Debs with a welcome and wonderful defense of Gorky as he along with his common-law wife and comrade Maria Andreyeva (not his ‘legal’ wife) visited the United States in 1906 on a fund-raising tour for the R.S.D.L.P. in the midst of Russia’s revolutionary wave. The press made much of Gorky’s ‘scandalous’ relationship, to which Debs pointedly rebuts with the truth behind the professed morals of the bourgeoisie.

‘Welcome, Maxim Gorky!’ by Eugene V. Debs from The Worker (New York). Vol. 16 No. 4. April 28, 1906.

With open arms and hearts attuned to love and greeting, we of the proletariat welcome Maxim Gorky and his wife to these shores.

We know them and we love and honor them.

They come to us as international revolutionists, comrades in the common cause; and in bidding them welcome, these brave spirits and unconquerable souls who have suffered all the tortures and terrors of Russian despotism, it is with mingled pride and joy that is marred only by the fact that the indignities to which they will be subjected by the bourgeois ruling class in “free” America will be more brutal and shocking, if possible, than those they have just escaped in their own native Tsar-cursed, wretched land.

Maxim Gorky’s career is as painful and pathetic with privation and suffering as it is luminous with brilliant and extraordinary achievement. Child of the social abyss, he has climbed to the very heights of fame and his genius triumphant commands the homage of a world. But thru all the wondrous changes of his life, his heart has remained in the social depths and continues to beat warm and true to “Les Misérables” of all the earth.

Christ-like is his love for the lowly and despised and his sacrifice of self, and Christ-like his persecution by the heartless pharisees.

Had Gorky been an intellectual prostitute he would be the social lion of the hour, especially here in the United States, and every door of the “upper” class would swing inward at his touch. But thru all the fiery ordeals that have fallen to his lot he has preserved inviolate his mental and moral integrity; he has fought bravely and unflinchingly the battles of the oppressed and heavy-laden of the earth.

Bold and intrepid champion of social justice and passionate lover of freedom, the ruling class, to whom he has never crooked the knee, must find some excuse to pour their garbage upon his head and so they, arch hypocrites that they are, affect to feel shocked at some irregularity alleged to have been discovered in his domestic relations, and now raise the cry that he is unclean.

Ye Gods! From the prurient plutocracy this is the very quintessence. of sarcasm, and on the stage it would win immortality.

The real trouble with Gorky is that he is not some syphilitic duke and that his wife is not some leprous countess. In that event our pork-chop bourgeoisie would break their lily-white necks climbing over each other to grovel at their feet and bask in the pollution of their diseased presence and their artificial smiles.

No wonder their refined sensibilities are shocked by the advent of genius, healthy, moral and sane, in full possession of all the virtues, nobility of soul, loftiness of mind and purity of heart no wonder they bar the doors of their harems and hostelries and draw the blinds in dread and fear of a fresh and purifying breath of moral atmosphere.

Tsar Nicholas, the ruler of all the Russias, has a “legal” wife, but actually lives with his mistress, and both wife and mistress are domiciled in the royal palace. All the world knows it, but the Tsar has lost no caste with the ruling classes on that account, and were he to land in New York, he would be received by the personal representatives of President Roosevelt, the White House would be made brilliant for his reception and the elite of the nation would fall on their faces to serve as the foot-mats of the royal parasite in his triumphant march thru the “Land of Freedom”.

The “society” of the bourgeoisie is a devilish curious contrivance. The product of vulgar and debasing exploitation, it is essentially immoral and corrupt, and its ethical sense, if not totally destroyed, is shockingly perverted. Gorky and his wife must not take its repulsiveness to heart. The malady it is suffering from is a loathsome one and is sure to have a fatal termination. Like any other mental, moral and physical deformity, it is entitled to pity rather than condemnation.

When it comes to “domestic relations”, the Gorkys ought to be provided with the transcript of a critical analysis of some of our upper” of “uppers”, the “Four Hundred” and their satellites. Whew! Talk about community of wives! Little wonder that they are sensitive and easily jarred; they and their cheap imitators have got to divert suspicion from themselves.

If Gorky and his wife had paid some bleary-eyed justice of the peace two bits for a tobacco-stained “permit”, their “domestic relations” would be stainless and sacred, and not a whisper would be heard upon the point, but some other miserable pretext would be trumped up by the scavengers of the ruling class to spew their vomit upon these apostles of freedom, these heralds of the brighter day.

Welcome, thrice welcome, Comrades Gorky!

We greet you with the love of comrades, and this love is made all the stronger by the vulgar hate of the ruling class which you have incurred by your fidelity and devotion to the cause of the proletariat in the great struggle for freedom.

The message of affection and good cheer sent by you to our kidnapped and tortured comrades in Idaho is one of the noblest nets of your noble and unselfish life, and from end to end of the land the proletariat join in hearty acclaim:

WELCOME TO OUR COMRADE GORKY!

The Worker, and its predecessor The People, emerged from the 1899 split in the Socialist Labor Party of America led by Henry Slobodin and Morris Hillquit, who published their own edition of the SLP’s paper in Springfield, Massachusetts. Their ‘The People’ had the same banner, format, and numbering as their rival De Leon’s. The new group emerged as the Social Democratic Party and with a Chicago group of the same name these two Social Democratic Parties would become the Socialist Party of America at a 1901 conference. That same year the paper’s name was changed from The People to The Worker with publishing moved to New York City. The Worker continued as a weekly until December 1908 when it was folded into the socialist daily, The New York Call.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/the-people-the-worker/060428-worker-v16n04-maydayspecial.pdf