Free speech in wartime

...The legal appeal mounted by socialist lawyers failed...

...Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Senate was resisting Wilson's League of Nations treaty, and in the fall of 1919 Wilson set out on that fateful nationwide speaking tour to rally support...

...His most recent book is Historians in Trouble...

...After the jury found him guilty, the judge asked if he had any last words before sentencing...

...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...

...he had criticized capitalists, but did not call for disloyalty to the government...

...The president's stroke changed many things in America, including the campaign for a pardon for political prisoners...

...And when the courts eventually recognized a constitutional right to dissent, they were following a broad public debate spurred by talented organizers and activists who came from places ranging from Debs's own Socialist Party to the new American Civil Liberties Union to the rank-andfile locals of the American Federation of Labor...

...All they had done, he said, was to exercise their "constitutional right of free speech...

...For them, "socialism" means something like "big government...

...The amnesty campaign also rallied, to confront him on the road...

...as he stood there for half a minute, their applause grew louder...

...If the Espionage Law stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead...

...Robins was an anarchist whose strategy focused on winning support from union locals...

...He said he stood in a long line of those martyred for "new ideals," starting with Jesus and Socrates and including the abolitionists and the Bolsheviks...

...He even cited Woodrow Wilson in his defense-Wilson's 1912 campaign manifesto had denounced an "unholy alliance of bosses and Big Business...

...Debs's position was a good one: that you "don't go to jail until you're forced...

...Tell that to John Yoo...

...That doesn't seem to have been the case, as Freeman shows...

...Debs knew he was only the most famous of jailed antiwar dissidents...

...But that 6 percent turned out to be the highwater mark for left-wing candidates (in 1948, Henry Wallace got 2.4 percent...

...The real offenders were not the socialists but the government that was attempting to "gag a free people...

...What the public learned about Debs in 1920, however, focused more on his saintly character than his advocacy of free speech for antiwar activists...

...As a result, tens of thousands of workers debated how to draw the line between legitimate protest and treason...

...He devoted only a few minutes to freedom of speech: "I believe in free speech, in war as well as in peace," he said...

...The next day, papers across the country printed stories under the headline, "Debs invites arrest...

...Now for the first time Debs himself was arguing that freedom of speech was central to the socialist project...

...Debs knew he was risking arrest under the new Espionage Act, passed in 1917...

...Debs was adamant that he would accept only an amnesty that applied to all political prisoners...

...By the time Debs died in 1926, the Socialist Party had shrunk to a tiny group...

...The speech that provoked the Wilson administration to jail Debs was one he gave in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918, at the state Socialist Party's annual picnic...

...He was sentenced to ten years...

...he turned to face them, and saluted them with his hat held aloft...

...Yet he refused to seek a pardon or release on humanitarian or health grounds...

...But when Eugene Victor Debs ran for president from 1912 to 1920, "socialism" had a different meaning: the end of capitalist exploitation...

...His theme: the coming victory of the poor in their struggle to bring peace, harmony, and cooperation in place of the evils of capitalism...

...then, overcome, he bowed his head and wept...

...His argument that Wilson was right to jail Debs was based on a strange analogy: if the government had a right to ask Americans to ration meat, sugar, and gasoline, he suggested, it was also appropriate for government to ask Americans to give up a portion of their free speech rights as well...

...Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to the Nation and teaches American history at UC Irvine...

...Even today, eighty-eight years later, the accounts of Debs leaving the Atlanta penitentiary is inspiring: as he walked out through the prison gates, nearly two thousand convicts cheered from their barred windows and called his name...

...its significance would grow...

...while there is a soul in prison, I am not free...

...At the trial the only witness for the defense was Debs himself...

...But if Debs was hopelessly na‹ve about the coming of socialism, he left a legacy for the country in another area: Eric Foner called it "the birth of civil liberties...

...Freeberg's beautifully written book combines a political biography of Debs in his years of crisis with a broader argument about the unintended consequences of the campaign to win his release...

