Transcript
Prisoner 9653
1917–1920
Election night · November 2, 1920
Election night, 1920. The movie house flashed the returns between pictures. One of the candidates was in prison.
Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party ran for president from a federal penitentiary. Atlanta. Prisoner number 9653.
His party put the number on its campaign buttons. He got about nine hundred thousand votes.
His crime was a speech, in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918.
Eugene V. Debs I realize that, in speaking to you this afternoon, there are certain limitations placed upon the right of free speech.
Eugene V. Debs I must be exceedingly careful, prudent, as to what I say, and even more careful and prudent as to how I say it.
A Justice Department stenographer took down every word.
Eugene V. Debs …it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.
The speech got him ten years.
Woodrow Wilson The world must be made safe for democracy.
Woodrow Wilson, asking Congress for war, April 1917.
That summer, marchers in New York turned his words into a question.
MR. PRESIDENT, WHY NOT MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY?
Over Here
1917–1918
America declared war in April 1917. To fight in France, Washington had to run the economy at home.
The War Industries Board decided what factories made, who got the steel, and what everything cost.
Herbert Hoover's Food Administration asked families for wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays, and meatless Tuesdays. Those were requests, not orders. Hoover's name became a verb: to Hooverize.
To save coal, Congress moved the clocks. Daylight saving time began on March 31, 1918. Washington had even taken over the railroads.
A National War Labor Board tried to settle disputes before they became strikes. Wages rose, and so did prices. Union membership nearly doubled.
The war cost over 30 billion dollars. More than half was borrowed, mostly through Liberty Bonds. Taxes covered about a fifth. The top rate hit 77 percent.
Movie stars sold bonds too. On Wall Street, Douglas Fairbanks held Charlie Chaplin up over the crowd.
Factories ran around the clock and couldn't find enough workers. Hold that thought.
Woodrow Wilson If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.
He said that in the same speech.
Four Minutes
1917–1919
On May 18, 1917, Woodrow Wilson signed the draft law. That night, in a Harlem hall ringed with soldiers and police, Emma Goldman got up to speak.
Emma Goldman If it is true that America went into war in order to fight for democracy — why not begin at home?
A patrolman took it down in shorthand. It became Government's Exhibit 31 at her trial, and she got two years.
Many Americans backed the war. The government didn't leave that to chance.
George Creel a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventure in advertising.
While the projectionist changed reels, a local volunteer gave a speech. The rule was four minutes.
A week later, citing Schenck, the Court upheld Eugene Debs's conviction. The vote was unanimous.
Eight months after Schenck, Holmes changed course.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market
He wrote it in dissent. The Court took decades to catch up.
Liberty Cabbage
1917–1918
By spring 1918, Main Street had new signs. Banks named "German-American" dropped the German. Sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage," the makers' own idea.
Iowa's governor ordered English only in public, on trains and on the telephone. Those who spoke no English were told to worship at home.
Some of the fear had a cause. In 1916, German agents blew up the Black Tom munitions pier in New York harbor.
In May 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act. It banned "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government, the flag or the uniform.
The American Protective League claimed about 250,000 volunteers. Their badges read "Secret Service." They reported neighbors for "disloyal" talk.
In Collinsville, Illinois, a mob seized Robert Prager, a German-born miner.
He had tried to join the Navy. Just after midnight on April 5, 1918, they hanged him.
The trial Madison County, Illinois · 1918
Eleven men were tried. The jury acquitted them all within minutes. Outside the courthouse, a band leading draftees to the train was playing "Over There."
Strikers were treated as enemies too. In Bisbee, Arizona, deputies loaded 1,186 miners into cattle cars.
Most were immigrants. They were left in the New Mexico desert.
Eugene V. Debs The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
Two weeks later, federal agents arrested him.
Eugene V. Debs …while there is a lower class, I am in it,
Eugene V. Debs and while there is a criminal element I am of it,
Eugene V. Debs and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
The judge gave him ten years.
The Road North
1916–1919
The war cut off immigration from Europe just as factories needed more hands than ever.
So Americans moved to the jobs.
Women took jobs men had held: in munitions plants, in rail yards, on streetcars.
Mexicans fleeing a revolution came north to farms, mines and railroads.
White Southerners came north too. Akron's tire factories tripled the city in ten years.
The biggest move was Black Southerners. They left segregation, lynching, and farm work that paid about seventy-five cents a day. Chicago's packinghouses paid three dollars a day.
Their guide was the Chicago Defender, a Black weekly. Pullman porters carried bundles south.
Letter writer, Port Arthur, Texas I never dreamed that there was such a race paper published and I must say that its some paper.
