Showing results for "Debs" in United States

The 1987 murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan sent shock waves through the affluent Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, Georgia like few other crimes before it. The neighborhood, with its stately mansions and top-tier schools, was simply not the kind of place where women were gunned down in broad daylight. How many socialites had enemies so dangerous they would be murdered by a hit man pretending to deliver roses on an early winter morning?

The labour leader Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for sedition after giving this speech on June 16, 1918 in Canton, Ohio. The speech denounced the First World War and the military draft.

Debs expresses concern for the vast number of workingmen without trades, who are often termed “unskilled” laborers. He argues that their importance in carrying forward the great industrial enterprises of the world has not been recognized in the past, and was not appreciated at the time. He also mentions that the term “skill” is often used in a sense which does great injustice to men who do not wear the badge of some particular trade, and hence, the term “skilled laborer” is never applied to men who are known as “common laborers.”

The birth of liberation movements in the C19th saw a rise in fighting for the rights of workers. William Morris believed decries the belief “not that Commerce was made for man, but that man was made for Commerce”, with the profit motive that renders all work miserable when “It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do; and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.”