Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent »

Ernest Freeberg is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee.

In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s role in World War I. Though many called Debs a traitor, others praised him as a prisoner of conscience, a martyr to the cause of free speech. Nearly a million Americans agreed, voting for a man whom the government had branded an enemy to his country.

In a beautifully crafted narrative, Ernest Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. Debs was one of thousands of Americans arrested for speaking his mind during the war, while government censors were silencing dozens of newspapers and magazines. When peace was restored, however, a nationwide protest was unleashed against the government’s repression, demanding amnesty for Debs and his fellow political prisoners. Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime.

The Debs case illuminates our own struggle to define the boundaries of permissible dissent as we continue to balance the right of free speech with the demands of national security. In this memorable story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America’s most prized ideals.

Publishers Weekly

This account of the trial and jailing of Eugene V. Debs for sedition in opposing WWI will be read by many as a warning for our times, yet it stands on its own as solid history. Remarkably, in 1920 Debs ran-from prison-a clever presidential campaign that gained him almost one million votes. Freeberg, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, relates this tale in a fast-paced narrative that underplays the irony. Debs-a firebrand orator and radical Socialist Party chieftain whom Woodrow Wilson and others considered a security threat-became a model federal prisoner who worked to alleviate the situations of fellow inmates. He also issued biting criticisms of American policy and never left off denouncing capitalists for having caused WWI. Not surprisingly, Debs's stance long delayed his pardon, first by Wilson, then by Warren Harding, who eventually commuted his sentence in 1921. But it gained Debs the wide hearing he sought. The most enduring consequence of this whole affair is the fuel it contributed to the growth of civil liberties consciousness and organization in the United States. Not for the first time, administrations brought about the very results they most opposed. 17 b&w photos. (May)

List of Illustrations

Prologue: Free Speech Campaign 1

1 Dangerous Man 7

2 Never Be a Soldier 24

3 War Declarations 42

4 Canton Picnic 67

5 Cleveland 83

6 Appeal 110

7 Long Trolley to Prison 134

8 Moundsville 148

9 Atlanta Penitentiary 174

10 An Amnesty Business on Every Block 190

11 Candidate 9653 203

12 The Trials of A. Mitchell Palmer 215

13 The Last Campaign 236

14 Lonely Obstinacy 257

15 Free Speech and Normalcy 268

16 Last Flicker of the Dying Candle 301

Epilogue: Amnesty and the Birth of Civil Liberties 319

Notes 329

Archives Consulted 365

Acknowledgments 367

Index 369