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Updated: June 17, 2025
Men like Debs understand that. Their business is to make social demands so concrete and pressing that statesmen are forced to deal with them. Agitators who accept government positions are a disappointment to their followers. They can no longer be severely partisan. They have to look at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and the statesman are both needed.
Or take Eugene V. Debs, three times candidate of the Socialist Party for President. I quote from one of his pamphlets: The propertied classes are like people who go into a public theatre and refuse to let anyone else come in, treating as private property what is meant for social use.
I remember leaving the Hotel that afternoon and walking down to the station and saying to myself: "If that man can behave as he does, there is surely no excuse for us younger chaps," and I felt then as I have felt ever since that I never in my life came in contact with so radiant a spirit as I did that afternoon when Debs was getting ready to take his place in the Federal Court and receive a penitentiary sentence.
Debs admits the need of revolutionary tactics as well as revolutionary principles and even says: "We could better succeed with reactionary principles and revolutionary tactics than with revolutionary principles and reactionary tactics."
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 circumstances.
But she made a desperate effort to free her wrists, and burst out madly: "Let me go! How dare you! I don't know you or yours! I'm nothing to you or your kin! My name is Desborough do you understand do you hear me, Mr. Debs? At the word the old man's fingers stiffened like steel around her wrists, as he turned upon her a hard, invincible face. "So thou'lt call thissen Des-borough, wilt tha?
Miss Desborough had gone up to her bedroom to put on a warmer cloak, and had rung twice or thrice impatiently for her maid. When the girl made her appearance, apologetic, voluble, and excited, Miss Desborough scarcely listened to her excuses, until a single word suddenly arrested her attention. It was "old Debs."
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 passed originally in 1917 June 15th and amended June 16, 1918.
In 1893-1894, as we shall see, however, this act was successfully invoked in several labor controversies, notably in the Debs case. The bitterness of the industrial struggle during the eighties made it inevitable that the labor movement should acquire an extensive police and court record.
But this man who thought straight; who loved his fellows, who spoke his convictions; who was true to his ideals this man is permitted to go to jail by the Supreme Court of the United States. I have seen the Supreme Court and I have seen Eugene V. Debs. From the Supreme Court I got neither love nor inspiration; from Debs I got both.
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