Labor Activists

"The American Dream is not about gadgets. It’s not about the size of our gross national product. It’s not about the level of technological sophistication. The American Dream is about man. It’s about broadening the opportunities and facilitating the growth of every human being, so that each person can reach out and achieve a sense of purpose and fulfillment."

"We have to reassert the sovereignty of people above profits in America."

"We say to American industry, if you can afford to pay pension plans to people who don't need them, then by the eternal gods you are going to have to pay them to people who do need them."

"The trouble is that industry operates on the basis of these double economic and moral standards. They say to the worker when he is too old to work and too young to die, 'You cannot have security in your old age, that is reserved to only the blue bloods, only the ones who were smart enough to pick the right grandfather before they were born. They can have security, but if you live on the wrong side of the railroad tracks you are not entitled to it.'"

"We are going to keep preaching the gospel that freedom and democracy in peace are indivisible values in the world and that no one can have them unless they are universal and all people may share them."

"We live in a world in which the common denominator that binds the human family together has been reduced to its simplest fundamental term—human survival."

"American labor had better roll up its sleeves, it had better get the stiffest broom and brush it can find, and the strongest soap and disinfectant, and it had better take on the job of cleaning its own house from top to bottom and drive out every crook and gangster and racketeer we find. Because if we don't clean our own house, then the reactionaries will clean it for us. But they won't use a broom, they'll use an axe, and they'll try to destroy the labor movement in the process."

"There's a direct relationship between the ballot box and the bread box, and what the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls."

"Labor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie. Labor is fighting for a larger pie."

"We have a saying in the union: "If a fellow looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, the possibility is that he is a duck." That is the way with a Communist. If the guy does everything that the party does, the prospects are very good that he is a party member or fellow traveler."

"Every worker today stands on the shoulders of giants, people like Lucy Parsons, Cesar Chavez, Bayard Rustin, Eugene V. Debs, and Walter Reuther."

"Walter Reuther was an American visionary so far ahead of his times that although he died a quarter of a century ago, our Nation has yet to catch up to his dreams."

"Americans of all religious faiths, of all political persuasions, and from every section of our Nation are deeply shocked and outraged at the tragic events in Selma Ala., and they look to the Federal Government as the only possible source to protect and guarantee the exercise of constitutional rights, which is being denied and destroyed by the Dallas County law enforcement agents and the Alabama State troops under the direction of Governor George Wallace. Under these circumstances, Mr President, I join in urging you to take immediate and appropriate steps including the use of Federal marshals and troops if necessary, so that the full exercise of constitutional rights including free assembly and free speech be fully protected. Sunday's spectacle of tear gas and night sticks whips and electric cattle prods used against defenseless citizens demonstrating to secure their constitutional right to register and vote as American citizens was an outrage against all decency. This shameful brutality by law enforcing agents makes a mockery of Americans’ concepts of justice and provides effective ammunition to Communist propaganda and our enemies around the world who would weaken and destroy us. Mr President, your prompt and decisive leadership in this crisis is imperative in demonstrating Americans’ fundamental allegiance to the constitutional rights of all citizens. Prompt and decisive action on your part will moreover discourage the apostles of hatred, bigotry, and violence, who would divide America. It will give great encouragement and added strength to the many Americans in the South who, like you and the vast majority of Americans, believe that every citizen has a moral and constitutional right to register and vote. I am confident that in this crisis, Mr President, you will act with the same conviction, courage, and compassion which has characterized your leadership and other periods of challenge."

"I think Jimmy Hoffa is bad for the American labor movement because I believe that he is surrounded by forces who are interested in a fast buck, and I think that anybody in the leadership of the American labor movement has got to be dedicated to the advancement of the well-being of the rank-and-file and their families, and whenever they're interested in a fast buck, they ought to be on the other side of the table."

"Well, you see, I have nothing against Goldwater. I think he has the finest eighteenth century mind in the U.S. Senate."

