NARRATOR
Eugene Debs led a national strike of railroad workers in 1894 and spent six months in jail for doing that. He went into prison a labor leader and came out a socialist. As leader of the Socialist Party he ran for president three times. When the United States entered World War I, President Wilson signed the Espionage Act, which provided long jail terms for anyone who said anything that might discourage recruitment in the armed forces. A filmmaker who made a movie about the American Revolution, depicting the British as enemies, was sentenced to ten years in prison, because now the British were our allies. His film was called The Spirit of ’76 and the court case against him was U.S. vs. Spirit of ’76.
Debs spoke against the war and was arrested for violating the Espionage Act; his conviction was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, which pointed to his statement that “the master class has always declared the wars, the subject class has always fought the battles.” Here, at his trial in the fall of 1918, he is speaking to the court.
EUGENE DEBS
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 on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, 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.
Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change—but if possible by peaceable and orderly means….
Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day, and from that time until now my heart has been with the working class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison….
I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched 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.
I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.