The South tried to stop them. Macon, Georgia, charged labor agents twenty-five thousand dollars for a license. Police pulled travelers off trains.
Many rode the Illinois Central, straight up from Mississippi and Louisiana to Chicago.
Between 1910 and 1920, Chicago's Black population more than doubled. Detroit's grew sevenfold.
They found better pay and the vote. They also found crowded housing, unions that kept them out, and fifty-eight bombings of Black homes by 1921.
Silent
1917–1918
In East St. Louis, Illinois, the Aluminum Ore Company brought in Black migrants to break a strike. White workers, afraid for their jobs, blamed the migrants.
On July 2, 1917, white mobs burned the Black neighborhood and shot people as they ran. At least thirty-nine Black people and nine white people died. About six thousand Black residents lost their homes.
Twenty-six days later, close to ten thousand Black New Yorkers marched down Fifth Avenue without saying a word.
One placard remembered Crispus Attucks, the first man killed in the Boston Massacre.
The only sound was the drums. Four days later, a delegation took a petition against lynching to the White House. They were told the president was busy.
A year later, with Black soldiers in France, Du Bois urged his readers to set their grievances aside.
W. E. B. Du Bois Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens
Many of his readers were furious. Almost 400,000 Black Americans served in the war, in segregated units.
Nineteen Nineteen
1918–1921
In October 1918 the Star closed. So did theaters, churches and schools across the country. Influenza killed about 675,000 Americans.
The war ended in November 1918. Four million men came home to canceled war orders and rising prices.
In 1919, one worker in five went on strike. In February, Seattle shut down for five days.
Boston's police walked out. Governor Calvin Coolidge broke the strike.
Calvin Coolidge There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.
Then came the bombs. On June 2, 1919, they exploded in eight cities. One wrecked the attorney general's house.
A. Mitchell Palmer Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order a year ago.
The Bolsheviks had taken Russia in 1917. Palmer believed the fire had reached America.
In November 1919 and again in January 1920, federal agents raided radical groups. The January raids reached more than thirty cities. Agents arrested thousands, most of them immigrants.
In between, on December 21, 1919, the army transport Buford sailed for Russia with 249 deportees. The press called it the Soviet Ark. Emma Goldman was aboard.
Palmer warned of a Red uprising on May Day, 1920. Police guarded cities all day. Nothing happened.
Congress had already passed a literacy test over Wilson's veto in 1917, and barred almost all immigration from Asia.
After the war, immigration came back: about 800,000 people in 1921.
In May 1921, Congress set quotas: three percent of each nationality counted in the 1910 census. The cuts fell hardest on southern and eastern Europe. Three years later came a stricter law.
Red Summer
1919–1921
W. E. B. Du Bois We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.
Chicago, July 27, 1919. A seventeen-year-old named Eugene Williams was swimming near a beach white people claimed.
He drifted across an invisible line in the water. Men on the shore threw stones. He drowned.
A week of rioting followed. Thirty-eight people died, twenty-three of them Black.
The NAACP's James Weldon Johnson called it the Red Summer. Between spring and fall, racial violence hit at least two dozen cities.
Near Elaine, Arkansas, Black sharecroppers met in a church to form a union and demand a fair price for cotton. Someone fired into the meeting.
White posses and federal troops hunted Black sharecroppers. At least a hundred died. Some estimates run past two hundred.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett Had this been a conspiracy of Negroes to kill whites, they would not have started in by killing their own members, break up their own meeting, nor burn their own church.
Wells interviewed twelve men sentenced to death. In 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that a trial swept along by a mob denied them due process.
Claude McKay Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Claude McKay Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
May 31, 1921. Greenwood was Tulsa's prosperous Black district. Armed Black veterans went to the courthouse to stop a lynching.
By the next afternoon, a white mob had burned thirty-five blocks.
Estimates of the dead run as high as three hundred.
Christmas, 1921
1921
President Harding commuted Debs's sentence. He walked out of Atlanta on Christmas Day, 1921.
Behind him, the prisoners crowded the windows and cheered. He turned, took off his hat, and wept.
The next day, he met Harding at the White House.
Harding reportedly said he'd heard "so damned much" about Debs that he was glad to meet him.
Between 1917 and 1921, the war made democracy bigger for some Americans and smaller for others. Often it did both at once.
It opened factory gates to women and to Southerners, Black and white. It also sent people to prison for speeches and began closing the door to immigrants.
The trains from the South kept coming. In the next fifty years, millions more made the trip.
Letter writer, Chicago, to Hattiesburg I should have been here 20 years ago. I just begin to feel like a man.
MR. PRESIDENT, WHY NOT MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY?