https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/espionage-act-sedition-debs-socialist-party-whistleblowers?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9ad38328-9d91-4a38-9bec-9b7c77d4889b
06.15.2017
Repressing Radicalism
The
Espionage Act turns 100 today. It helped destroy the Socialist Party of America
and quashes free speech to this day.
Eugene Debs
delivering the 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio for which he was thrown in jail.
National Archives
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Last week, a little over an
hour after the Intercept published a story about a classified
National Security Agency report concerning Russian election interference, Reality Winner,
the alleged leaker, was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act.
In recent years, the
Espionage Act has been used as a statutory sword against whistleblowers. Donald
Trump allegedly told former
FBI director James Comey he wanted to prosecute journalists under the statute.
But historically, the
Espionage Act is perhaps most significant not for its role in persecuting
whistleblowers, but for crushing dissent during World War I.
Nowhere was this crackdown
felt more acutely than within the Socialist Party (SP). While never on par with
some of its international counterparts, the SP was a genuine mass party that
elected countless local officials, sent two members to Congress on its own
ballot line, and fostered a vibrant socialist press that reached millions. Its
longtime standard-bearer, Eugene
Debs, was a nationally known figure.
During World War I, even as
the majority of its counterparts in the Second International elected
to be complicit in the bloodshed, the SP steadfastly opposed the
conflict for pitting worker against worker in a scramble for markets
and colonies.
According to conventional
narratives, it was this decision that caused the SP’s decline: its
staunch opposition to a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” made it unpalatable
to the patriotic masses. Yet by any measure the Socialist Party’s popularity
increased — in fact, it became one of the main vehicles for antiwar and
anti-conscription sentiment.
If the SP was brought down
by the war, it was only because the Espionage Act gave its enemies long-coveted
tools to wound the party. Its leaders were indicted and jailed. Its politicians
were barred from office. Its newspapers were confiscated.
A century later, as
socialist politics gain favor again in the United States, it’s important to
remember the role that brute repression played in the SP’s downfall — and the
continued threat the Espionage Act poses to democratic freedoms today.
War,
Conscription, and Opposition
On June 15, 1917, after a
rancorous debate about civil liberties and press freedom during wartime,
Congress, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, passed the Espionage Act.
Wilson had campaigned for
reelection on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” Apparently, enough people
opposed US entry into World War I to put Wilson over the top. Yet just a few
months later he was sending US troops into brutal trench warfare abroad.
To acclimate the public to
the war they thought they’d voted against, Wilson created a domestic propaganda
apparatus called the Committee on Public Information. The man who headed it,
George Creel, would later describe the
range of antiwar opinions peppering the nation: Irish Americans had little interest
in fighting a war alongside the British, many Americans in the West held
isolationist views, and the “Northwest buzzed with talk of a ‘rich man’s war’
waged to salvage Wall Street loans.”
Propaganda alone wasn’t
enough to gin up support. Early on, recruitment was sluggish. The federal
government decided to impose conscription.
Forcing people to fight in
an unpopular war, however, posed its own challenges. In New York City alone,
ninety of the first hundred draftees claimed exemption. A number of other
people gave false addresses to draft boards or simply ran away.
As substantial pockets of
the country resisted the draft, the Socialist Party reaffirmed its
opposition to the war. In “all modern history there has been no war more
unjustifiable than the war in which we are about to engage,” the party
proclaimed, pledging its “[u]nyielding opposition” to conscription.
The most observable impact
of the party’s platform was a dramatic growth in support for the Socialists. In
the 1917 municipal elections, the SP saw an exponential increase in its share
of the popular vote. While such local affairs may not seem like a referendum on
internationalism and militarism, the party’s antiwar stance was well known, and
prominent candidates like Morris Hillquit, a New York City mayor hopeful, ran
on an explicitly anti–World War I platform. Hillquit won 22
percent of the vote, “five times the normal Socialist vote there.” Similar
results could be seen elsewhere, with the party jumping from the low single
digits to well into the thirties in Chicago and Buffalo.
Electoral opposition and
draft evasion weren’t the only sources of concern for the political elite.
On August 3, 1917, a
multiracial group of Oklahoma tenant farmers opposed to conscription launched
an armed rebellion, intending to march across the country to Washington, DC.
They didn’t get very far, but they burned bridges and slashed telephone lines
before being stopped. The “Green Corn Rebellion” resulted in three deaths,
400 arrests, and 150 convictions.
Pro-war elites clearly had a
problem on their hands.
Making the
World Safe for Democracy
Shortly after the US
officially entered World War I, Woodrow Wilson sent the Espionage Act to
Congress. While the legislation was ostensibly intended to target German
saboteurs, the act’s proponents made it clear they were equally, if not more,
concerned with domestic dissent.
The initial version of
the Espionage Act trampled on freedom of speech in an unprecedented way. It
would have created a board for press censorship and imposed criminal penalties
on newspapers that ran afoul of it. It also would have made sowing
“disaffection” within the military punishable by life in prison.
Predictably, the press
censorship provision aroused strenuous opposition from newspapers across the
country. Yet while the nation’s leading papers spoke out against this section
of the bill, they had no problem with the Espionage Act as a whole.
They sought to draw a
distinction between themselves (responsible members of the political
establishment) and antiwar figures (radicals and reprobates undeserving of
civil liberties). They smeared antiwar activists and radicals in their pages,
championed political repression, and published propaganda from the Committee on
Public Information. It was Clyde Miller, a
journalist with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who ultimately reported
Eugene Debs to federal prosecutors.
While the two
controversial provisions were ultimately stripped from the bill, one
provision in the final legislation effectively accomplished the same ends
as the rejected censorship clause: it empowered the postmaster general to
prohibit from the mail any publications advocating or urging treason,
insurrection, or forcible resistance to any US law. The postmaster general used
his prerogative to attack the socialist press, effectively shuttering many
publications by driving them into bankruptcy.
One magazine that came under
fire was the Messenger —
“the most able and the most dangerous of all Negro publications,” in the
Department of Justice’s estimation. The political and literary magazine was
banned from the mail, its office was raided by federal agents, and its editors,
Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, were indicted under the Espionage Act.
(Ironically, thanks to a racist judge, who did not believe they
“were old enough, or, being black, smart enough, to write that red-hot stuff in
the Messenger,” Owen and Randolph were acquitted.)
The Espionage Act gave the
US state a variety of instruments to quash radicalism.
Using a clause that made it
a crime to interfere with the United States’ recruitment efforts, the
government jailed individuals who criticized the war on the theory that such
statements were intended to dissuade enlistment-age men from serving in the
army. Verboten statements included: “I
am for the people and the government is for the profiteers,” “war is murder,”
and “Woodrow Wilson is a Wall Street tool.” Arguing the draft constituted
slavery and violated the Thirteenth Amendment was also grounds for conviction.
Still, some in Congress and
the Wilson administration felt that the legislation did not go far enough —
that too many subversive elements were escaping their grasp.
In 1918, Congress passed an
amendment known as the “Sedition Act.” Often confused as a separate piece of
legislation — rather than a revision of the Espionage Act — the Sedition Act
made it a crime to interfere with the sale of war bonds and to “willfully
utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
language about the form of the Government of the United States.”
In subsequent years,
indictments and other court papers would only reference the Espionage Act,
making it difficult to parse how many people fell prey to offenses specifically
criminalized in the Sedition Act amendments. Whatever the number, the
legislation expanded the Espionage Act’s already vast net.
The most prominent case
brought under the Espionage Act was that of Eugene Debs. Debs was a
perennial presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. He frequently
traveled the country giving speeches to mass audiences and wrote regular
columns for the Socialist press. Perhaps the US’s best-known voice of
socialism, he commanded an audience outside the party’s ranks.
When the war broke out, Debs
was stricken with ill health and forced to watch from afar as his comrades were
hauled off to jail. In 1918, Debs returned to the lecture circuit filled with
disgust at a supposed war for democracy that was being used to justify the
abrogation of democracy at home. In Canton, Ohio he
proclaimed, in perhaps, one of his most famous addresses:
The master class has always
declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master
class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had
nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives. . . .
[T]he working class who
fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the
working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never
yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class
that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.
Yours not to reason why;
Yours but to do and die.
Yours but to do and die.
That is their motto and we
object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.
If war is right let it be declared by
the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others
have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace.
For this speech, Debs was
sentenced to ten years in prison for intending to “cause and incite
insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military,” as
well as “to obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United
States.” The Supreme Court, when upholding Debs’s conviction, put significant
weight on the fact that during his speech Debs had expressed solidarity and
support for his Socialist comrades imprisoned under the Espionage Act.
The SP leaders targeted
through the act extended down the party ladder. Victor Berger, an avatar of the party’s right who had
previously served in Congress, was indicted in March 1918 under the Espionage
Act for opposing World War I. Berger ran for Congress anyway and won. Yet
the US House refused to seat him, triggering a special election in his
Wisconsin district. Berger won again, but again the Congress declined to seat
him. It wasn’t until 1923 that Berger was permitted to serve in Congress.
The biggest radical group in
the US other than the SP was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). While
the IWW had always faced brutal repression (and though they were less vocally
opposed to the war than their SP comrades), the federal government
used World War I as an opportunity to try to break the IWW once and for all.
When the IWW led a series of
militant strikes, the federal government decided to move in on them. It
suppressed many of the strikes using federal troops. And on September 5, 1917,
the Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI, raided IWW offices
across the country. Over one hundred IWW members, including its most prominent
member, Big Bill Haywood, were put on trial for
a mixture of industrial conspiracy and Espionage Act charges.
According to the
prosecutors, the IWW, by leading strikes during wartime, had attempted to
sabotage the war effort as part of an unpatriotic, treasonous conspiracy. All
of the accused were convicted. Haywood would flee to Soviet Russia, where he
would live out the remainder of his life.
Another radical organization
had been felled.
After the War
In recent decades, the
Espionage Act has been used not to prosecute individuals for publicly railing
against war but to threaten whistleblowers and journalists.
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg,
along with his friend Anthony Russo, photocopied and leaked — first to members
of Congress and then to the press — the Pentagon Papers, a
secret history of the US’s three decades of intervention in Vietnam. Both
Ellsberg and Russo were charged under the Espionage Act — one of the first
times the statute had been used against whistleblowers who leaked
information to the press. (The charges against Ellsberg and Russo were dropped
when illegal wiretapping and a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist
came to light.)
In the years between
Richard Nixon’s presidency and Obama’s, only two leakers were
charged under the Espionage Act — one under Ronald Reagan and one under George
W. Bush. (At one point, Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, threatened a
number of major news outlets using the Espionage Act, but he never delivered.)
Prosecuting domestic
whistleblowers for espionage remained a rare occurrence until Obama’s
inauguration. Obama used the Espionage Act to wage an unprecedented war on
whistleblowers. Eight whistleblowers — Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Stephen
Jin-Woo Kim, James Hitselberger, Shami K. Leibowitz, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey
Sterling, and Edward Snowden — were charged under the statute.
All of these cases are
shocking in their own right, but the details of John Kirakou’s case are
especially troubling. Kirakou was a former CIA agent who told ABC News that the
CIA had engaged in a program of torture and that President George W. Bush not
only knew about it but approved it. The CIA wanted Kirakou charged with the
Espionage Act, but under the Bush administration, one of the most hostile in US
history to civil liberties, the FBI declined to
bring charges, concluding Kirakou had not committed a crime.
Things changed when Obama
came into office. A memorandum later revealed that the DOJ initially
responded with confusion to the CIA’s request, as nothing Kirakou did could be
construed as espionage. The CIA insisted they charged him with espionage
nonetheless. Obama’s DOJ obliged.
Kirakou would plead to lesser charges, but he ended up serving nearly
two years in federal prison — the only person to receive a
jail sentence in relation to the CIA torture program.
Chelsea Manning’s case was
another study in extreme vindictiveness and antipathy toward press freedom.
Manning, who leaked information about US war crimes in Iraq and diplomatic
cables that revealed abhorrent government misconduct, pled guilty to ten
separate charges carrying up to twenty years in prison. But this wasn’t enough
for the Obama administration: military prosecutors still brought Manning to
trial on additional charges. This included not only several counts of espionage,
but also aiding the enemy. (The military judge found Manning guilty of the
Espionage Act–related charges, while acquitting her of aiding the enemy.)
Following mass pressure,
Obama commuted Manning’s sentence. This only came, however, after Manning
served more time for leaking information to the press than anyone else in US
history. At times she was held in conditions that constitute torture.
Unfortunately, Obama’s
aggressive use of the Espionage Act gives Trump — who is obsessed with leaks
and contemptuous of press freedoms — another weapon he can use. If Trump
strikes a serious blow against press freedom, liberals should look not to
Vladimir Putin, but to Barack Obama for having paving the way.
A Century of
Repression
Counterfactuals often make
bad history, but when looking at the World War I–era Socialist Party, it
is impossible not to ask what might have been. Many conventional histories of
the period seek to cast state repression as part and parcel of a wider mob
mentality, of popular outbursts reacting hysterically against nonconformity in
their midst.
But while vigilante mob
violence against radicals was real, the initial outbreak of World War I
did not hinder the SP’s growth, but encouraged it. By bringing the full
weight of the state’s repressive apparatuses down upon the SP and the IWW, the
Wilson administration not only chilled opposition to the war, it destroyed two
of the most vibrant radical movements in the US. Efforts to form a viable left
party or build a mass socialist movement were undoubtedly set back.
Today, the Espionage Act
terrorizes potential whistleblowers into silence. It prevents the citizenry
from gaining a full picture of the US’s covert wars, surveillance apparatuses,
and drone-based program of extrajudicial executions.
The century of the Espionage
Act has been a century of repression, forced silence, and chilled speech. It
began with the systematic quashing of powerful radical movements and continues
with a culture of secrecy in which the only people to face sanction for the US
government’s crimes are those who bravely expose them.
The Espionage Act, in other
words, has worked out exactly as designed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chip
Gibbons is a writer and activist whose work has been
featured in Truthout and the Dissent NewsWire. He
is also the policy and legislative counsel for Defending Rights and Dissent,
but the views expressed here are his own.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski
[at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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