I have no country to fight for;
my country is the earth,
and I am a citizen of the world.
-Eugene V. Debs
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday March 17, 1918
Eugene V. Debs on Indictments of Socialist Comrades
From The Eye Opener of March 16, 1918, page 2:
Indicted, Unashamed and Unafraid.
by Eugene V. Debs
Sunday morning, March 10, the press dispatches in the daily papers announced the indictment the day before in the federal court at Chicago of Adolph Germer, National Secretary; Victor L. Berger, member of the National Executive Committee; J. Louis Engdahl, editor of The Eye Opener; William F. Kruse, Secretary of the Young People’s Socialist League; and Irwin St. John Tucker, writer and lecturer, all of the Socialist Party [of America]. The charge against them is seditious utterance and interference with the prosecution of the war.
The indictments were found Feb. 2, we are told, but secrecy was preserved regarding the proceeding until the administration at Washington could be consulted and its sanction secured before entering the prosecution.
It is thus made clear that this indictment, while ostensibly directed against certain individuals, is in fact the indictment of the Socialist Party by the national administration at Washington.
If Germer, Berger, Engdahl, Kruse, and Tucker are guilty, so are we all. They have but spoken and written what the Socialist Party stands for, and if Socialism, the thing we stand for and shall continue to stand for, is criminal and subject to indictment and prosecution, then the administration, to be logical and consistent, should indict, prosecute, and imprison not only the spokesmen of the party but its entire membership of more than 100,000 social rebels, who in opposing the damnable profiteering system which has precipitated this bloody deluge upon humanity are alike guilty of sedition and disloyalty in the bleared eyes of the autocratic rulers of this country.
