Anti-intellectualism has always been a weapon of the ruling class. Debs asks us to learn and to think.

‘Feed Your Head’ by Eugene V. Debs from Truth (Duluth). Vol. 2 No. 28. July 12, 1918.

The normal human has a head and two hands. The head plans, the hands perform. They understand each other perfectly. The hands do what the head wants them to do. But it so happens–why, has always been a mystery to us–that most men’s hands are subject to a few other men’s heads. It is, indeed, a grotesque arrangement. To say that it expresses the creative plan is to impeach the Almighty.

If He intended most men to be the mere hands of others, why did He not create them headless? Surely, He could not have intended their heads merely as knobs to hang hats on!

Oh, no; the fault is not with the plan, but with its execution; or, to be exact, its non-execution. The plan of a head for every hand strikes us as infinite wisdom at high-water mark.

The head perched aloft so it can see, blazes the way for the body and warns against danger! How admirable that this dome should be the seat of reason as well as the lighthouse of vision.

Here the subtle machinery of thought is lodged in the brain.

Marvelous mechanism! Here the wants of the body, the needs of the mind and the aspirations of the soul all center, and here the plans and specifications are drawn and transmitted to the hands and other organs for execution.

But what if the brain itself is neglected! What follows the lack of proper nourishment? Darkness, eclipse. The lighthouse may remain, but the light is extinguished.

As certain as the body languishes and finally succumbs for the want of proper nourishment, so the brain wastes away and finally ceases to function for the same reason.

Every human being should nourish, with wholesome food and stimulant, his mental organism. Unless he does this, be suffers agony and shame until the grave opens to add another to the countless number of silent witnesses that life is a wretched failure.

“Feed your head” is a rather coarse phrase, but it embodies the head and expresses the thought.

Feed your head! Nourish your brain! Cultivate your intellect! Develop your mind! It all means the same thing, the thing that twenty odd millions of humans called hands in the United States ought to understand.

The capitalist does not become the industrial captain by the use of his own head and his own hands. Oh, no; he uses the hands of an army of others who have no heads of their own or have so long neglected them that all they are fit for is to light the way of their hands to and from their slavish tasks.

Listen just a moment, you myriad-headed host of toil! You have power to snap your chains asunder as you would pack threads. You have but to light the fires in that darkened brain and feed the sacred flame. To have the power of a giant and cower beneath the scorn of pigmy is not your misfortune, but your disgrace. Shame should keep your face black as are your hands. You have no need to crawl; you have the strength to stand; you require no master; be your own. Cease to beg, and help yourself. This earth is yours, and if it is not beautiful in every atom, joyous in every breath, and divine in every impulse, it is because your base and cruel neglect for centuries have disfigured it.

Look into your deformed hands and read the story of your age-long thralldom! It is traced there in characters that throb with pain; written in the alphabet of misery and death!

Yes, look into your hands, you millions of humans who are known as hands, and treated as hands, because you have denied your heads and attached yourselves to the heads of your masters that they may reap in opulence where you sow in despair!

There, in the hands you have, abused, you can read the indictment of the head you have neglected.

To put out the light of brain is to make convicts of the hands.

The calloused palms of the labor giant tell the tragic story of his apostacy to his brain.

Every scar in labor’s hands bears the humiliating testimony of its neglected brain.

A horny hand is a thing to blush for, not to be proud of.

It is a palpitant protest against abuse; a burning impeachment of self-respect; a blistering reproach to manhood.

When the working class uses its brain, it will no longer have to abuse its hands.

When the working class uses its brain, it will know its power, seize its heritage and reign supreme.

The class struggle is the product of class rule. When class rule is overthrown, the class struggle will disappear.

Truth emerged from the The Duluth Labor Leader, a weekly English language publication of the Scandinavian local of the Socialist Party in Duluth, Minnesota and began on May Day, 1917 as a Left Wing alternative to the Duluth Labor World. The paper was aligned to both the SP and the IWW leading to the paper being closed down in the first big anti-IWW raids in September, 1917. The paper was reborn as Truth, with the Duluth Scandinavian Socialists joining the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. Shortly after the editor, Jack Carney, was arrested and convicted of espionage in 1920. Truth continued to publish with a new editor JO Bentall until 1923 as an unofficial paper of the CP.

PDF of full issue: https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/lccn/sn89081142/1918-07-12/ed-1/seq-1