...Then the AFL convention voted to endorse amnesty-which meant four million union workers, almost all white men and almost all patriotic, now were defending the jailed radicals they had denounced only a few years earlier as traitors...

...But that is absurd...

...The series portrayed Debs as a "rare spirit, so courageous and so good," and declared that keeping him in jail was "one of the outstanding governmental crimes of modern times...

...It seemed at the time that socialism was on the march, and that 1916 would be even better...

...Debs himself had not focused his argument for amnesty on constitutional issues, but a crucial shift in his thinking came in 1919 and 1920, stirred by the Bolsheviks' open contempt for "bourgeois liberties...

...the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the verdict, in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who would later become a champion of civil liberties...

...The First Amendment was not considered fundamental...

...Mostly they were socialists, but others were religious pacifists, and many were German immigrants...

...Freedom of speech would suffer more setbacks after Pearl Harbor, during the Korean War, and after September 11, 2001...

...His chain of newspapers published a sympathetic, five-part profile of Debs in prison that was read by millions of middle-of-the-road Americans...

...In 1912, six years before his incarceration, Debs had won almost a million votes running for president, 6 percent of the total, doubling the Socialist tally from four years earlier...

...Today the debate over the right to dissent in wartime isn't over-but now we know how it began, thanks in part to this superb book...

...There Debs restated the argument against the war that socialists had been making for the past few years: the First World War was not a war to make the world safe for democracy but rather a battle among imperialists over profits...

...Holmes wrote that the key issue in any conflict between freedom of speech and public safety in wartime was whether the speech in question created a "clear and present danger...

...The year 1920 also brought the beginning of the end of Wilson's policies in civil liberties...

...The Socialist Party hoped to win three million votes in 1920, but instead Debs got the same number of votes that he had in 1912and because women only voted for the first time in 1920, that meant support for Debs had dropped from 6 percent to 3.5 percent of the voters...

...when Wilson arrived in Seattle, his parade route was lined for several blocks with Wobblies (IWW members)-longshoremen, miners, and lumberjacks-standing silently and wearing hatbands that read, "Release Political Prisoners...

...In addition to targeting German sabotage and espionage, the bill gave the president unprecedented powers to regulate public debate about the war...

...his friends thought prison would kill him...

...The campaign started with the United Hebrew Trades, the more radical unions in New York City, and especially the needle trades...

...Senator William Borah of Idaho said, "Some Senators seem to think that the Constitution is suspended in time of war...

...With the Supreme Court case lost, the focus now shifted to a public campaign to persuade Wilson to grant amnesty to Debs and other war protesters...

...Debs now declared that he rejected violence and "dictatorship in every form"-including Lenin's dictatorship of the you-know-who...

...The offer was smuggled into the country by poet-reporter Carl Sandburg...

...Nevertheless, the Wilson administration put him on trial for violating the Espionage Act...

...That last argument was a tiny part of a two-hour lecture...

...The portrait of Debs-as-saint came from an unlikely source: William Randolph Hearst, who wanted to embarrass Wilson...

...When the Wilson administration sent Debs to prison, it jailed the greatest living hero of American radicalism...

...Republicans would control the White House for twelve years...

...His response is legendary: "While there is a lower class, I am in it...

...The Bolsheviks had been explicit in denying freedom of speech to those they considered "class enemies...

...Why, Debs asked, should he be jailed for saying what the president had already said...

...Instead," Freeberg writes, "the president broke first...

...Later he called it "the most deeply touching and impressive moment" in his life...

...Dozens of left-wing publications were banned...

...He said the masters of "corporate capital" were responsible for the war...

...Supporters of the Bolsheviks had split from the Socialists in 1919 to form their own Communist Party...

...In Greenwich Village, the Bolsheviks' enthusiastic supporters at the Liberator declared that in Russia "the dominant proletariat is openly and boastfully stamping out the rights of the bourgeoisie...

