"In Spiritual Communion":
Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Christians

Jacob H. Dorn
Wright State University

He had only seen Debs three times, met him twice, and really talked to him once, but when Debs died in 1926, John Haynes Holmes, pastor of New York City's Community Church (Unitarian), himself a distinguished civil libertarian and social reformer, announced that he loved Debs deeply and "honored him above all other men now alive in America." Why did many people share that love of Debs, and others hate him, Holmes asked. In both cases the answer was Debs' own outflowing love, which common folks cherished but the rich and powerful saw as a threat to the established order. Exactly the same answer explained reactions to Jesus. Holmes spoke at a mass meeting in Debs' memory at the Madison Square Garden and converted a Sunday service at the Community Church into "a public memorial" to Debs: "I shall take his life as my text," he wrote Theodore Debs, "use his writings for Scripture reading, and place in the pulpit a full-sized copy of Louis Mayer's bust, draped with the Red flag." Waxing poetic, Holmes had Christ receive Debs into heaven with these words: 'Gene! dear Comrade! Come up here, beside me, You are worthy, 'Gene, For you did good deeds of love To the least of my brethren, My toilers and my poor Come up here beside me, And rest you, 'Gene! For it was for such as you That my Father laid the foundations of his earth, In justice, in mercy, in love.1	1
Only months before Debs' death, testimony to another religious leader's regard for him came from the widow of Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the Social Gospel's most incisive thinkers. Approaching the anniversary of his death, Pauline Rauschenbusch told Debs that Walter had been "a great admirer of yours and a kindred spirit," and that she often linked the two men in her thoughts even though they had never met. Not being a member of the Socialist Party, she added, had not kept Rauschenbusch from voting its ticket. In reply, Debs regretted never meeting Rauschenbusch, with whom he felt he had been "in spiritual communion."2 Just after Debs' passing, Lewis J. Duncan, a Unitarian minister and one-time Socialist mayor of Butte, Montana, utilized the biblical language of laying down one's life for friends to interpret Debs' life; and Robert Whitaker, an English-born Baptist minister active in radical circles in California, called him "in the truest sense of the word a saint."3	2
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