11-24-08, 10:08 am

Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent by Ernest Freeberg Boston, Harvard University Press, 2008.

US Attorney General Thomas Gregory persuaded Congress in 1917 to pass the Espionage Act, which contained provisions for government censorship of public discussion of the First World War. It was designed, ostensibly, to protect US prosecution of the war from sabotage by German-sympathizers and provocateurs. In practice, particularly amid the sudden patriotic furor to 'make the world safe for democracy,' the Espionage Act became the legal warrant (N.B. unchallenged as to its constitutionality, right up to its repeal after the armistice) to repress any and all political groups that criticized the war, once it had been declared. Even a number of prominent socialists, among them Upton Sinclair and Charles Edward Russell, urged their party to support Wilson's program, for fear that 'if Germany wins, good night to Socialism.'

In the meantime, the Espionage Act empowered the Postmaster General to censor any publications which he, personally, deemed seditious and inimical to the war-effort. Consequently numerous left-wing and socialist publications disappeared, leaving the hawkish conservative media unchallenged in the realm of public debate in print. It was, therefore, only by spoken word that many radicals mounted a challenge to Wilson's war-machine.

In the summer of 1918, while the Wilson administration pursued its military intervention in Europe, Eugene Debs delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio, during which he exhorted the audience to defy the government draft, and above all to recognize that the World War was a struggle amongst imperialist nations, a redrawing of the map of global capitalist powers, in which the international working class was the hapless instrument.

Shortly thereafter, Debs was arrested and convicted of violating the Espionage Act. His case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Canton speech effectively impeded the federal government in its execution of war, and that it satisfied the legal criterion of a 'bad tendency.' Under this test, a jury could convict a speaker if they concluded that the 'natural consequences' of their speech would be harmful to the operations of government.

Here, Freeberg documents an interesting convergence between World War I radical activity and the ongoing moderate vs. conservative legal debate. Debs' case quickly became the rallying point for an unprecedented interest in First Amendment rights. For the Socialist Party, free-speech was a point of leverage to liberate their most esteemed and accomplished comrade and attract new initiates to its dwindling membership, as well as to indict the repressive State apparatus Wilson and his Attorney General had set in motion. Then, in the wake of the armistice, the Espionage Act was repealed. The jailed Debs became a figure of sympathy to the public, even outside radical circles. Along with him, hundreds of socialists, wobblies, religious pacifists, and immigrants remained incarcerated. After the peace, public opinion began to turn from hawkish paranoia toward forgiveness and petitioning for mass amnesty for prisoners of dissent. In 1920, Debs campaigned for the presidency from prison. The campaign, even though pilloried in the conservative press, by that token kept the issue of free speech, and the persecution of dissent, in the public eye.

For the first time, Freeberg argues, civil liberties emerged as an integral part of political debate. The First World War was the first real test of the First Amendment, a test the US failed. Yet the mass movement surrounding prisoners of dissent in general, and Debs's presidential campaign in particular, focused political discussion on civil liberties, their legal interpretation, and the limits to judicial restraints on free speech. Indeed, in 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had previously upheld Debs's conviction under the 'bad tendency' test, changed tack and suggested that government should only interfere with free speech when it presented the 'present danger of an immediate evil.' Even after Debs’s release in 1921, the progressive campaign in defense of free speech continued, culminating in the ACLU and other civil liberties groups.

This is a fine book, engrossing both as a biographical narrative about Debs, as well as a history of a pivotal transition in the political discourse of the nation. This transition was decisive, not so much in establishing free speech once and for all, but rather in opening a space in which the limits and possibilities of free speech could be considered. Ultimately, as powerful a protection as free speech, Freeberg argues, 'is no one thing, but the crossroads for competing claims about the relative value of individual liberty and public order, and the freedoms and responsibilities of democratic citizenship.'

--Will Hackman is a student at the University of Chicago.