Free speech in wartime

Newsweek recently proclaimed that Barack Obama's budget means, "We're all socialists now," and conservative erstwhile presidential contender Mike Huckabee declared that "a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born." For them, "socialism" means something like "big government." But when Eugene Victor Debs ran for president from 1912 to 1920, "socialism" had a different meaning: the end of capitalist exploitation.

Today Debs's belief in the imminent birth of a classless society makes him seem "deeply deluded" about "the political and social reality in front of his face," as Ernest Freeberg suggests in Democracy's Prisoner. But if Debs was hopelessly naïve about the coming of socialism, he left a legacy for the country in another area: Eric Foner called it "the birth of civil liberties." Before the 1920s, Americans had no legally enforceable right to free speech. The First Amendment was not considered fundamental. The transformation in our definition of "freedom" came in response to what Foner calls "the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation had ever known"—the wartime policy of Woodrow Wilson, that Democrat and former Princeton professor of history who jailed Debs, and thousands of others, for opposing the Great War.