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Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of Appreciations cover

Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of Appreciations

Chapter 158: Mr. Debs an Artist in Expression
By Eugene V. Debs
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About This Book

A detailed biography traces the subject's formative years and public activity, followed by a broad selection of essays, poems, and speeches that lay out arguments for socialism, critiques of the wage system, and strategies for labor organization. Topics range from personal conversion to socialist ideas and analyses of craft, industrial, and revolutionary unionism to responses to government injunctions and the conduct of strikes. Several pieces address prison labor and civil liberties. Appraisals and appreciations by contemporaries, reproductions of photographs and illustrations, and editorial notes contextualize the movement and its rhetoric for sympathetic readers.

APPRECIATIONS

FREDERIC AUGUSTE BARTHOLDI

The great sculptor who modeled the colossal statue, “Liberty Enlightening the World,” in New York harbor, wrote of Debs:

“He is endowed with the most precious faculty to which one can aspire—the gift of language, and he uses it for the proclamation of the most beautiful and generous thoughts. His beautiful language is that of an apostle.”

Mr. Debs an Artist in Expression

If the use of language to express thought is an art, Mr. Debs is an artist. If oratory is a science, he is a master of the science. If eloquence reaches and takes hold of the hearts and emotions of mankind, Mr. Debs has that which will make his auditors stand and deliver the goods. His address lasted over two hours and at its close, not only men, but women, surged to the platform to grasp his hand and congratulate him. This is something unique, for while it is customary for men to do so with labor leaders, women generally stay in the background if they attend these meetings at all.—Detroit Times.