The Debs Decision Part 2

"War does not come by chance. War is not the result of accident. There is a definite cause for war, especially a modern war. The war that began in Europe can readily be accounted for. For the last forty years, under this international capitalist system, this exploiting system, these various nations of Europe have been preparing for the inevitable. And why? In all these nations the great industries are owned by a relatively small cla.s.s. They are operated for the profit of that cla.s.s. And great abundance is produced by the workers, but their wages will only buy back a small part of their product. What is the result? They have a vast surplus on hand; they have got to export it; they have got to find a foreign market for it. As a result of this, these nations are pitted against each other. They begin to arm themselves to open, to maintain the market and quickly dispose of their surplus. There is but the one market. All these nations are compet.i.tors for it, and sooner or later every war of trade becomes a war of blood.

"Now, where there is exploitation there must be some form of militarism to support it. Wherever you find exploitation you find some form of military force. In a smaller way you find it in this country. It was there long before war was declared. For instance, when the miners out in Colorado entered upon a strike about four years ago, the state militia, that is under the control of the Standard Oil Company, marched upon a camp, where the miners and their wives and children were in tents. And by the way, a report of this strike was issued by the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. When the soldiers approached the camp at Ludlow, where these miners, with their wives and children, were, the miners, to prove that they were patriotic, placed flags above their tents, and when the state militia, that is paid by Rockefeller and controlled by Rockefeller, swooped down upon that camp, the first thing they did was to shoot those United States flags into tatters. Not one of them was indicted or tried because he was a traitor to his country.

Pregnant women were killed, and a number of innocent children slain.

This in the United States of America,--the fruit of exploitation. The miners wanted a little more of what they had been producing. But the Standard Oil Company wasn't rich enough. It insisted that all they were ent.i.tled to was just enough to keep them in working order. There is slavery for you. And when at last they protested, when they were tormented by hunger, when they saw their children in tatters, they were shot down as if they had been so many vagabond dogs.

"And while I am upon this point, let me say just another word. Working men who organize, and who sometimes commit overt acts, are very often condemned by those who have no conception of the conditions under which they live. How many men are there, for instance, who know anything of their own knowledge about how men work in a lumber camp--a logging camp, a turpentine camp? In this report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, you will find the statement proved that peonage existed in the state of Texas. Out of these conditions springs such a thing as the I. W. W.--when men receive a pittance for their pay, when they work like galley slaves for a wage that barely suffices to keep their protesting souls within their tattered bodies. When they can endure the condition no longer, and they make some sort of a demonstration, or perhaps commit acts of violence, how quickly are they condemned by those who do not know anything about the conditions under which they work.

"Five gentlemen of distinction, among them Professor John Graham Brooks, of Harvard University, said that a word that so fills the world as the I. W. W. must have something in it. It must be investigated. And they did investigate it, each along their own lines; and I wish it were possible for every man and woman in this country to read the result of their investigation. They tell you why and how the I. W. W. was inst.i.tuted. They tell you, moreover, that the great corporations, such as the Standard Oil Company, such as the Coal Trust, and the Lumber Trust, have, through their agents, committed more crimes against the I.

W. W. than the I. W. W. have ever committed against them.

"I was asked not long ago if I was in favor of shooting our soldiers in the back. I said, 'No. I would not shoot them in the back. I wouldn't shoot them at all. I would not have them shot.' Much has been made of a statement that I declared that men were fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. I made the statement. I make no attempt to deny it. I meant exactly what I said. Men are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder; and the time will come, though I shall not live to see it, when slavery will be wiped from the earth, and when men will marvel that there ever was a time when men who called themselves civilized rushed upon each other like wild beasts and murdered one another, by methods so cruel and barbarous that they defy the power of language to describe. I can hear the shrieks of the soldiers of Europe in my dreams. I have imagination enough to see a battlefield. I can see it strewn with the wrecks of human beings, who but yesterday were in the flush and glory of their young manhood. I can see them at eventide, scattered about in remnants, their limbs torn from their bodies, their eyes gouged out. Yes, I can see them, and I can hear them. I look above and beyond this frightful scene. I think of the mothers who are bowed in the shadow of their last great grief--whose hearts are breaking. And I say to myself: 'I am going to do the little that lies in my power to wipe from this earth that terrible scourge of war.'

