A missive from Debs on the first ‘4th of July’ held during World War One.

‘International Patriotism’ by Eugene V. Debs from Northwest Worker. No. 235. July 8, 1915.

We socialists hold in scorn and contempt the narrow, mean, and contemptible “patriotism” surreptitiously inculcated in the minds of unsophisticated workers by their crafty and unscrupulous masters. But for this false and vicious “patriotism” which has poisoned the minds and hearts of its millions of victims the war now deluging the nations of Europe with blood would have been impossible.

It is “patriotism” of the workers of one nation to fall upon and foully murder the workers of another nation to enlarge the possessions of their masters and increase the piles of their bloodstained riches, and as long as the poor, deluded toiling masses are fired by this brand of “patriotism,” they will serve as cannon fodder and no power on earth can save them from their sodden fate.

We socialists are not wanting in genuine patriotism, but we are deadly hostile to the fraudulent species which is “the last refuge of the scoundrel” and which prompts every crook and grafter and every blood-sucking vampire to wrap his reeking carcass in the folds of the national flag that he may carry on his piracy and plunder in the name of “patriotism.”

Ours is a wider patriotism — as wide as humanity. We abhor murder in uniform even more than we do in midnight assassination.

We stand with Garrison upon the proposition that the world is our country and that all mankind are our countrymen.

We stand for peace and for the only system that makes peace possible. They, who support a system that breeds war cannot consistently say they are for peace, and they who prate so much about their “patriotism” have, as a rule, the hearts of poltroons and the souls of cowards.

Patriotism, like brotherhood, must be international and all-embracing to be at all. Socialism rightly understood is the most profound patriotic movement on the planet.

The Washington Socialist was a weekly newspaper of the Socialist Party of Snohomish County published in Everett, Washington and edited by Maynard Shipley. Closely aligned with the Industrial Workers of the World, who were strong in the Pacific Northwest’s lumber industry, the paper ran for only 18 months when it was renamed The Northwest Worker with Henry Watts as editor in June, 1915, and again Co-Operative News with Perter Husby as editor in October, 1917. Like virtually all of the left press, the Co-Operative News was suppressed in June 1918 under the Federal Espionage Act.

Access to PDF of full issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88085770/1915-07-08/ed-1/seq-1/