On this day in history, December 25:
In an effort to calm the nation in the wake of the Red Scare, President Warren Harding freed socialist leader and election opponent Eugene Debs from jail in 1921. Debs had been convicted on charges brought by the Wilson administration for his opposition to the draft during World War I.
Debs had delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, urging resistance to the military draft. He was arrested for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which had been passed at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, who thought that widespread dissent in time of war constituted a threat to American victory.
It was the advent of the Red Scare, when thousands of Americans suspected of radical leftist sympathies, such as communists, socialists and Wobblies, were arrested, detained, and even deported. Debs's antiwar speeches earned him the eternal enmity of Wilson, who called him a "traitor to his country."
Debs was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail and disenfranchised for life. At his sentencing hearing, he rose and said: “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that 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.”
Debs Born in Indiana
Born to French immigrant parents in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, Debs quit high school at age 14 to work as a painter in the local railroad yards. He went on to become a railroad fireman and, in 1891, announced his retirement as grand secretary of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Then, he played an instrumental role in founding the American Railway Union, the first industrial union in the United States.
In 1894, he got involved in the Pullman Strike, when workers struck the Pullman Palace Car Company over a wage cut. The strikers fought back by boycotting Pullman cars and, under Debs' eventual leadership, the strike came to be called "Debs' Rebellion.” But President Grover Cleveland sent the Army into Chicago, which led to Debs's arrest for contempt of court and imprisonment for six months.
Debs read the works of Karl Marx while in jail and turned to socialism. He was one of the charter members of the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, in 1905. By then, Socialist Party membership had reached an all-time high of 135,000. Over time, Debs became the most influential socialist in the country, his popular reputation helping him to win the Socialist Party nomination for president five times, in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920.
He once told an audience of working people in Utah: “I am not a labor leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”
Debs Appealed to Supreme Court
Debs appealed his 1918 conviction to the Supreme Court. In its ruling, the court cited several statements made by Debs in regard to socialism and World War I. He had tailored his speeches to comply with the Espionage Act, but the court found that he intended to obstruct the draft and prevent recruitment for the war.
The court also noted his praise for people imprisoned for opposing the draft. In his opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissively stated that Debs's case was essentially the same as another one in which the court upheld a similar conviction.
Debs went to jail on April 13, 1919. In protest, a parade of socialists, unionists, communists and anarchists marched in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 1, 1919, and the event erupted into the violent May Day Riots.
In the 1920 election, while he was imprisoned at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Georgia, Debs ran for president one last time. He received 913,664 write-in votes, the all-time high for a Socialist Party candidate, or 3.4 percent, only slightly less than the 6 percent he won in 1912, the highest percentage for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in American history.
Debs Met Harding at White House
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer learned that Debs was ill and felt it would damage the administration if he died in custody. So, he prepared a clemency petition on his behalf for a presidential pardon in order to free him from prison. Upon receiving the petition, President Wilson replied "Never!" and wrote "Denied" across the paper.
On Christmas day, December 25, 1921, President Harding commuted Debs's sentence to time already served. Debs was freed from jail and greeted by Harding at the White House. "I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs,” Harding said warmly, “that I am very glad to meet you personally."
In 1924, Debs was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a Finnish socialist because he "started to work actively for peace during World War I, mainly because he considered the war to be in the interest of capitalism.”
In 1926, Debs was admitted to a sanitarium in Illinois, where he died on October 20 at age 70. His body was brought back to Terre Haute, where it lay in state in the Central Labor Temple. People from all over the world came to his funeral, which was conducted by Norman Thomas, the next American socialist leader, from the front porch of Debs’s home.
Journalist Heywood Broun said in his eulogy for Debs: "That old man with the burning eyes actually believed 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 was around, I believed it myself.”
John Kirshon - John Kirshon is a journalist/editor with more than 25 years of experience at the Associated Press, The New York Times and CBS News. He was ...