"If I believed in war I could not be kept out of the first line trenches. I would not be patriotic at long range. I would be honest enough, if I believed in bloodshed, to shed my own. But I do not believe that the shedding of blood bears any actual testimony to patriotism, to love of country, to civilization. On the contrary, I believe that warfare in all of its forms is an impeachment of our social order, and a rebuke to our vaunted Christian civilization.

"And now, gentlemen of the jury, I am not going to detain you too long.

I wish to admit everything that has been said respecting me from this witness chair. I wish to admit everything that has been charged against me except what is embraced in the indictment from which I have read to you. I cannot take back a word. I cannot repudiate a sentence. I stand before you guilty of having made this speech. I stand before you prepared to accept the consequences of what there is embraced in that speech. I do not know, I cannot tell, what your verdict may be; nor does it matter much, so far as I am concerned.

"Gentlemen, I am the smallest part of this trial. I have lived long enough to appreciate my own personal insignificance in relation to a great issue, that involves the welfare of the whole people. What you may choose to do to me will be of small consequence after all. I am not on trial here. There is an infinitely greater issue that is being tried today in this court, though you may not be conscious of it. American inst.i.tutions are on trial here before a court of American citizens. The future will tell."

5. DEBS TALKS TO THE JUDGE

The jury found Eugene Debs guilty and on Sat.u.r.day morning the judge p.r.o.nounced sentence. Before the sentence was given, Debs had another opportunity to tell someone about Socialism--this time it was the judge.

Debs never loses a chance. When the clerk asked him whether he had anything to say he made another Socialist speech. Said he:

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of earth. I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower cla.s.s, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free....

"If the law under which I have been convicted is a good law, then there is no reason why sentence should not be p.r.o.nounced upon me. I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this law, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon it as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free inst.i.tutions.

"Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present Government; that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believed in the change of both--but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means.

"Let me call your attention to the fact this morning that in this system five per cent. of our people own and control two-thirds of our wealth, sixty-five per cent. of the people, embracing the working cla.s.s who produce all wealth, have but five per cent. to show for it.

"Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen, I went to work in the railroad shops; at sixteen, I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships, all the privations, of that earlier day, and from that time until now, my heart has been with the working cla.s.s. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison. The choice has been deliberately made. I could not have done otherwise. I have no regret.

"In the struggle--the unceasing struggle--between the toilers and producers and their exploiters, I have tried, as best I might, to serve those among whom I was born, with whom I expect to share my lot until the end of my days.

"I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul. I can see them dwarfed, diseased, stunted, their little lives broken, and their hopes blasted, because in this high noon of our twentieth century civilization, money is still so much more important than human life. Gold is G.o.d and rules in the affairs of men. The little girls, and there are a million of them in this country--this, the most favored land beneath the bending skies, a land in which we have vast areas of rich and fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce an abundance for every man, woman and child--and if there are still many millions of our people who are the victims of poverty, whose life is a ceaseless struggle all the way from youth to age, until at last death comes to their rescue and stills the aching heart, and lulls the victim to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty, it can't be charged to nature; it is due entirely to an outgrown social system that ought to be abolished, not only in the interest of the working cla.s.s, but in a higher interest of all humanity.

"I think of these little children--the girls that are in the textile mills of all description in the East, in the cotton factories of the South--I think of them at work in a vitiated atmosphere. I think of them at work when they ought to be at play or at school; I think that when they do grow up, if they live long enough to approach the marriage state, they are unfit for it. Their nerves are worn out, their tissue is exhausted, their vitality is spent. They have been fed to industry.

Their lives have been coined into gold. Their offspring are born tired.

That is why there are so many failures in our modern life.

"Your Honor, the five per cent. of the people that I have made reference to, const.i.tute that element that absolutely rules our country. They privately own all our public necessities. They wear no crowns; they wield no sceptres, they sit upon no thrones; and yet they are our economic masters and our political rulers. They control this Government and all of its inst.i.tutions. They control the courts.

"The five per cent. of our people who own and control all of the sources of wealth, all of the nation's industries, all of the means of our common life--it is they who declare war; it is they who make peace; it is they who control our industry. And so long as this is true, we can make no just claim to being a democratic government--a self-governing people.

"I believe, your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation ought to own and control its industries. I believe, as all Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly owned--that industry, the basis of life, instead of being the private property of the few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of all.

"John D. Rockefeller has today an income of sixty million dollars a year, five million dollars a month, two hundred thousand dollars a day.

