A Free Soul Bound For Jail: Eugene Debs Speaks in Canton, Ohio–June 16, 1918

June 16, 1918 was a warm summer day in Canton, Ohio. The Socialist Party of Ohio had gathered in the city for its yearly convention. On this day, in Nimisilla Park, the speaker was arguably the best-known Socialist in America: Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana. Debs’ progressive credentials were impeccable. By this time he had run as Socialist candidate for President four times and founded the American Railway Union, which successfully struck James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad in April, 1894. He had served a six-month jail term when the ARU supported a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company just a few months later. He was one of the founders of the legendary radical union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), although Debs and the Socialist Party later broke from that organization in disagreement over tactics.

By this day in Canton, the United States had been involved in World War I for slightly more than a year. The country officially declared war on the Central Powers on April 6, 1917, and since that time dramatic change had swept the country. Raw lumber Army camps sprang up in rural parts of the nation. Thousands of men had been drafted  and National Guard units federalized for overseas service. George Creel, who was essentially President Wilson’s minister of propaganda, was spearheading a public relations campaign in support of America’s commitment that was breathtaking in scope and intensity.

The government produced millions of posters encouraging Americans to support the war effort, including James Montgomery Flagg’s legendary “I Want You” poster with a scowling and finger-pointing Uncle Sam. Hollywood stars worked the crowds at bond drives. Local leaders, known as “Four Minute Men”—mayors, ministers, prominent business owners, teachers—gave short talks in support of the war effort with government-produced texts in the times between movie showings and at other gatherings across the country.

Along with this surge of propaganda came a wave of ugly anti-German prejudice that resulted in German language books destroyed, German musicians and artists  harassed, and German classical music barred from performance. Cities with large German-American populations such as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati were particularly affected by the anti-German hysteria. Debs’ hometown of Terre Haute had its share of ugliness. A policeman held a German grocer’s arms behind his back and allowed a banker to beat the man—the grocer was one of Debs’ neighbors. A Socialist coal miner refused to purchase a Liberty Bond and narrowly escaped a lynching. This reaction also had its sadly comical components, such as renaming sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.” This particular kind of foolishness surfaced in our own times as French fries became “freedom fries” in 2003 when war hawks in the U.S. were unhappy with France’s opposition to the Iraq invasion.

The hostility extended to radicals as well as Germans and German-Americans. The IWW and other radical organizations, or individuals who questioned the existing political order, the tenets of capitalism and the ugliness of industrial profiteering from war, or those who actively campaigned for peace, came in for attack and sometimes even direct oppression that resulted in imprisonment. Conscientious objectors, including men affiliated with traditionally pacifist sects such as the Mennonites and Hutterites, were often badly treated.

The Congress had its own responses to quell dissent after the war’s declaration. They passed the Espionage Act, which punished obstruction of the draft and aiding the enemy. This is the kind of action a government may take in wartime that a lot of citizens would likely support. What was more questionable and problematic was the Sedition Act, which penalized any person or organization expressing criticism of the flag or the American government. It’s not difficult to see that this can get pretty nebulous in some instances and can lead to inevitable conflicts around First Amendment rights. On June 18, 1918, Eugene Debs ran afoul of the Espionage Act.

There were around 1200 or so people in the crowd Debs addressed that day. Nimisilla Park was located across the street from the Stark County Workhouse where three Ohio Socialists had been jailed for draft opposition. Debs paid a visit to these inmates prior to his speech. While the U.S. had been in the war for some time, it was only during the summer of 1918 that the Americans were really beginning to see serious action overseas. Much of the previous year was spent mobilizing and training the services, organizing and transporting supplies and the like. But during the time of Debs’ speech, U.S. forces were taking serious casualties on the western front. The month-long battle of Belleau Wood was in full swing, which helped shape the legendary status of the U.S. Marines. Americans were dying in the war and opposition to dissent hardened.

Circulating through the crowd that day were both official government agents and representatives of an organization called the American Protective League (APL). The APL was a controversial private organization. It had semi-official status, although Wilson and other officials had misgivings about it. It was one of a number of vigilante type organizations that sprang up during the war. I’m sure it was galling for most men of draft age in the crowd that day to have some other ordinary citizen demanding to see his draft card.

Debs was used to controversy. He was born Eugene Victor Debs in Terre Haute on November 5, 1855, the son of Alsatian immigrants. He left school at age fourteen to work for the Vandalia Railroad scraping paint from rail cars. He later became a fireman, the worker who shoveled coal to keep the train moving. He did this for four years until his mother, concerned about the high mortality rate of railroad workers, persuaded him to take another line of work. Debs became a grocery clerk, but was still drawn to the railroad and became the secretary for the local Brotherhood of Railroad Firemen, later becoming the union’s Grand Secretary-Treasurer in 1880 and editor of its magazine. Debs was also known as a figure in the cultural and intellectual life of the city. As a member of the city’s Occidental Literary Club he helped bring noted figures such as freethinker and agnostic Robert Ingersoll, feminist Susan B. Anthony and poet James Whitcomb Riley to speak in Terre Haute. Debs and Riley became great friends. Riley became a regular visitor to the Debs house in Terre Haute and had his own room in the house when he stayed over.

In addition to his union work, Debs was elected to two terms as Terre Haute city clerk and served one term as a Democrat in the Indiana General Assembly. He helped form the American Railway Union, which, as noted earlier, won a huge victory against the Great Northern Railroad but was decimated after supporting the Pullman strike in 1894. During the strike Debs and several other union leaders were convicted of obstructing the U.S. mails. He served six months in jail in Woodstock, Illinois and became convinced that Socialism was the answer to the problems of inequality in industrial America. Debs ran as the Socialist candidate for President in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920—this last campaign conducted from prison, where prisoner number 9653 garnered nearly a million votes. He also ran for Congress and lost in 1916.

