The 16th meeting of the Fredonia Shakespeare Club was held on Feb. 28 at the Lanford House, hosted by Linda Dunn. Fifteen members were in attendance. Vice-President Minda Rae Amiran welcomed members and thanked our hostess and presenter.

Priscilla Bernatz read the minutes from the previous meeting. The minutes were approved as written.

The club’s area of study for the 2019-2020 year will be Nobel Prize winners. Individual members will choose their topic at the June picnic.

The club’s area of study this year is The World Between WWI and WWII. Leanna McMahon presented her paper “Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, and Socialism in the United States” which is summarized as follows:

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, the Socialist Party was quite active in the United States and its candidates for state and local office were often successful. Although no member of the Socialist Party was ever elected President of the United States, between 1904 and 1940 socialist candidates did compete for the office as they sought to spread the ideals of socialism to working men and women across the country.

During the Industrial Revolution, as people increasingly left farms and craft benches for cities and factories, life presented them simultaneously with horrors and hopes. Factory workers were subject to inhumanely long hours, dangerous conditions and low wages. At the same time, they were witnessing breathtaking technological progress which seemed to hold out the possibility of widespread human prosperity and flourishing. A better life seemed theoretically possible, if not exactly within reach.

Labor unions began to spring up in mills and factories. Among the early labor organizers was Eugene Victor Debs, the son of immigrants from France who began working for railroad companies at age 14 and as a young man organized the American Railway Union. Debs did not start out a socialist, but while jailed in 1894 as a result of his actions during the Pullman Strike, Debs read deeply in socialist theory and became convinced that a conversion of the economy to socialism was both necessary and possible.

In 1897 Debs was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of the United States and he was elected chairman of the party’s governing board. He was the party’s candidate for President of the United States in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, turning down the nomination in 1916.

Debs earned nearly a million votes, six percent of the total, in the presidential election of 1912; a high water mark for the Socialist Party. Debs was a pacifist, and the opposition of Debs and other Socialists to America’s entry into WWI caused many Americans to look on the party with disfavor. The prosperity of the 1920s dimmed the interest of many Americans in socialism. Immigrants, who typically endured less favorable working conditions, were more interested in socialism, but they often were unable to vote.

Debs was sentenced to three years in federal prison for a June 16, 1918 speech against the military draft and the war in which he told a Canton, Ohio audience, “you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.” His citizenship was also revoked, although it was posthumously restored in 1976. Eugene Debs died in 1926 and was eulogized at his funeral in Terre Haute by Norman Thomas, who followed Debs as the leader of the socialist movement in the United States.

Norman Thomas, born 1884, was the eldest of six children, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers. He graduated from Princeton, moved to New York and attended Union Theological Seminary and was ordained a Presbyterian minister himself. While attending seminary he served in churches in areas with large populations of immigrant workers, and Thomas was touched by the harsh conditions they faced.

Moved by a progressive Christian faith to work for the rights of workers and for peace, Thomas wrote the following in support of the candidacy of the socialist Morris Hillquit for mayor of New York City in 1917:

“The hope for the future lies in a new social and economic order which demands the abolition of the capitalistic system. War itself is only the most horrible and dramatic of the many evil fruits of our present organized system of exploitation and the philosophy of life which exalts competition instead of cooperation.” In October, 1918, he applied to join the Socialist Party, saying, “I think these are days in which radicals ought to stand up and be counted.”

Like Debs, Thomas was committed to the inclusion as equals of women, Blacks, and immigrants in the labor movement and in the country as a whole. Thomas was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and an advocate for free speech and the right of assembly during times when the government often sought to silence those advocating for workers’ rights or for peace.

Thomas ran for President in 1924, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. The platforms of the Socialist Party during those years called for federally funded old age pensions, unemployment insurance, voting rights, a shortened work week, and a minimum wage. The fact that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal borrowed heavily from the Socialist platform was noted by many, although Norman Thomas felt Roosevelt did not go nearly far enough, as unemployment, poverty, racial discrimination, and other ills remained far from fully eliminated.

Thomas remained active in public life until his death in 1968 at the age of 84. On his deathbed Thomas dictated an eloquent farewell letter, still urging his country to work for justice and equality:

“I have not been talking about an impossible utopia when I continue to say that this world can be motivated and structured in such a way as to achieve a world without war — a world to end the madness which continues to condemn children everywhere to hatred, starvation, disease. The tactics of this great struggle for such a world need continual and fresh evaluation. There is no rigid ideology to insure its achievement. But we have the courage, high hopes, and abilities to see that it is done.”

Dr. Irene Strychalski assisted at the tea table. The next meeting of the club will be held at the Edwards Waterhouse Inn hosted by Mary Jane Covley-Walker. Dunn will present a paper.