He does not produce a penny of it. I make no attack upon Mr. Rockefeller personally. I do not in the least dislike him. If he were in need, and it were in my power to serve him, I should serve him as gladly as I would any other human being, I have no quarrel with Mr. Rockefeller personally, nor with any other capitalist. I am simply opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful, to ama.s.s a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all of the days of their lives secure barely enough for existence.

"This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but fortunately I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and co-operative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic and political movement that is spread over the face of all the earth.

"There are today upwards of sixty million Socialists, loyal, devoted, adherents to this cause, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color or s.e.x. They are all making common cause. They are all spreading the propaganda of the new social order. They are waiting, watching and working through all the weary hours of the day and night. They are still in the minority. They have learned how to be patient and abide their time. They feel--they know indeed--that the time is coming in spite of all opposition, all persecution, when this emanc.i.p.ating gospel will spread among all the peoples, and when this minority will become the triumphant majority and, sweeping into power, inaugurate the greatest change in history.

"In that day we will have the universal commonwealth--not the destruction of the nation, but, on the contrary, the harmonious co-operation of every nation on earth. In that day war will curse this earth no more.

"Your Honor, I ask no mercy. I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more clearly comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom.

"I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come to their own.

"When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry fingerpoints the Almighty marks the pa.s.sage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the look-out knows that the midnight is pa.s.sing--that relief and rest are close at hand.

"Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is pa.s.sing, and joy cometh with the morning....

"Your Honor, I thank you, and I thank all of this court for their courtesy, for their kindness, which I shall remember always.

"I am prepared to receive your sentence."

Whereupon the judge sentenced Eugene Debs to ten years in the West Virginia Penitentiary--the penitentiary at Atlanta being too crowded to receive him.

6. THE APPEAL

An appeal was taken to the Supreme Court of the United States and was argued on the ground that the Espionage Act was unconst.i.tutional. No act was charged against Debs, except the Canton speech. In that speech he had simply stated what he had said a thousand times before, but the Court held that under the Espionage Act a man who made a speech, the probable result of which was to create mutiny or to hinder recruiting and enlistment--was guilty, providing that he did it knowingly and wilfully. The jury had to decide, first, that he had done something the probable result of which was to create mutiny or to hinder recruiting and enlistment, and then if he had done it, that it was done with intent, knowingly and wilfully. The jury had found Debs guilty under these circ.u.mstances.

Debs was an American, and as an American he relied upon a certain guarantee contained in the First Amendment to the Const.i.tution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peacefully to a.s.semble and to pet.i.tion the Government for a redress of grievances."

Debs, as an American citizen, relied upon that guarantee, and his lawyers, in making the appeal, relied upon that guarantee.

Over and against that guarantee was the Espionage Act pa.s.sed originally in 1917--June 15th--and amended June 16, 1918.

The language of the original act was as follows:

(t.i.tle I, Sec. 3.) "Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall (1) wilfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies, and whoever, when the United States is at war, (2) shall wilfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall (3) wilfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both."

The Amended Act was far more drastic:

"Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall wilfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or to promote the success of its enemies, or shall wilfully make or convey false reports or false statements, or say or do anything except by way of bona fide and not disloyal advice to an investor or investors, with intent to obstruct the sale by the United States of bonds or other securities of the United States or the making of loans by or to the United States, and whoever, when the United States is at war, shall wilfully cause, or attempt to cause, or incite or attempt to incite, insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall wilfully obstruct or attempt to obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, and whoever, when the United States is at war, shall wilfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Const.i.tution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States, or any language intended to bring the form of government of the United States, or the Const.i.tution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute, or shall wilfully utter, print, write or publish any language intended to incite, provoke or encourage resistance to the United States or to promote the cause of its enemies, or shall wilfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall wilfully, by utterance, writing, printing, publication or language spoken, urge, incite or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things, product or products, necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war in which the United States may be engaged, with intent by such curtailment to cripple or hinder the United States in the prosecution of the war, and whoever shall wilfully advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated, and whoever shall, by word or act, support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both." ...

There you have both pieces of legislation. On the one hand, the Const.i.tution provides immunity, and on the other hand, the Espionage Act provides a penalty for the expression of opinion.

The Supreme Court on the 10th of March handed down its decision. The decision was read by Justice Holmes and concurred in by the entire court.

7. THE SUPREME COURT DECISION

The substance of the decision is contained in the following sentences: