On June 16, 1918, Debs famously delivered a staunch antiwar speech at a Socialist Party state convention in Canton, Ohio. As a result, he was arrested, prosecuted, and ultimately convicted of violating the 1917 Espionage Act by interfering with the draft. As commentators have noted, Debs well understood his legal vulnerability when he spoke at Canton, and he was careful not to explicitly advocate draft resistance. At the same time, the speech offered a relentless attack on the hypocrisies of the war, the authoritarian tendencies it unleashed, and the treatment of workers as the cannon fodder of inter-imperialist rivalry. Debs denounces “the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty,” insisting that “in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.”
The speech was radical in its condemnation of the war and its promise of socialist revolution. And it contained none of the references to the American revolutionary heritage—Jefferson, Paine, Garrison—that had marked the 1895 “Liberty” speech and so much of Debs’s rhetoric in the ensuing years. Yet in Debs’s address to the jury in his 1918 trial, quoted in Scott Nearing’s 1919 pamphlet “The Debs Decision,” these themes boldly reappear. Proudly defending his sympathy for the Bolshevik Revolution, Debs pivots to the fact that America itself was born in revolution. He reminds the jury that “there was a time when George Washington, who is now revered as the father of his country, was denounced as a disloyalist, when Sam Adams, who is known to us as the father of the American Revolution, was condemned as an incendiary, and Patrick Henry, who delivered that inspired and inspiring oration that aroused the colonists, was condemned as a traitor.” He then shifted to the “mighty agitation” associated with the abolitionist movement, declaring himself to proudly stand in a tradition of dissent much more serious about liberty than those hypocritical “patriots” who carry the flag while they trample freedom afoot.
Debs noted the irony of an American government that was prosecuting socialists in the name of “democracy”: “Isn’t it strange that we Socialists stand almost alone today in defending the Constitution of the United States?” And he closed by refusing to recant a single word of his Canton speech. “What you may choose to do to me will be of small consequence after all,” he told the jury. “I am not on trial here. There is an infinitely greater issue that is being tried today in this court, though you may not be conscious of it. American institutions are on trial here before a court of American citizens. The future will tell.”