05/30/2026
Even before the official entry of the United States in 1917, World War I was a deeply divisive issue in the country. Militant labor activists, socialists, and anarchists were vehement opponents of the war from the start. There were also strong anti-war sentiments in the American mainstream as well. The Wilson Administration was deeply concerned with the popularity of anti-war media.
Wilson established the Committee on Public Education (CPI), which “worked to drum up domestic and foreign support for US involvement in World War I.” Proponents of American entry into the war took more direct measures as well. The 250,000-member vigilante group, the American Protective League, coordinated with the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the modern FBI), to repress anti-war activism and labor organizing. Civilian vigilantes surveilled and opened the mail of suspected leftists, and even conducted raids upon their homes, with the tacit (and occasionally overt) approval of the authorities. Thousands were arrested, and attacks on anti-war activists in the street were widespread.
It was in this environment, in 1918, that Eugene Debs delivered a speech against the war in Canton, Ohio.
By 1918, Eugene Debs was a veteran labor activist and a revered figure in the American left of the era. Debs was born in Indiana in 1855. He dropped out of school at the age of 14, and began working for the Vandalia Railroad. Early in life, he was a member of the Democratic Party, and spent time as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives. Debs came of age during a time of intense strife and militancy in American labor. Debs remained employed by the railroad through the end of the 19th century, where he became involved with union organizing and more radical politics. In 1893, he helped to organize, and was elected as the first president of, the American Railway Union (ARU), which waged a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway in 1894.
Debs first rose to national prominence later the same year, thanks to his central role in the Pullman Strike.[8] The strike began in 1894 when ARU-represented workers at the Pullman factory in Chicago walked off the job in protest of low wages and poor living conditions. Although Debs initially advised against the walkout—which he viewed as too risky—the ARU ultimately threw its support behind a nationwide boycott, and railroad workers across the nation refused to work on trains containing Pullman cars. The strike was so effective that, between May and June, nationwide rail transport ground to a virtual halt. The economic disruption was so great that, in July, President Grover Cleveland issued an injunction against the work stoppage and called in federal troops to suppress the strike. Clashes broke out, and federal troops and police killed at least 30 railroad workers while suppressing the strike. Debs was arrested and imprisoned for his role in the action. The case later made its way to the United States Supreme Court, in 1895 in In re Debs, which resulted in the Court upholding the injunction against the strike. This would not be Debs’ first appearance before the Court.
After his release from prison, Debs was one of the most important figures in the American labor movement at the turn of the century.
On June 16, 1918, while on his way to the Ohio state Socialist convention in Canton, Debs stopped to deliver a speech outside the Stark County Workhouse, where three local leaders of the Socialist Party were imprisoned for opposing the draft. Debs spent the following two hours speaking in front of a crowd of 1,200, which included plain clothes agents of the Justice Department, who circulated through the crowd demanding to inspect the draft cards of audience members. The Justice Department had also hired a stenographer specifically for the occasion, who frantically recorded Debs’ speech during which he, at various times, praised the three imprisoned socialists, denounced the war, denounced the U.S. Supreme Court (which had recently struck down a law against child labor), and generally called for the abolishment of capitalism in the United States and world as a whole.
The speech concluded without incident; Debs continued on to the state convention, and the audience dispersed and returned to their homes. Two weeks later, on May 30th, in Cleveland, Eugene Debs was arrested by U.S. marshals at a Socialist picnic, and charged with ten counts of violating the Espionage Act, as amended by the Sedition Act, during his speech in Canton. Debs’ initial trial took place in September 1918 in Cleveland. Addressing the jury directly, Debs proclaimed, “I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war.” Debs was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. He appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court of the United States, which heard arguments in 1919.
The Court seized upon Debs’ address to the jury in Cleveland and referenced it in its opinion. Even though Debs did not directly instruct his audience to oppose the draft or obstruct recruitment into the military, the Court concluded that his expressions of sympathy and solidarity for those convicted of doing so amounted to obstruction because his audience could have inferred that they should engage in illegal activity from the tone of his speech. In a unanimous ruling, the Court upheld Debs’ conviction under the Espionage Act.
The amendment to the Espionage Act, known as the Sedition Act, was repealed one month after the election. Despite the repeal, Debs remained in prison for another year, until his sentence was commuted by President Warren G. Harding, and he was released on Christmas Day, 1921.
