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“In Spiritual Communion”: Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Christians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Jacob H. Dorn
Jacob H. Dorn
Affiliation:
Wright State University
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Extract

He had only seen Debs three times, met him twice, and really talked to him once, but when Debs died in 1926, John Haynes Holmes, pastor of New York City's Community Church (Unitarian), himself a distinguished civil libertarian and social reformer, announced that he loved Debs deeply and “honored him above all other men now alive in America.” Why did many people share that love of Debs, and others hate him, Holmes asked. In both cases the answer was Debs' own outflowing love, which common folks cherished but the rich and powerful saw as a threat to the established order. Exactly the same answer explained reactions to Jesus. Holmes spoke at a mass meeting in Debs' memory at the Madison Square Garden and converted a Sunday service at the Community Church into “a public memorial” to Debs: “I shall take his life as my text,” he wrote Theodore Debs, “use his writings for Scripture reading, and place in the pulpit a full-sized copy of Louis Mayer's bust, draped with the Red flag.” Waxing poetic, Holmes had Christ receive Debs into heaven with these words:

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 2 , Special Issue 3: New Perspectives on Socialism I , July 2003 , pp. 303 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2003

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References

1 Holmes, John Haynes, Debs – Lover of Men (New York: Community Church, “The Community Pulpit” Series 1926–1927, No. V)Google Scholar; Holmes to Theodore Debs, October 22, 1926, in Letters of Eugene V. Debs, 3 vols., ed., J. Robert Constantine (Urbana, 1990), 3: 606–07 (hereafter cited as Letters). The poem also appeared in Unity, November 15, 1926. Holmes included Debs in a chapter, “Great Men,” in I Speak for Myself: The Autobiography of John Haynes Holmes (New York, 1959), 245–48.

2 Pauline Rauschenbusch to Eugene V. Debs, May 3, 1926, and Debs to Rauschen-busch, May 22,1926, Letters, 3: 567–69, 579–80. For Rauschenbusch's views of socialism, see Dorn, Jacob H., “The Social Gospel and Socialism: A Comparison of the Thought of Francis Greenwood Peabody, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch,” Church History 62 (March 1993): 91–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Lewis J. Duncan to Theodore Debs, October 19, 1926, and Robert Whitaker to Theodore Debs, [October 1926], Papers of Eugene V. Debs, 1834–1945 (microfilm ed., 1983), reel 4, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana (hereafter cited as Papers).

4 Salvatore, Nick, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, 1982), 310–11.Google Scholar The best previous biography of Debs gives relatively little attention to religious analogies but also argues that journalists, ministers, poets, and others created a “Debs Legend” of self-sacrifice and greatness of soul. Ginger, Ray, Eugene V. Debs: A Biography (New York, 1962), 284–85Google Scholar; originally published as The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949).

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6 Debs, Eugene V., “Bigelow and the Blacksnake Brutes,” Social Revolution, December 1917Google Scholar, in Papers, reel 8; Herbert S. Bigelow to Debs, January 12, 1921, ibid., reel 3.

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8 Coleman, McAlister, Eugene V. Debs: A Man Unafraid (New York, 1930), 319.Google Scholar Citations to two other postwar poems that linked Debs and Christ appear in Letters, 2: 453, 522; Prade, Ruth Le, “Eugene V. Debs,” Protest (May 1919)Google Scholar and Kunitz, Joshua, “Debs – America's Soul,” New York Call, May 4, 1919.Google Scholar

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41 One notable exception is John Spargo, a Methodist preacher in England who became an agnostic and then an Episcopalian. Associated with the Right on trade-union policy, Spargo was part of an effort to deny Debs the presidential nomination in 1908. In interviews years later, he accused Debs of hypocrisy and pseudo-martyrdom and played up the embarrassments his drinking caused the party. He appealed to President Wilson, however, for a pardon for Debs. “The Reminiscences of John Spargo” (Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 1957), 208–15.

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48 Herron, George D., “A Plea for the Unity of American Socialists,” International Socialist Review 1 (December 1, 1900): 321–28.Google Scholar This address in Chicago appeared as the lead article in the ISR.

49 Minutes of the Unity Convention, typescript, 3–8, 166–71, 182, National Office Papers, General Records, July 1901, Socialist Party of America Papers, Duke University. Herron's articles in the ISR appeared from January through May 1901. They originated as lectures in Chicago and were also covered by the Social Democratic Herald. For Herron's role in the new party, see, Dieterich, Herbert R., “Patterns of Dissent: The Reform Ideas and Activities of GeorgeD. Herron” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1957): 132–36Google Scholar; Handy, Robert T., “George D. Herron and the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1890–1901” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1949): 146–47Google Scholar, 167–69, 172; Nelson, , “Herron and the Socialist Clergy,” 205–06Google Scholar, 236–38; Quint, Howard H., The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Indianapolis, 1953), 134–36Google Scholar, 374, 377, 383–84.

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52 Frederick G. Strickland to Eugene V. Debs and Theodore Debs, May 3, 1906, in Papers, reel 1, and to Eugene V. Debs, n.d., reel 3; Frederick G. and May Strickland to Theodore Debs and Family, October 23, 1926, reel 4; Theodore Debs to Frederick G. and May Strickland, March 12, 1941, reel 5.

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