Democracy’s Prisoner

I have at long last finished reading Ernest Freeberg’s Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Harvard, 2008).

All in all, a most edifying read, though I’ll admit that I bogged down in some of the detail, the fine points of Debs’s legal appeals, the many splits in the Socialist Party, and the many splits in and complicated maneuverings of the amnesty movement were all a bit more than necessary for a general interest reader like me.

World War I destroyed Socialism in the United States, most obviously by the Post Office’s suppression of their newspapers and magazines, but also by splitting the party between those who wanted all out opposition to the war and those who wanted to sort of go along to get along. The last relics of the movement were pretty much literally stamped out by the rise, in the 1920s, of the American Legion and the resurgence of the KKK. I mention them in the same sentence because they used the same tactics, though their targets were a bit different. The American Legion went after the Wobblies and unions and anyone they considered disloyal.

By the time Debs got out of prison in 1921, he had become a beloved relic for some and a curiosity for others.

What arose from the ashes of Socialism was the ACLU, the Free Speech movement, and a definition of, push to expand the protections of the Frist Amendment.

Because I am abysmally ignorant of Twentieth Century history, these were all good things for me to learn. But what I enjoyed most about the book were the human interest elements. I enjoyed seeing my beloved literary figures, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, move in and out of the Socialist picture. In 1919, Upton Sinclair even helped put together a protest volume called Debs and the Poets, with contributors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Whitcomb Riley, Sandburg, H. G. Wells, Sigfried Sassoon, and Louis Untermeyer. Needless to say, not their best works. You can sample a few pages at Google Books.

I was also very moved by the descriptions of Debs in prison, in the way he converted his prison experience into a sort of mission. He won over warden and prisoners alike and in both the West Virginia prison and the Atlanta prison, prisoners flocked to him for advice or just to be near him. Here is Freeberg’s description of Debs’s release on Christmas Day, 1921:

Halfway to the street, Debs was stopped in his tracks by a roaring tribute from his fellow inmates. In Debs’s honor, the warden had loosened prison regulations that holiday morning, and the prisoners pressed against all three stories of barred windows, craning for a last look at their beloved cellmate. Most of the two thousand convicts cheered, hollered, and called his name. Debs turned to face them, and for half a minute he held his hat aloft as their applause grew louder. Finally overcome, he bowed his head and wept. This was, he later wrote, “the most deeply touching and impressive moment and the most profoundly dramatic incident in my life.” The prisoners’ ovation continued, still audible a half-mile away, as Debs rode in the warden’s car to the train station. [pp. 296-297]

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