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Hellraisers Journal, Sunday September 15, 1918
Cleveland, Ohio – Eugene Debs Address the Court, Part I
On September 12th, Comrade Debs was convicted under the Espionage law on charges based upon his Anti-War Speech delivered at Canton, Ohio, on June 16th. On Saturday September 14th, Debs appeared at Federal Court in Cleveland, Ohio, in order to receive the sentence of Judge Westenhaver. The motion for a new trial was denied and Debs was asked if he had anything to say before sentence was pronounced. Comrade Debs faced the Judge and spoke:
STATEMENT TO THE COURT, PART I
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, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and 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 pronounced upon me. I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions.
Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to 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 class 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 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. 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 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 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 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 god 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 in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and stills the aching heart, it is not the fault of the Almighty, it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system that ought to be abolished, not only in the interest of the working class, 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 constitute that element that absolutely rules our country. They privately own all our public necessities. They wear no crowns; they wield no scepters, they sit upon no thrones; and yet they are our economic masters and our political rulers. They control this Government and all of its institutions. They control the courts.
And Your Honor, if you will permit me, I wish to make just one correction. It was stated here that I had charged that all federal judges are crooks. The charge is absolutely untrue. I did say that all federal judges are appointed through the influence and power of the capitalist class and not the working class. If that statement is not true, I am more than willing to retract it.
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 destiny. And so long as this is true, we can make no just claim to being a democratic government, a self-governing people.
[Part I of II.]
[Newsclip added is from Akron Evening Times of September 14, 1918.]
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SOURCES
Eugene Debs: Address to the Court, Bending Cross Speech
(Note: this speech was delivered on Sept 14, 1918, in court in Cleveland, just before he was sentenced to ten years in prison. By Sept 18th, Debs was back in Terre Haute.)
http://www.emersonkent.com/speeches/address_to_the_court.htm
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen’s Magazine, Volumes 66-67
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, 1919
(search: “debs statement to the court)
https://books.google.com/books?id=D2wfAQAAMAAJ
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=D2wfAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA6-PA4
Debs’ Address to the Jury
-and Statement to the Court
National Office Socialist Party
Chicago, 1918/1919 (?)
http://debs.indstate.edu/d288d37_1918.pdf
Note: see preface:
-“Argument to the Jury” delivered before verdict passed on September 12, 1918. (Begins on page 3.)
-“Statement to Court” delivered before sentence was passed on September 14, 1918. (Begins on page 12.)
IMAGE
EVD, Debs Gets 10 Years, Akron Eve Tx p1, Sept 14, 1918
https://www.newspapers.com/image/228054069/
See also:
Tag: USA v Debs 1918
https://weneverforget.org/tag/usa-v-debs-1918/
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“While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Labor and Freedom by Eugene Debs
St Louis, 1916
https://archive.org/stream/16DebsLaborandfreedom/16-debs-laborandfreedom#page/n0