There were a few reform leaders, brave men, who never wavered in their opposition to the war. And a more militant wing of the Socialist Party, to its everlasting lasting good name, refused to knuckle under, and faced the force of the government head-on. In 1917, Charles Schenck, Secretary of the Socialist Party, was sentenced to prison for six months in violation of the newly passed Espionage Act. His crime had nothing to do with espionage as that word is commonly understood. Rather it was for speech previously protected under the First Amendment. The Party had mailed out leaflets urging opposition to compulsory military conscription on the grounds that it constituted involuntary servitude, which is prohibited under the 13th Amendment. Such speech violated a weasel-worded sedition clause tucked into the Espionage Act. The clause was clearly unconstitutional; nothing in the Constitution says you are not allowed to speak out against war during war time, or Capitalism, or the United States government. But the Supreme Court knuckled under, too, and upheld Schenck’s conviction.
“Free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his Jesuitical opinion that introduced the “clear and present danger” justification. In 1918, the Sedition clause was strengthened to include “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States—or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army and Navy.”
My teenage father at the time knew little of the Wobblies, who, like the militant Socialists, were imprisoned and otherwise abused under the Espionage Act for antiwar speech. Still a Socialist, his attention was focused on a man he would revere his entire life—and whom he was privileged to meet briefly when that man was aged and bent: Eugene V. Debs. I tried over the years to get my father to explain exactly what it was that so attracted him to Debs and he would give me nothing specific. You had to be in his presence, you had to see him, was all he would say. “He brought out the better part of you.”
At Debs’s funeral in 1926, a leading journalist of the day, Heywood Broun, repeated this quote from a cynical admirer: “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 of it. As long as he’s around I believe it myself.”
The “old man” was surely one of the great orators of American history. He was brave and he was honest. In 1906, less than a year after playing an instrumental role in the founding of the IWW, Debs told an audience of working men: “I am not a Labor Leader.… I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.” He left the IWW with the conviction that electoral politics rather than strikes and industrial agitation was the best path toward a just society. He ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket in 1912 and received 900,000 votes: not bad for a revolutionist. He would not back down as the U.S. geared for war, and the patriotic fervor began to mount.
“When I say I am opposed to war I mean ruling-class war, for the ruling class is the only class that makes war. It matters not to me whether the war is offensive or defensive, or what lying excuse may be invented for it. I am opposed to it, and I would be shot for treason before I would enter such a war.” Debs was eventually convicted of Sedition under the Espionage Act. At his trial he said, “Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government, that I am opposed to the social system in which we live, that I believed in change of both, but by perfectly orderly and peaceable means…. I ask no mercy, I plead no immunity.” And he received none. He was sentenced to ten years in Atlanta Penitentiary. At his sentencing hearing on November 18, a week after Armistice Day, Debs told the Court. “Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison I am not free.”
In 1894, in response to his leadership of the Pullman Railroad Car Strike, the New York Times labeled Debs “a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race.”
Years later, Woodrow Wilson agreed. He called Debs “a traitor” and refused to commute his sentence in 1920, although Debs—disenfranchised for life, and behind bars—nevertheless received over 900,000 votes for president that year. Leading citizens of the day—historians, lawyers, journalists, philosophers—appealed to Wilson as a scholar as well as president to show some humanity; they mentioned historical precedents where men of high principle were treated differently by those in high power. Even Attorney General Palmer, of Palmer Raids notoriety, urged leniency for Debs on the grounds of the man’s failing health. But Wilson was too small a man for that, and said no to that specific request, apparently preferring that Debs die in jail. It took Warren Harding to finally commute his sentence in 1921. Upon his release his fellow inmates sent him off “with a roar of cheers.” Harding invited Debs, old and sick, to the White House. “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” he said, “and shake your hand.”
5: Sam Is Bounced from the Socialist Party
Sam’s disillusioning experience with the Socialist Party and its response to the Red Scare led him to question the basic premise for the existence of the Party—and beyond that, the basic premises of “capitalist democracy” itself. His critique was intuitive and expressed in the unpolished fashion of an unlearned working-class kid. Nevertheless it had a powerful internal logic.
How can one expect those who have spent a lifetime trying to gain power within an unjust system—with all the compromises, connivances, and betrayals that takes—to fundamentally change it? Far from opposing the capitalist system, the Socialist Party reinforced capitalism by siphoning off discontent into the same harmless channels advocated by the Democratic Party: cheaper subway fares, lower prices, workplace reforms, etc. In fact, the Democratic Party was more effective at these things. Eschewing its revolutionary ideals, the Socialist Party had become capitalist democracy’s poor relation.
And what of this vaunted “democracy”? You elect a president who, like Wilson, campaigns for peace and turns on a dime to declare war—what’s more passes laws that compel you to fight whether you agree or not, and other laws that suspend the Bill of Rights to imprison you if you object. He can keep you vindictively in prison or pardon you magnanimously as he chooses. He can bestow privileges on one segment of the population and pursue policies that punish others. He holds in his person dominion over a hundred-million human beings. In what sense, the young Sam asked, does a president differ from a king?
Ah, you say, the president is not a king because he cannot do these things without consent of Congress. But what is a Congressman, after all? How few of them there really are! Can one individual truly represent the interests of five-hundred-thousand people—or in the case of a senator, an entire State? Obviously not; he represents himself alone. Yes, Congress as an institution may oppose a president’s policies and act as a brake on his ambitions, but only to further its own interests; it constitutes a class unto itself. To paraphrase Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Congress is, with the president, “a king with six-hundred heads.”
But surely, you may say, this is a gross caricature; these people are elected. You can turn them out if they do not represent you. Yes, Sam would say, you—or, more accurately, an electorate involving vast numbers of people who may or may not share your views—have the right to bring in a fresh pack of kings every few years (and how few of them are really exchanged, and how minimal are the policy changes!). But ruled you are, make no mistake about that. Why, he asked, should one support a system that rules over you? Electoral politics is a fraud—and worse than that pernicious, because by fostering the illusion of freedom it seduces people into participating in their own enslavement.
What of civil liberties, you counter? Surely freedom of speech and other guarantors of human rights differentiate democracy from tyranny, one might say, by definition. Surely that makes our government—and similar democracies—worthy of support. However, Sam would insist, this line of thinking confuses matters by equating Government and freedom.