Eugene Debs had led historic strikes and run for president four times on the Socialist Party ticket, But the renowned orator had never given a speech so risky or consequential as the one he delivered in a Canton, Ohio, park on June 16, 1918.
As 1,200 people watched, Debs stepped to the front of a wooden bandstand. Nearly bald, he wore a tweed jacket and buttoned vest despite the summer swelter. Justice Department agents sifted through the audience, asking to see men’s draft cards. As Debs spoke, a stenographer hired by a federal prosecutor took frantic notes of the lines that struck him as especially subversive. Sweat dripped down Debs’ face, and his arms reached over the bandstand’s rail toward the crowd.
“The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war,” Debs declared. “If war is right, let it be declared by the people – you, who have your lives to lose.”
Those were dangerous words in June 1918. World War I was nearing its climax, with American soldiers fighting their first major battles, resisting Germany’s all-out drive toward Paris. The U.S. government, armed with repressive new laws, had jailed anti-war protesters across the country. And Debs, 62 years old and recovering from illness, had emerged from near-seclusion to rejoin the fight against the war.
“Debs Wakes Up Howling At War; U.S. May Get Him,” a Chicago Tribune headline announced the next day. “Debs Invites Arrest,” the Washington Post declared. Soon Debs would be in jail for his speech that day. His trial and incarceration would captivate the tense, conflicted nation. After the war, Americans debated whether he was a traitor or a martyr for free expression. Debs’ Canton speech, delivered 100 years ago this week, became the era’s most infamous example of how dissent can become a casualty of war.
Debs’ journey to that stage in Canton began in 1870, when he left his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana, at age 14 to work in train factories. “From my very boyhood I was made to feel the wrongs of labor,” he wrote in the New York Comrade in 1904: the dangers, uncertainty of work, and scant wages common to working men. After years in the labor movement, he became president of the new American Railway Union in 1893.