Eugene Debs Was an American Hero
On June 16, 1918, Eugene Debs gave the anti-war speech that would soon send him to prison. His arrest sparked a nationwide movement to secure his release — and forced the government to finally recognize the free speech rights of wartime dissenters.
Eugene Debs’s mug shot, 1919. National Archives
The United States’s entrance into World War I in December 1917 set off a storm of jingoism and enforced conformity. And Terre Haute, Indiana, the birthplace and residence of Eugene Debs, the country’s most famous socialist, was no different.
“Schoolteachers and college professors had been fired for their views,” historian Ernest Freeberg writes, “German books were burned in the streets, vigilantes attacked stores owned by German-Americans, beat the editor of the local Socialist paper ‘almost to death,’ and lynched an immigrant coal miner who was unwilling to buy war bonds.”
Debs was unbowed. He and others in the Socialist Party, including leading orator Kate Richards O’Hare, continued to publicly criticize Woodrow Wilson’s war.
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