If they hang Moyer and Haywood,
they’ve got to hang me.
-Eugene Victor Debs
Hellraisers Journal, Friday June 7, 1907
Current Literature on Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone Case, Part I
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WHAT Mr. Debs, once a Socialist candidate for President, calls “the greatest legal battle in American history,” is now in progress in Boise City, Idaho. Fifty special correspondents of newspapers and magazines from all parts of the country hastened last month to the little city to report the case, and the telegraph company installed ten additional circuits to handle the press of business. Boise City itself is not excited. It has not furnished any of the defendants, nor any of the lawyers, nor the victim whose murder is the cause of all this excitement. All it furnishes is the jury to try the case. But the country at large is furnishing the excitement. The President of the United States has been involved in a heated controversy over the character of the defendants. The United States Supreme Court has rendered a decision which is likened by Socialist orators to the Dred Scott decision of half a century ago. Thousands of men have been parading the streets of many cities—50,000 in New York alone according to The Herald’s estimate—waving red flags, singing the Marsellaise, denouncing the Supreme Court and assailing the President in terms of bitter reproach. And a collection of $250,000, according to some estimates, has been gathered from the members of labor unions to insure for the defendants in this trial an adequate defense.
