Harry Targ
Over 700 Greater Lafayette residents rallied around the Courthouse in a “Remove! Reverse! Reclaim!” rally, April 5, 2025. This rally, organized by many local groups including Indivisible, featured numerous colorful signs including “Morons are Gas Lighting America,” “Love Your Neighbor No Deportation,” “Hands Off Social Security, Our Bodies, Medicare/Medicaid, and Our Free Speech.” The rally included chanting, speeches, singalongs, and a march across the bridge from West Lafayette to Lafayette, Indiana. This rally, organized locally was part of over 1,000 rallies and marches around the country by millions of protesters who were saying “NO!” to virtually every policy instituted by the new Trump administration and the billionaires around him, especially Elon Musk.
As a participant in the 700-person rally against hate,
the greed of the wealthy, and the enormous human suffering at home and abroad caused
the Trump administration, I was proud to be a Hoosier. I was moved to reflect
on the life of one of Indiana’s most renowned citizens, Eugene V. Debs, five
time presidential candidate under the banner of the Socialist Party.
Ten thousand times the labor movement has
stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by
thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public
opinion, and deceived by politicians. But not withstanding all this and all
these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever
known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the
setting of the sun (Eugene V. Debs).
Born and raised in Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs began
his political life as a teenager, served a term in the Indiana legislature,
worked on the railroad, and spearheaded the formation and national mobilization
of the American Railway Union, an early industrial union. When the ARU
supported a strike of Pullman workers in 1894, the federal government,
encouraged by railroad moguls, bankers, and the media, sent troops to Chicago
to crush the workers’ movement. Debs and some of his comrades were sentenced to
six months in jail for leading the Pullman strike.
And it was in jail, reading, studying, and reflecting,
that Debs became a Socialist. For the remainder of his life he worked to
mobilize the working class to use the ballot, the strike, and mass actions to
organize and agitate for a new, humane, Socialist society.
He believed that those who produced all the wealth of
society, workers (Black/white, men/women, native born and immigrants) should
receive the fruits of their labors. They should receive the value of what they
produced. They should control the means of their production. And they should
have a predominant voice in the political institutions in their society.
For thirty years as a leader of the newly constituted
Socialist Party, Debs articulated this vision before hundreds of thousands of
workers. He garnered millions of votes over his five presidential campaigns.
His party, the Socialist Party, produced a national newspaper, The
Appeal to Reason, in Emporia, Kansas, which at one time had 700,000
subscribers.
Debs’ last incarceration resulted from his violation
of the Sedition Act which prohibited any public opposition to World War I. He
had made it clear in his famous 1918 antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, that the
global working class had no interest in war; that the ruling class of bankers
and manufacturers declared wars that workers were forced to fight.
The Eugene V. Debs story is vividly portrayed in a
29-minute video on his life (still available). The
video, divided into eleven chapters, briefly discusses the lack of contemporary
awareness of Debs and his movement; the rise of finance and manufacturing
capital and its war on workers; the emergence of the Socialist Party as one
working class response to capitalist exploitation; and the personal biography of
Debs, from his youth in Terre Haute Indiana to national and global acclaim. It
highlights the theory that capitalism is an exploitative system that in the end
was antithetical to the interests of workers. Capitalists seek to divide
workers (by race, gender, ethnicity, and nation) to weaken their capacity to
organize. Debs also emphasized the inextricable connection between capitalism and war.
Sure, Debs was an activist a long time ago. Times have
changed. But what has not, was reflected in the 700 passionate marchers today
in a small Indiana town. That is, these Hoosiers were marching for justice. It
is a long march, but worth taking.
