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Book Review
| Ernest Freeberg, Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. 380. $29.95 (ISBN 978-0-674-02792-3).
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| Democracy's Prisoner productively restages several constitutional dramas involving the First Amendment during the Great War and the early 1920s. Noting that previous studies have focused on actions by Woodrow Wilson's administration, responses by civil libertarians, and decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, this one takes a different turn. It spotlights the "amnesty movement" organized on behalf of Eugene V. Debs, the socialist leader imprisoned for violating the Sedition Act of 1918. A grassroots campaign demanded that federal officials free him and other "political prisoners." Firmly grounded in archival and secondary sources, Democracy's Prisoner works within a two-tiered structure. |
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First, it offers a somewhat contestable meta-assertion about the relationship of the Debs controversy to what Harry Kalven once called "a worthy tradition" of free expression in the United States. Amnesty activists "pioneered a new form of free speech politics that has played a crucial role in American society ever since" (6). People such as Lucy Robins, head of the League for the Amnesty of Political Prisoners, "succeeded in keeping First Amendment questions on the nation's agenda" into the 1920s and contributed to "a gradual but profound change in American ideas about the value of free expression" (326). |
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Second, and far more interestingly, the microanalytical tier of Democracy's Prisoner probes the "small politics" surrounding the cause of Debs. Prosecutors, for instance, produced differing transcriptions of the speech that would land him in prison. Debs, apparently determined to appear more radical as time went by, admitted at his trial to having made statements about Wilson's war seemingly at odds with a skeptical reading of the ambiguous accounts of his speech at a Socialist Party picnic. While subsequently imprisoned within a federal lockup and his own legend, Debs settled into playing the role of a revolutionary firebrand. The Atlanta Penitentiary certainly confined him and perhaps affected his fragile health, but it also provided Debs a stage on which to perform, especially during his celebrated 1920 presidential campaign. Equally well-attuned to the dramaturgical dimensions of the larger amnesty saga, Freeberg's study finds Charles Chaplin and Mae West among the celebrities supporting amnesty for Debs. |
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As this book moves toward the 1923 release of Debs, it skillfully dissects what Lucy Robins would call "a little amnesty business on every block." It sees, for example, the amnesty movement fragmenting as much as advancing a single First Amendment tradition, especially among those on the political left. Moreover, it highlights the crass political maneuvering that accompanied, and sometimes eclipsed, any principled consideration of free-expression ideals. Rivalries among leading Democrats, for instance, derailed proposals to release Debs before President Wilson left office. Similarly, the press of partisan politics propelled influential Republicans toward amnesty for people, especially Debs, who had been imprisoned by a Democratic administration. Meanwhile, the cultural landscape of the Twenties transformed the aging socialist icon from a "dangerous man" into one of America's "great dreamers," a change that opened up political space for the GOP (318). |
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When reflecting on its second-tier analysis, Democracy's Prisoner ultimately employs a historical framework that seemingly parallels those of First Amendment commentators such as Stanley Fish and Pierre Schlag. Its "Epilogue" sees, for example, continuing controversies over wartime dissent and postwar amnesty, suggesting "that 'free speech' is not one thing, but the crossroads for competing claims" that express constitutional ideals and also carry concrete consequences for individual citizens and the larger polity (326–27). Growing differences over the direction of the amnesty effort, for instance, severed the personal and socialist politics that had once linked Lucy and Bob Robins. |
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Careful attention to devilish details thus helps Democracy's Prisoner to escape from solitary confinement within the heroic mode of traditional First Amendment history. If political and cultural changes, for example, might have allowed amnesty activists to claim victory in their battle to spring Debs and other political prisoners, their movement hardly won any broader struggle to translate the "terms of our democratic social contract" into legal protections for dissenting expression that promised to be more than ceremonial and symbolic (327). |
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Even so, some within the divided amnesty cause did raise new issues and concerns. As Senator Hiram Johnson of California predicted, future insurgent movements would confront the effective merger, anticipated during the First World War, between the politics of national security and the increasingly expensive artistry of the "propaganda" industry. Similarly, the journalist Clyde Miller, an ambivalent witness at the 1918 trial of Debs and an advocate for his release, later became an academic critic of the public relations strategies that the Wilson administration had introduced while marketing U.S involvement in World War I. By directing attention to the series of popular constitutional dramas involving Eugene Debs, then, Democracy's Prisoner highlights a number of different fronts in the ongoing politics of the First Amendment and those of "democracy" itself. |
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| Norman L. Rosenberg
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| Macalester College |
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