Sherry Chandler

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Eugene Debs did appeal his conviction under the Espionage Act, all the way to the Supreme Court. But it was a thoroughly conservative court that counted among its number Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Here is Ernest Freeberg on Holmes, from Democracy’s Prisoner:

He was a steely-eyed pragmatist who thought of the law as an expression of the majority’s will to power. Truth, as he famously put it, was determined by “the majority vote of that nation than can lick all others.” A Civil War veteran who had been wounded in battle, Holmes believed that the majority had a primordial right to defend itself by drafting men and sending them to the front. “No society had ever admitted that it could not sacrifice individual welfare to its own existence,” he wrote. “If conscripts are necessary for its army, it seizes them, and marches them, with bayonets in thier rear, to death.” [p. 123]

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I was musing this morning about what it is that makes me want to post this information, what I think the take-home message is.

One part of it is, as Holmes makes clear in this quotation, power will always protect itself, especially in time of war. And we will always need citizen watchdogs over government power. That belief is what makes me more Jeffersonian than not.

Another part is that these things are cyclical. These battles have to be fought over and over again. Which, I suppose, is the nature of life itself. Yesterday morning as I mopped up after one of our aging cats whose arthritic back makes it hard for him to hit the litter, I found myself whining that I am really tired of losing the same battles over and over again. But life is like that. And so is democracy. (Or even a republic.)

Some good things came in the aftermath Wilson’s repressions. For one thing, the American Civil Liberties Union was born and though they’ve been known to anger both sides, conservative and liberal, they have done good work for nearly a century in protecting our individual freedoms.

The last part is my desire to share this very good book with you. Though I got a little bogged down in the chapters about the legal niceties of Debs’s trial and appeal, for the most part I’ve found this glimpse of our history fascinating. And it’s good to have a human face to put on Eugene Debs, who has been hardly more than a name and a few quotable quotes in my universe.

Possibly related posts:

Some things I didn’t know about Eugene V. Debs

Kentucky’s Civil War

Debs at Moundsville

Democracy’s Prisoner

What’s at stake?

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