Touch and Go by Studs Terkel Read Free Book Online Page B

waged in so soaring a manner that he caught fire as the populist hero of working stiffs everywhere. Remember, too, that he turned down President Wilson’s offer of Secretary of State; in fact, he resigned on learning that Wilson was planning entry into World War I. His lucid eloquence, seemingly improvised, has hardly been matched.
    Though to many of the intelligentsia (what a lovingly sadistic time H.L. Mencken had with Bryan) and the urban “learned,” circumstances
meant one thing; for the poor, bedraggled farmer, who sang “Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow,” circumstances meant something else.
    Now, some eighty years gone by and we still have a problem with creationism, without determining where the ache lies.
    There were more country songs written about Bryan than about Abe Lincoln; at least twenty-five. Just about every country-song bard had one, including Vernon Dalhart, whom my father and I heard so often on the crystal set. Surely, you of an age remember “The Prisoner’s Song”—“Oh, I wish I had the wings of an angel, over those walls I would fly.”
    Here’s a Carson Robison song, written in grief shortly after Bryan’s death. Years later, I heard a kid sing a few stanzas of this one in a Pennsylvania town, Girard.
    Oh, the folks in Tennessee are as faithful as can be,
And they know the Bible teaches what is right.
They believe in God above and his great undying love,
And they know they are protected by his might.
Then to Dayton came a man with his new ideas so grand
And he said we came from monkeys long ago.
But in teaching his belief, Mr. Scopes found only grief
For they would not let their old religion go.
Oh, you must not doubt the word that is written by the Lord,
For if you do your house will surely fall.
And Mr. Scopes will learn that wherever you may turn
The old religion’s better after all.
    WHAT EXCITED MY FATHER MOST was that we were one block away from Lindlahr, the hospital where Eugene B. Debs, his number-one hero, was spending his last days. Debs was visited by those who were to us the celebrities of the time: Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Ida Tarbell. Often we’d take a slow walk and hang around the corner outside Lindlahr, just as young groupies later waited for Mick Jagger, wondering who of our favorite muckrakers
would be there. The irony was, Debs was no longer there. He had been moved to the hospital in Elmhurst, where he died.
    Unfortunately, neither my father nor I knew too much of Bryan, being most ignorant of the farmers’ trials and tribulations. Oh, we knew the phrases “Crown of Thorns,” and “crucified on the Cross of Gold,” but that’s about all. It was Gene Debs whose glory possessed Sam. Of course, he knew the statement old Gene made on the day of his conviction for treason. Remember that? Oh, Jesus, how could you? Your grandmother had hardly been born. It was in Canton, Ohio, in 1916. Debs was challenging Wilson’s plan to enter World War I. As he was sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for ten years, Gene spoke up: “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.”
    It was President Harding, a Republican political toy, who, as one of his first acts in office, granted Debs his pardon. It so happened that the genial Harding and Gene were mutual admirers of the film cowboy hero Tom Mix. Was that a factor in Harding’s inviting Debs to the White House? In fact, he not only invited Debs. He ordered Harry Daugherty, his attorney general, who escaped prison himself on a technicality, to put Debs on the train without a guard. Woodrow Wilson, our professorial chieftain, was a movie fan, too. According to Eric Foner, the American historian, Wilson found Birth of a Nation “as awful as lightning, but unfortunately true, quite true.”
    Eugene Salvatore, in his biography of Eugene Debs,