts that beat as one.”
There is also the highest authority for the statement charging Mr.
Roosevelt with declaring about the same time he was lauding Cleveland
that if he was in command he would have such as Altgeld, Debs and other
traitors lined up against a dead wall and shot. The brutal remark was
not for publication but found its way into print and Mr. Roosevelt,
after he became a candidate, attempted to make denial, but the words
themselves sound like Roosevelt and bear the impress of his savage
visage.
Following the Pullman strike in 1894 there was an indignant and emphatic
popular protest against “government by injunction,” which has not yet by
any means subsided.
Organized labor was, and is, a unit against this insidious form of
judicial usurpation as a means of abrogating constitutional restraints
of despotic power.
Mr. Roosevelt with his usual zeal to serve the ruling class and keep
their slaves in subjection, vaulted into the arena and launched his
tirade upon the “mob” that dared oppose the divine rule of a corporation
judge.
“Men who object to what they style ‘government by injunction,’” said he,
“are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty
sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors, who lived in caves,
fought one another with stone-headed axes and ate the mammoth and woolly
rhinoceros. They are dangerous whenever there is the least danger of
their making the principles of this ages-buried past living factors in
our present life. They are not in sympathy with men of good minds and
good civic morality.”
In direct terms and plain words Mr. Roosevelt denounces all those who
oppose “Government by Injunction” as cannibals, barbarians and
anarchists, and this violent and sweeping stigma embraces the whole
organized movement of labor, every man, woman and child that wears the
badge of union labor in the United States.
It is not strange in the light of these facts that the national
congress, under President Roosevelt’s administration, suppresses
anti-injunction and eight-hour bills and all other measures favored by
labor and resisted by capital.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account