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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday November 12, 1918
Max Eastman on the Federal Trial of Eugene Debs at Cleveland
From The Liberator of November 1918:
-Note: Comrade Debs was convicted of violating the Espionage Act in Federal Court in Cleveland on September 12, 1918.
The Trial of Eugene Debs
By Max Eastman
AT a Russian Socialist convention held in Stockholm in 1907 it was estimated that the delegates-140 of them-had spent, collectively, one hundred and thirty-eight years, three months and fifteen days in prison. They had been in exile one hundred and forty-eight years, six months and fifteen days. The length of time the convention as a whole had been active in Socialist propaganda was 942 years.
“It follows,” says Trotsky in a preface to one of his books, “that the time spent in prison and exile is about one-third of the time a Social-Democrat is active.” Reading that preface on my way west to attend the trial of Eugene Debs, I was struck by Trotsky’s unconscious assertion that the time spent in prison is part of the time that a Socialist is “active.” It is often the time that his influence is most active. And though the government may succeed in accelerating the immediate war program by imprisoning Debs, they will also accelerate the effect of his life-long service to the social revolution.
Whatever else he may be, Debs is the spiritual chief and hero of American Socialism, and I find myself in a very real perplexity in trying to report his trial on a charge of obstructing the war program. I believe that the postal authorities will recognize the necessity I am under, as a Socialist editor, of giving this news to the readers of the LIBERATOR. And, of course, I cannot write the news without some special appreciation of his life and character and the elevation of his motives. Yet, on the other hand, I recognize the necessity that the postal authorities are under of keeping out of circulation anything designed to obstruct the war program of the government. Therefore I assure the reader in advance, not only that I shall not quote or refer to anything that Debs said about the war, but that I shall not in any indirect way imply any such quotation or reference; or any discussion of what he said. As a Socialist, bidding a kind of temporary hail and farewell to a companion who is dear to the hearts and minds of millions of Americans-whether pro-war or anti-I write the news of his trial for Socialists.
When I slipped into the court-room at Cleveland a pretty young man in a pressed suit and a bow tie was reading Debs’ speech at Canton to the jury. He was manifestly embarrassed to find so much eloquence in his mouth. Debs was never younger, more spirited, more full of love and irony, than he was in that speech of June 16th.