"I'm grateful for the contribution [private enterprise] made, but even in the early days of capitalism the government helped a great deal. The railroads got tremendous land grants, the steamship companies got subsidies—they still get subsidies–the airlines got subsidies; none of these great industries developed without some assistance from the government. The whole question here, Mike, the whole question is not are you opposed or are you in favor of government intervention into certain areas of our free society. The question is: Whenever people are either unable or unwilling to do what must be done to maintain the health and advance the well-being of the whole society, then government is the only instrument that the whole people have to look to to do that job. Now, I'm for limiting that; I'm for encouraging voluntary nongovernmental approaches. This is why I try to do everything I can at the collective bargaining table; this is why we fought on the Social Security front, on the pension front. But when you've got a problem like education or medical care for the aged that you can't solve on a nongovernmental basis, then the government must do the job."

"I only want the government to do the things that you can't do without the government."

"Now I share the basic philosophy of Abraham Lincoln when he said that the purpose of government is to enable the people to do together through the instruments of government what they are unable to do without the aid of government."

"Now this essentially is the difference between the Republican party and the Democratic party. Philosophically, the Republican party believes that if you help big business to earn higher profit, they will then invest more money in plants. That will create more job opportunities. That will create full employment. They've got this trickle-down theory that you can build prosperity from the top down. The Democrats basically believe that you've got to build prosperity from the bottom up by expanding purchasing power, by doing the things that will make it possible for all the American people to participate in prosperity."

"You've got to judge the worth of the government not by what it does to help the few who have too much to get more, but what governments does to help the many to get enough."

"If we don't plan for the constructive and creative use of the growing measure of human leisure that we're going to have based upon our technological progress, we can wind up as a well-fed nation of morons."

"There is nothing that helps the Socialist Party so much as receiving an occasional deathblow. The oftener it is killed the more active, the more energetic, the more powerful it becomes."

"It was characteristic of IWW meetings that after the last speech had ended and the applause had died down, the audience would break up into circles, to continue discussing the subject, and later each circle would sing its favorite song. Gradually the circles would merge, and finally each man present, his arms over another's shoulders, would join in Joe Hill's best-known ballad, The Preacher and the Slave."

"During his short life, he penned some of the Wobblies' most beloved labor songs, including labor movement mainstays like "There Is Power in a Union" and "Rebel Girl," which he dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and his last words to Big Bill Haywood have since been taken up as a rallying cry-"Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize!""

"I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night Alive as you or me Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead," "I never died," says he."

"If there is really one thing that I am proud of in my long labor history, it is that while he was in prison, before he was executed, Joe Hill wrote a song for me dedicated to me, that was called, the "Rebel Girl" and that song, I hope you will do it here some time, it may not be the best of words or the best of music, but it came from the heart and it was certainly so treasured."

"The planet, Earth."

"Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave? Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?"

"I die with a clear conscience, I die fighting, not like a coward."

"Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize."

"My will is easy to decide, For there is nothing to divide. My kin don't need to fuss and moan — "Moss does not cling to a rolling stone." My body? — Oh! — If I could choose, I would to ashes it reduce, And let the merry breezes blow My dust to where some flowers grow. Perhaps some fading flower then Would come to life and bloom again. This is my last and final will. Good luck to all of you. [Joe Hill]"

"I'll take the shooting. I'm used to that. I've been shot a few times in the past, and I guess I can stand it, again."

"A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read."

"There is pow'r, there is pow'r In a band of workingmen. When they stand hand in hand, That's a pow'r, that's a pow'r That must rule in every land — One Industrial Union Grand."

"Workingmen of all countries, unite, Side by side we for freedom will fight: When the world and its wealth we have gained To the grafters we'll sing this refrain: You will eat, bye and bye, When you've learned how to cook and to fry Chop some wood, 'twill do you good, And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye."

"Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right; But when asked how 'bout something to eat They will answer with voices so sweet:You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die."

"As the Socialists became more successful at the polls (Debs got 900,000 votes in 1912, double what he had in 1908), and more concerned with increasing that appeal, they became more critical of IWW tactics of "sabotage" and "violence," and in 1913 removed Bill Haywood from the Socialist Party Executive Committee, claiming he advocated violence (although some of Debs's writings were far more inflammatory)."

"The writer Heywood Broun once quoted a fellow Socialist speaking of Debs: “That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as he's around I believe it myself.""