...He gave a two-hour speech to the jury, which became the most famous speech of his life...

...A grassroots campaign was then organized by Lucy Robins, one of the heroes of the book...

...Freeman calls it the most famous speech in the history of American radicalism...

...The Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion were gaining strength...

...The law made it a crime to "attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military," or to obstruct military recruitment...

...Congress also gave the postmaster general the power to ban from the mails magazines and newspapers he judged "treasonous...

...While his supporters were campaigning for freedom of speech outside the prison, Debs was campaigning for prison reform on the inside: opposing the brutality of the guards, seeking a regime of respect and kindness that he believed could help overcome the effects of an inhumane economic system...

...In his speech he had tried to avoid the forbidden topics: he had not explicitly called for draft resistance...

...At the time he was sixty-three years old and in poor health...

...the working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war...

...The Wilson administration had arrested more than two thousand and jailed twelve hundred, while states and municipalities went after many more...

...it had to make a broader and more general case...

...Thousands of radicals had been deported during the Red Scare of 1917-1920...

...Nine months after Harding took office, he announced that Debs would be freed on Christmas Day, 1921...

...Before the 1920s, Americans had no legally enforceable right to free speech...

...in 2000, Ralph Nader got 2.7 percent...

...Eventually, thirty-six thousand local unions were asked to endorse amnesty for political prisoners...

...That year the ACLU was founded...

...From prison Debs denounced Wilson's League of Nations proposal as an expression of capitalist "greed, passion, and fear...

...The same year Justice Holmes changed his mind about the First Amendment, declaring that "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death...

...The story of the amnesty campaign, and how it redefined the First Amendment for ordinary Americans, and then for the Supreme Court, is the heart of Freeberg's book...

...Free speech in wartime JON WIENER Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent by Ernest Freeberg | Harvard University Press, 2008 | 392 pages | $29.95 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...

...He declared that Wilson had sent him to prison "to kill or break me," and promised never to break...

...I would not, under any circumstances, gag the lips of my bitterest enemy...

...In September 1918, Wilson suffered a massive stroke, from which he would never fully recover...

...If war is right, let it be declared by the people...

...Progressives in Congress had objected...

...The effort began badly when conservative labor leader Samuel Gompers refused to allow the AFL to endorse it...

...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...

...He defended the Industrial Workers of the World, whose leaders were on trial in Chicago, along with other radicals who had been prosecuted for opposing the war...

...They promised to do the same when revolution came to the United States, starting with the New York Times...

...The campaign's theme was "jail house to the White House," with Debs calling for the day "when capitalism is dead and labor is free...

...The list of Debs's opponents included some surprises, starting with John Dewey...

...The Espionage Act remained on the books...

...while there is a criminal element, I am of it...

...Against the communists, Debs declared, "We stand for freedom, equal rights, and justice for all...

...In the speech that would land him in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Debs declared, "The working class who fight the battles, the working class who make the sacrifices, the working class who shed the blood...

...Sending Debs to prison made him the center of a campaign for freedom of speech for dissenters and antiwar activists...

...Holmes thought Debs's speech had done that, but it wouldn't be long before civil libertarians would use that test to argue that criticizing the government did not pose a clear and present danger...

...Henceforth the argument for amnesty couldn't focus on persuading the disabled president...

...While socialists and their allies campaigned for amnesty for all political prisoners, V. I. Lenin had a different approach: he offered to swap American diplomats held hostage by the Bolsheviks in exchange for Debs...

...The transformation of Debs's image from dangerous traitor to saintly hero doubtless helped win his eventual release...

...But that wasn't what Debs had in mind, and the issue surfaced in the 1920 presidential campaign, when the Socialist Party again nominated him...

...The Republicans won by the largest popularvote margin (in percentage terms) in American history-a massive repudiation of Wilsonianism and evidence of a passion for what President-elect Warren G. Harding called "normalcy...