My Dear Brewer:—
Have just read the majority report of the [Socialist Party] Committee on
Immigration. It is utterly un-socialistic, reactionary, and in truth
outrageous, and I hope you will oppose with all your power. The
plea that certain races are to be excluded because of tactical expediency
would be entirely consistent in a bourgeois convention
of self-seekers, but should have no place in a proletariat gathering
under the auspices of an international movement that is calling
on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to
unite for their emancipation....
Away with the “tactics” which require the exclusion of the
oppressed and suffering slaves who seek these shores with the
hope of bettering their wretched condition and are driven back
under the cruel lash of expediency by those who call themselves
Socialists in the name of a movement whose proud boast it is
1that it stands uncompromisingly for the oppressed and downtrodden
of all the earth. These poor slaves have just as good a
right to enter here as even the authors of this report who now
seek to exclude them. The only difference is that the latter had
the advantage of a little education and had not been so cruelly
ground and oppressed, but in point of principle there is no difference,
the motive of all being precisely the same, and if the
convention which meets in the name of Socialism should discriminate
at all it should be in favor of the miserable races who
have borne the heaviest burdens and are most nearly crushed to
the earth.
Upon this vital proposition I would take my stand against
the world and no specious argument of subtle and sophistical
defenders of the Civic Federation unionism, who do not hesitate
to sacrifice principle for numbers and jeopardize ultimate success
for immediate gain, could move me to turn my back upon
the oppressed, brutalized and despairing victims of the old
world, who are lured to these shores by some faint glimmer of
hope that here their crushing burdens may be lightened, and
some star of promise rise in their darkened skies.
The alleged advantages that would come to the Socialist
movement because of such heartless exclusion would all be
swept away a thousand times by the sacrifice of a cardinal principle
of the international socialist movement, for well might the
good faith of such a movement be questioned by intelligent
workers if it placed itself upon record as barring its doors against
the very races most in need of relief, and extinguishing their
hope, and leaving them in dark despair at the very time their
ears were first attuned to the international call and their hearts
were beginning to throb responsive to the solidarity of the oppressed
of all lands and all climes beneath the skies.
In this attitude there is nothing of maudlin sentimentality,
but simply a rigid adherence to the fundamental principles of
the International proletarian movement. If Socialism, international,
revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly,
and uncompromisingly for the working class and for
the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands
for none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion
and a snare.
Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the
international door in the faces of their own brethren; we will be
none the weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they
evidently have no clear conception of the international solidarity,
are wholly lacking in the revolutionary spirit, and have no
proper place in the Socialist movement while they entertain
such aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.
Let us stand squarely on our revolutionary, working class
principles and make our fight openly and uncompromisingly
against all our enemies, adopting no cowardly tactics and holding
out no false hopes, and our movement will then inspire the
faith, arouse the spirit, and develop the fiber that will prevail
against the world.
Yours without compromise,
Eugene V. Debs.
Published in International Socialist Review, vol. 11, no. 1 (July 1910), pp. 16-17.
[ISR Editor’s Note:— This letter was written to Comrade Brewer of Kansas
while the Socialist Congress was in session [National Congress of the
Socialist Party of America, Chicago, May 15-21, 1910]. It would have
been read to the Congress but for the fact that the writer’s permission
was received too late. Fortunately the committee’s Majority Report was
rejected. Comrade Debs’ letter should be read by every socialist in the
United States and we believe it will do much to prevent any such proposition
from coming up again in any future convention.]
(With thanks to Marxists Internet Archive)
