Eugene V. Debs Quotes
What can Labor do for itself? The answer is not difficult. Labor can organize, it can unify; it can consolidate its forces. This done, it can demand and command.
Debs, Eugene V. "The American Railway Union." Eugene V. Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1908, p. 120.
The unions that broke off were very successful at increasing union membership and made large efforts at organizing. The others were losing members for the most part and devoted most of their resources to politics to protect what they had.
The then Vice President was accosted on the train by southerners who believed that he was on his way to his home state of Tennessee to persuade the legislature not to secede from the union. Amid cries to hang him and after he was punched by one of the mob, ex-Senator Wigfall—the man who had received the surrender sword at Sumter, who was also on the train, persuaded the crowd to hear Johnson out. Johnson thus began his speech which was potentially for his life, but never wavered from his view that secession was a mistake. Most of the crowd calmed down and as the train pulled out, they let him go though there were still a few shouts for “hanging.” There was no secret service protection for the President or vice President at the outbreak of the Civil War. Pinkerton had organized some informal protection for the President and thwarted some plots, but it was the Vice President who was attacked first. And there was not sufficient protection to prevent Lincoln’s assassination.
Sadova was a major battle where the Prussians defeated the Austrians. It was known to all Germans as historically key to developing a German nation.
Roosevelt shocked the conservative members of his own party with this statement. Labor unions were not then an accepted concept in American society. Anti trust legislation and enforcement was in its infancy and companies in an industry commonly conspired as to price fixing, labor negotiations and market share allocations. TR had a scrupulous sense of fairness and equity.
He had squads of thugs that he would “rent” out to other gangsters for their enforcement activities and to unions to protect themselves from goons and intimidate non union workers. However, he would not let his men work as goons and strike busters or for companies—despite huge pay offers—to keep their workers in line, a common practice at the time.
Eugene Victor "Gene" Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) ("Wobblies") and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.
