By Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE
May 31, 2008 08:11 pm
—
Criticizing a president’s war rationale would have been far more perilous if Scott McClellan lived in Eugene Debs’ day.
In a new book released last week, McClellan, a former White House press secretary, wrote that President Bush and his administration created a “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people.”
From 2003 to 2006, McClellan often drew the assignment of explaining the administration’s decisions on executing the Iraq war. Now, he writes, the president’s staff made the “[weapons of mass destruction] threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were.” The Bush team also, in McClellan’s words, downplayed any talk of “the possible unpleasant consequences of war — casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions.”
The Iraq war, which of course is still raging, “was not necessary,” McClellan wrote.
Turn the clock back 90 years.
In sweltering heat on June 16, 1918, in Canton, Ohio, Debs lashed out at the U.S. government for arresting thousands of Americans for speaking out against World War I. Corporate capitalism sparked that conflict, Debs claimed that day. He added that in war it is “the working class who fights the battles, the working class who shed the blood, the working class who furnish the corpses. The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. … If war is right, let it be declared by the people — you who have your lives to lose; you certainly ought to declare war, if you consider a war necessary.”
Debs was soon arrested for violating the federal espionage act. The Terre Haute native was tried, convicted and imprisoned in a federal penitentiary at Atlanta until President Warren Harding, under pressure, commuted Debs’ 10-year sentence in 1921.
That pivotal moment in American history altered the government’s control of free speech during wartime.
“It’s really a shocking story, and it does make you realize how our protection of free speech has evolved,” Ernest Freeberg, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, said by telephone last week.
Freeberg recounts the saga in a new book, “Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent” (Harvard University Press).
American public opinion evolved even during Debs’ three-year prison stay. While still incarcerated, Debs ran for president for the fifth time atop the Socialist Party ticket in 1920 and drew nearly 1 million votes. A large percentage came as protest votes, rather than an endorsement of Debs’ socialist ideals, Freeberg said, because that party included barely 10,000 card-carrying members.
“It was really others, rallying to his defense, who didn’t necessarily agree with his opinions, that had the greater impact,” Freeberg explained. “It was really up to the rest of the country to decide if he should be allowed to say these things, even if they disagreed.”
Sentiment had changed.
In 1918, with war under way, newspapers around the country clamored for Debs’ arrest, according to Freeberg’s book. Even in Debs’ hometown, a Terre Haute paper said, “He voices the sentiment of a very few, some of whom are already in prison and all of whom should be there and probably soon will be.” By 1921, a booth was set up in downtown Terre Haute so people could sign a petition demanding Harding grant amnesty for Debs. The line was long. Sixty percent of the city’s citizens signed the petition. The Terre Haute Post, which once called for wartime dissenters to be shot by a firing squad, encouraged its readers to back the amnesty campaign “if you feel that free speech is worth preserving in America.”
Finally, Harding relented and had the nation’s most famous “radical” released. When Debs returned to Terre Haute by train on Dec. 28, 1921, the frail, aging labor leader got a warm welcome. Brass bands played. Church bells rang. Some held signs, such as “Debs the humanitarian.” Reports of Terre Haute’s reaction and Harding’s act repulsed hard-liners elsewhere. The New York Times wrote, “A shallow, howling minority has had its way.”
Debs, whose common-man demeanor had been largely revered in his home city, had to be touched by Terre Haute’s greeting, Freeberg said.
“I didn’t find the evidence, but having thought about Debs for years, I would think that he would’ve been deeply moved by the reception he got,” Freeberg speculated last week, “because he loved the town.”
Like public opinion, the 1917 Espionage Act was eventually altered, although many parts of it remain. The nationwide protest against Debs’ imprisonment also spawned a civil liberties movement and, then, the American Civil Liberties Union. While the ACLU’s harshest critics would certainly regret its creation, the Debs episode forced the United States to rethink the balance between free speech, granted in the Constitution’s First Amendment, and national security.
Until his college days, Freeberg, a 49-year-old native of Maine, had little exposure to the story of Debs’ life. When his professorial career began, Freeberg and his students found Debs’ imprisonment, and his presidential campaign as a convict, fascinating.
“Students were always shocked and wanted to know more, and I did, too,” Freeberg said. “That strange jailhouse to the White House campaign is very striking. … That’s the hook that gets people interested in the story.”
In his research, Freeberg made several visits to Terre Haute, gathering information from the Indiana State University Cunningham Library Department of Special Collections, from the Debs Museum, and from local people. The tale is complicated, just like Debs. Though he ran for president five times, Debs didn’t consider his administrative skills to be strong enough to hold that position, Freeberg concluded. His larger mission, even during his highly publicized sedition trial, was to advance his brand of socialism, which Freeberg said differed from versions practiced in the communist era after Debs’ death.
The drama surrounding Debs’ speech, arrest, trial, incarceration, presidential campaign and amnesty sounds like movie material. “I see Robert Duvall playing Debs,” Freeberg said, with a chuckle. “If I knew how to send him a copy [of the book], I would.”
The complex story stands on its own merits, in the context of its own time, Freeberg said. Still, clearly, the tug between the First Amendment and wartime national security is still felt today, whether in the form of an ex-White House spokesman saying an ongoing war was unnecessary or people protesting on the courthouse lawn.
Debs’ “courageous stand really rallied the country,” Freeberg said, “and provoked a discussion about the meaning of the First Amendment that is still going on today.”
Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.
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Tribune-Star columnist Mark Bennett