Debs at Moundsville

Eugene Deb’s most famous saying is probably this one:

While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

So I found this portrait of him in Moundsville prison, from Democracy’s Prisoner, telling:

Prison offered certain mind-expanding experiences for Debs as well. For decades he had been preaching about the problem of crime. Criminals were not evil, he had argued, but were the victims of social conditions created by capitalism. Always a champion of the underdog, Debs now lived among some of society’s most disenfranchised men. “I belong in prison,” he told [the journalist] Karsner. “I belong where men are made to suffer for the wrongs committed against them by a brutalizing system.” Though Debs had promised the warden he would not talk socialism to other inmates, he spoke through the power of practical example. From across the country hundreds of well-wishers sent him presents—flowers, cakes, books, and boxes of fruit. Keeping little for himself, he spread these gifts among the other inmates, white and black, who were delighted to be “smoking high grade cigars and eating choice candy, the like of which they had never before tasted.” …Some of the most hardened convicts still suspected that Debs was some kind of “schemer and palaverer,” but most were won over by his kindness. Sitting on the hospital porch in the evenings, he was surrounded by men who wanted his advice and sympathy, or his help writing letters home. With growing admiration, the warden conceded that Debs was one of the few men he had ever known who “practiced absolutely what he preached.”

Debs was very well treated in Moundsville. Not only was the warden taken with him but he also knew that many of Debs’s supporters would be looking for cause to protest. Debs was given light duties in the prison hospital, to help out “when he felt like it.” And he did have a bad heart so there was some reason for this treatment. But he also had a room of his own that looked out over landscaped prison grounds and he was allowed to take his meals in his room. His bending of the rules about mail privileges was also winked at. Nevertheless, he was in prison and he considered himself one of the prisoners.

By the way, Moundsville prison features in Davis Grubb’s book Night of the Hunter as well as in the film of the same title. It is in Moundsville that the preacher meets the young bankrobber and learns about the hidden money.

Moundsville was decommissioned in 1995 and is now a tourist attraction with a haunted house theme.

And one more aside. Eugene Debs reportedly also said:

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.

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