"When Susan B. Anthony, at eighty, went to hear Eugene Debs speak (twenty-five years before, he had gone to hear her speak, and they had not met since then), they clasped hands warmly, then had a brief exchange. She said, laughing: "Give us suffrage, and we'll give you socialism." Debs replied: "Give us socialism and we'll give you suffrage.""

"when he read Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, it deeply affected him."

"There were Negroes in the Socialist party, but the Socialist party did not go much out of its way to act on the race question. As Ray Ginger writes of Debs: "When race prejudice was thrust at Debs, he always publicly repudiated it. He always insisted on absolute equality. But he failed to accept the view that special measures were sometimes needed to achieve this equality.""

"It was the Depression of 1893 that propelled Eugene Debs into a lifetime of action for unionism and socialism."

"I regret exceedingly that though I am constantly coming upon references to the martyrdom of Eugene V. Debs, I do not know what particular act of righteousness has landed him in gaol. But from the admiration which he has excited in the breasts of many Americans whom I admire, I have an uneasy suspicion that he ought to change places with his judges."

""Chattel slavery has disappeared," Eugene Debs said. "But we are not yet free. We are engaged in another mighty agitation today. It is as wide as the world. It is the rise of the toiling and producing masses, who are gradually becoming conscious of their interest, their powers, as a class, who are organizing industrially and economically, who are slowly but surely developing the economic and political power that is to set them free. They are still in the minority, but they have learned how to wait and to bide their time. It is because I happen to be in this minority that I stand in your presence today, charged with crime." Not one word of his speech in Canton did he take back or try to soften. Instead he re-asserted the right of any minority, or any individual, to speak out against war or any other act of a nation which that minority or individual believed wrong. The indictment charged Debs with utterances calculated to incite mutiny in the army, stirring up disloyalty to the government, obstructing the enlistment of soldiers, encouraging resistance to the United States of America, and promoting the cause of the enemy. Then sixty-three years old, Debs was found guilty and sent to Atlanta penitentiary to serve ten years."

"It must have been about this time that I first heard Debs speak. He was facing an audience which packed the Academy of Music. On that same stage Henry Ward Beecher had stood and upheld the cause of the Democratic party in a tense campaign. I had been greatly interested in seeing Debs, for I had read and been told much about him-of his fearless leadership in the railroad strike of 1894, his term in jail as a consequence, and his fighting spirit. But I was disappointed that night-not by what he said, but by his manner. I thought him too much like a school-boy elocutionist. In after years, however, I attended several mass-meetings at which Debs was the main speaker, and he who had once been amateurish had become a real tribune of the people and a master of chastisement of the profit pharisees. No question about it an inspiring man because he was himself inspired. He was emotional, and used the logic of understanding born of long experience with workers. When one heard him voice a natural sympathy for the enslaved, one felt that here was a champion who would go to the stake rather than sacrifice his own beliefs."

"He helped found both the American Railway Union and the Industrial Workers of the World, and was jailed in 1919 for his opposition to World War I. While in prison he ran for president, and received nearly 1,000,000 votes."

"While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines sniping, attacking, and denouncing them… This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration."

"While the history of Debs is the history of the Socialist Party in its activities and enthusiasm, it seems in the retrospect a somewhat extraordinary fact that a man who had been so active in building labour organization for more than twenty years was not, in the Socialist Party, primarily an organizer any more than he was a theoretician. He was instead the voice, sometimes the pen, always the soul and conscience of the Party."

"Clearly the White House is the only safe place for an honest man like Debs."

"In 1979, with changing technology, I wrote and produced a video on the life and times of Eugene Victor Debs that was sold to colleges around the country. Debs was a great American who played an enormously important role in our history, but he was unknown to most people. He was one of the leading trade union leaders of the late nineteenth century, the founder of the American Socialist Party, and a six-time candidate for president of the United States. In 1920, he received nearly 1 million votes for president while he was in jail for his opposition to World War I. Many of the ideas that Debs campaigned on were later adopted by FDR and incorporated into the New Deal. Today, I have a plaque of Debs on a wall in my Senate office."