In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

97 4 The Trial of Eugene V. Debs, 1918 Melvin I. Urofsky On the afternoon of June 16, 1918, Eugene Victor Debs, the four-time presidential candidate of the American Socialist Party, arrived at Nimisilla Park in Canton, Ohio, to address more than a thousand of the party faithful gathered for their annual picnic. In addition to local socialists, the crowd also included federal agents, newspaper reporters, and a stenographer who would record the speech for prosecutors considering criminal charges. Local vigilantes also worked the crowd looking for slackers, and whenever they spotted a young man, they insisted on seeing his draft card. Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926) dominated the American socialist movement for much of his adult life.1 In 1896, he helped found the Social Democratic Party, which then elected him chairman of the executive board. In 1900, he ran for president for the first time on the Socialist ticket, receiving 88,000 votes. Debs would run again in 1904, 1908, and 1912, and in the last election, he received 913,693 votes, the largest number ever garnered by a Socialist Party candidate.2 During that period, Debs supported himself and his wife by giving speeches and writing articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a charismatic speaker who often employed both the vocabulary and the style of evangelical Christianity, 98 Melvin I. Urofsky even though he personally disdained organized religion. The columnist Heywood Broun, in his eulogy of Debs, quoted a fellow socialist who said: “That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that’s not the funniest part. As long as he’s around I believe it myself.”3 At the beginning of World War I in 1914, Debs and the Socialist Party swam in the mainstream of American public opinion in wanting the United States to stay out of the conflict. Socialism by definition is pacifist, and American socialists hoped that their brethren in Europe would stand up for their principles and oppose the war. Instead, socialist groups in Germany, France, and England all chose to support what the German socialists called national “self-defense” over the international solidarity of the working class. Within the American party, the debate raged over what should be done, and as Debs traveled the country, he grappled with what the war meant—for the nation, for its people, and for the socialist movement. Sometimes, he seemed to argue that nothing could be done to stop the fighting; at other times, he indicated that perhaps there might be a chance to mediate a peace. At all times, however, he blamed the war on the capitalist system. “Capitalist nations not only exploit the workers,” he told his audiences, “but ruthlessly invade, plunder and ravage one another. The profit system is responsible for it all.” As the radical journalist John Reed put it, “This is not Our War.”4 Debs, Reed, and other socialists and pacifists could say this safely while the United States remained neutral. Between August 1914 and April 1917, Debs constantly attacked the war as well as the idea that the United States should get involved. War would kill young men and enrich the capitalists. “Never Be a Soldier,” he wrote. The army would turn a man into a “vile and abject thing, the hired assassin of his capitalist master.” Occasionally, his prose took on a somewhat purplish hue. He would let himself be shot before he would defend American capitalism, he declared, and he told members of the master class to “rip out their own loins and livers, riot in their own blood and entrails and offer up their own mangled and putrescent carcasses on the blood-drenched altar of Mars and Mammon.”5 By the spring of 1917, however, public opinion had moved sharply in favor of the Allies, and when President Woodrow Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Germany, most of the country cheered. Ironically, the war to make the world safe for democracy triggered one of the worst invasions of civil liberties in American history. The government obviously had to protect itself from subversion, but many of the laws passed by Congress at 99 The Trial of Eugene V. Debs, 1918 the urging of the Wilson administration seemed aimed as much at suppressing criticism of government policy as at ferreting out spies. The 1918 Sedition Act, for example, passed at the behest of senators...

Share