During these years Debs became one of the most loved and vilified men in America. There were many who disagreed with his views who liked Debs personally. This was especially the case in Terre Haute. Debs was easygoing and friendly, with a warm, engaging manner that conveyed respect for others, even those who might have found his beliefs repellent. Debs enjoyed speaking with people one-on-one, and he enjoyed drinking with other workmen in taverns. His oratorical style, aside from his content, was familiar to his listeners. He was much like an evangelical preacher when he spoke from the rostrum.

His evangelical style was on full display that afternoon in Canton’s Nimisilla Park. Debs certainly had a right to be riled up. He learned that two of the three men he met at the workhouse had been hanging by their wrists from a rafter for two days for refusing to work in the jail’s laundry. Despite the heat, Debs didn’t unbutton his vest or remove his tweed jacket. Here’s Debs: 

“I have just returned from a visit over yonder, where three of our most loyal comrades are paying the penalty for their devotion to the cause of the working class. They have come to realize, as many of us have, that it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world. I realize that, in speaking to you this afternoon, there are certain limitations placed on the right of free speech. I must be exceedingly careful, prudent, as to what I say, and even more careful and prudent as to how I say it. (Laughter). I may not be able to say all I think, (laughter and applause), but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would a thousand times rather be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets. They may put those boys in jail—but they can not put the Socialist movement in jail.”

Debs continued to lambaste the governmental and industrial order in the United States, even taking the Supreme Court to task:

“Why, the other day, by a vote of five to four—a kind of craps game—come seven, come ‘leven—they declared the child labor law unconstitutional…and this in our so-called Democracy, so that we may continue to grind the flesh and blood and bones of puny little children into profits for the junkers of Wall Street…The history of this country is being written in the blood of the childhood the industrial lords have murdered.”

Debs’ one war statement was this:

“The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”

A government stenographer took down Debs’ words. Debs covered a lot of ground in his speech. He had spoken up for the recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia, for Tom Mooney, an anarchist wrongly convicted of throwing a bomb in a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, for the Industrial Workers of the World and Big Bill Haywood, one of its leaders.

Ironically, Debs had been giving essentially the same speech for the past several weeks and the government had taken no action against him. Print outlets for dissenting opinion had dried up: the government had suppressed the publication of periodicals such as The Masses and the International Socialist Review. Debs had been sick for much of 1918 and felt called to action for a variety of reasons. He had a hard time lying down when old comrades were standing up for their beliefs and being jailed and denounced. Debs biographer Nick Salvatore wrote that Debs knew that other people in the movement still looked to him as a leader and wanted to see him act. According to another Debs biographer, Ray Ginger, the Socialist leader had wanted to arouse opposition to the war and test the government’s willingness to enforce these repressive laws. But this time the government decided to bite—after some consideration.

Debs’ comments had first been relayed to the Justice Department. Officials there mulled over Debs’ speech for three days, including Attorney General Thomas Gregory. They argued against prosecution, stating “Parts of the speech, taken in connection with the context, brings the speech close to, if not over, the line, although the case is by means a clear one. All in all, the Department does not feel strongly convinced that a prosecution is advisable.”

E.S. Wertz, U.S. attorney for northern Ohio, still felt he had a case and brought it to a grand jury, which indicted Debs on June 29, 1918 on ten counts of violating the Espionage Law. He was arrested the following day, with his trial following in September. At age sixty-two, Eugene Debs was in the confines of a jail cell once again, and he would spend more time in one after his trial. He was convicted on two counts and spent a little over two and a half years in federal penitentiaries beginning in April 1919 before having his sentence commuted by President Warren Harding of Marion, Ohio in December of 1921. I will be following the centennial observations of Debs’ trial, sentencing and commutation here on buckeyemuse during the next several years.

In his book The World Remade: America in World War I, G.J. Meyer writes that Debs was “sentenced to ten years in prison for having the wrong opinions.” I would say this is essentially correct. Much of the content of Debs’ speech was the kind of rhetoric he had used for years, but he never specifically urged resistance to the Selective Service system. He also pointed out uncomfortable facts, one of which was that superpatriot Teddy Roosevelt, who was turned down for WWI service by Woodrow Wilson, had visited the now-despised Kaiser in 1907 when German socialists, longtime opponents of Kaiser Wilhelm’s, were languishing in prison. Debs’ talk seems so mild now in comparison to some of the political speech and behavior we have seen in public since 1918. I have to wonder what E.S. Wertz would have made of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s or some of the other acts and statements of protest during that time and in the following decades.

One hundred years later, during the incredible turmoil we are living through now, we can remember that voices of conscience have always been heard in America, challenging us to truly live the ideas and ideals we promote. The kind of courage and example displayed by Debs is needed more than ever.

Patrick Kerin

Eugene V. Debs: A Biography by Ray Ginger (originally published as The Bending Cross, A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs). Collier Books, New York, New York. 1949, 1962.

Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Second Edition) by Nick Salvatore. University of Chicago Press, Urbana and Chicago. 1982, 2007.

“TREASON IN CANTON!: The Trial of Eugene Debs” by John E. Vacha. Timeline (A Publication of the Ohio Historical Society). November-December 2001. Volume 18/Number 6

The World Remade: America In World War 1 by G.J. Meyer. Bantam Books, New York, 2016.