RIGHTING A WRONG: WOODROW WILSON, WARREN G. HARDING, AND THE ESPIONAGE ACT PROSECUTIONS.

• Author: Forte, David F.
• Position: Symposium on the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Year of Executive Order 9066

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. DEBS II. WILSON III. HARDING CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION

For all its horrors, war can sometimes bring out the best in men. For all their good intentions, wartime laws can sometimes trigger the worst. Courage and self-sacrifice attends the soldier, yet fear and intolerance can strike at home. While thousands of valorous men hurled themselves at the beaches of Normandy, loyal Americans of Japanese lineage remained confined in isolated internment camps. While the doughboys at Belleau Wood gave their lives in openhanded sacrifice, back at home, their government prosecuted thousands for what they said, and mobs persecuted others for who they were.

This is a story of excess and reparation. It is a chronicle of one President from the elite intellectual classes of the East, and another from a county seat in the heartland. Woodrow Wilson was the college president whose contribution to the art of government lay in the principle of expertise and efficiency. When he went to war, he turned the machinery of government into a comprehensive and highly effective instrument for victory. For Wilson, it followed that there could be little tolerance for those who impeded the success of American arms by their anti-war propaganda, draft resistance, or ideological dissent. Nor would there be any compromise with those who later opposed his plan for peace.

Warren G. Harding was a middling sort of person, simple in his virtues, mundane in his vices. Inadequately educated--as he always admitted--he nonetheless became a successful newspaper editor by overcoming the shared monopoly of two established dailies. His persistence brought him political success in the rough world of Ohio Republican politics. Where Wilson thought efficiency the hallmark of a successful administration, Harding believed it to be harmony. While Wilson sought to confine those who opposed his war aims, and unseat those who rejected his peace aims, Harding did not think a man should be in jail for what he said. Where Wilson oversaw the segregation of the civil service, Harding confronted Jim Crow in the Deep South.

Between the two stood Eugene V. Debs, the Marxist Socialist who could gather nearly a million votes for President but who looked forward to a revolution that would unseat the capitalists from their positions of power. There was nothing that Debs stood for that either Wilson or Harding could abide. But while Wilson wanted to keep Debs in prison, Harding wanted to shake his hand.

1. DEBS

   On Christmas Eve 1921, a tearful Eugene V. Debs waved to the cheers of more than 2,000 inmates at the Atlanta Penitentiary as he took leave of them and his incarceration, his commutation in hand signed by President Warren G. Harding. (1) Now former prisoner 9653, Debs was taken to the train, but he did not travel directly to his home in Terre Haute, Indiana. Instead, the train took him to Washington, D.C., for President Harding had appended a request to the commutation: would Mr. Debs be kind enough to allow the President to receive him at the White House? (2)

   An early labor organizer, Debs, who was first a Democrat, read Das Kapital and other socialist writings in jail when he had been convicted of violating a court injunction during the Pullman strike of 1894. (3) Thereafter, on January 1, 1897, he announced his conversion to socialism. (4) Debs soon became one of the most influential leftist politicians America has ever seen. He helped to found the Industrial Workers of the World ("IWW") in 1905, (5) and in 1901, he had a hand in organizing the Socialist Party of America. (6) As a Socialist, he ran for President in nearly every election since 1900. In the 1912 contest, with Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft as his opponents, he had gained nearly six percent of the popular vote. (7) Over his activist lifetime, he had addressed millions. (8) Debs was a master politician, but his manner was not compromise. It was theatre. Cutting a slim and kindly mannered figure, he always surprised and moved his audiences with his words. In 1910, an Ohio newspaper reported on one of his perorations:

   Bending his lean figure far over the edge of the platform, his clearly chiseled features gleaming with intensity, he fairly hissed forth his denunciation of the moneyed interests.... His six feet of spareness quivered as he spoke and he gesticulated constantly with his long arms. Sometimes his words conveyed the most acrid sarcasm and sometimes the most impassioned appeal. (9) In person, Debs struck everyone as genuinely compassionate, someone who bore no animus to any individual. After a personal interview with Debs in 1921, Harding's Attorney General Harry Daugherty said of him, "I found him a charming personality, with a deep love for his fellow man." (10) While in prison, his personality stilled the conflicts among the inmates, much like Melville's Billy Budd. (11) His cell door was left unlocked. (12) "The Warden couldn't say enough good things about him," Daugherty reported. (13) Another person described him as "a stooping figure of infinite tenderness, mercy, compassion, and love." (14) But he was ever passionate in the defense of his convictions. In 1919, when a visitor to Debs in prison relayed that Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had hinted that "things might be made easier for him" if he "repented," Debs exclaimed, "No! Not in a thousand years shall I repent for a single principle that I possess." (15) The visitor noted, "Debs was on fire. His great frame was hot in the molten passion of his spirit." (16) Until 1919, Debs's charisma and leadership helped to mitigate the incessant ideological squabbles and schisms within the Socialist movement. He would run a fifth time for President in 1920--receiving over 900,000 popular votes--but this time from his jail cell in Atlanta. (17) He was there because of his oratory.

   On June 16, 1918, Debs inspired his fellow Socialists when he spoke out against the draft in a speech at the Ohio State Socialist Party convention. (18) He was far from the first to rail against conscription. On April 14, 1917, barely a week after the United States entry into World War I, the Socialist Party adopted an anti-war--but pro-revolutionary--proclamation at its convention in St. Louis. In it, the Socialist Party declared that it was "unalterably opposed to the system of exploitation and class rule which is upheld and strengthened by military power and sham national patriotism." (19) It went on: "The only struggle which would justify the workers in taking up arms is the great struggle of the working class of the world to free itself from economic exploitation and political oppression...." (20)

   The proclamation assured its readers that "[t]he working class of the United States has no quarrel with the working class of Germany or of any other country. The people of the United States have no quarrel with the people of Germany or any other country." (21) It pledged:

   Continuous, active, and public opposition to the war through demonstrations, mass petitions, and other means within our power.... [And u]nyielding opposition to all proposed legislation for military or industrial conscription. Should such conscription be forced upon the people we pledge ourselves to continuous efforts for the repeal of such laws and to the support of all mass movements in opposition to conscription." (22) Mass protests against the war and the draft developed, one drawing as many as 20,000 persons. (23) Debs, being ill, had not been present at the drafting of the proclamation, but he fully supported it. (24)

   On June 15, 1917, Congress approved the Espionage Act. (25) Among its provisions, the law provided:

   Whoever ... shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both. (26) It also punished conspiracy to obstruct the draft. (27) Moreover, any writing the contents of which offended any other part of the Act was declared nonmailable, (28) and Postmaster General Albert Burleson, with the approval of the President, pressed this provision to its outer limits, (29) despite the efforts of Judge Learned Hand. (30)

   There would be more. A year later, in May 1918, Congress amended the Espionage Act with what came to be known as the Sedition Act. (31) The Amendment added further offenses and penalties to those who were opposing the war.

   [W]hoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause, or incite or attempt to incite, insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct or attempt to obstruct the recruiting or enlistment services of the United States, and whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully utter, print, write or publish Any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States ... into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute, or shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any language intended to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies, or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully by utterance, writing, printing, publication, or language spoken, urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things, product or products, necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war in which the...