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Our Country Under Censorship

Our Country Under Censorship

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch

Censoring the News, Big Time

Though few remember it today, exactly 100 years ago, this country’s media was laboring under the kind of official censorship that would undoubtedly thrill both Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. And yet the name of the man who zestfully banned magazines and newspapers of all sorts doesn’t even appear in either Morison’s history, that Britannica article, or just about anywhere else either. 

The story begins in the spring of 1917, when the United States entered the First World War. Despite his reputation as a liberal internationalist, the president at that moment, Woodrow Wilson, cared little for civil liberties. After calling for war, he quickly pushed Congress to pass what became known as the Espionage Act, which, in amended form, is still in effect. Nearly a century later, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden would be charged under it and in these years he would hardly be alone.

Despite its name, the act was not really motivated by fears of wartime espionage. By 1917, there were few German spies left in the United States. Most of them had been caught two years earlier when their paymaster got off a New York City elevated train leaving behind a briefcase quickly seized by the American agent tailing him.

Rather, the new law allowed the government to define any opposition to the war as criminal. And since many of those who spoke out most strongly against entry into the conflict came from the ranks of the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World (famously known as the “Wobblies”), or the followers of the charismatic anarchist Emma Goldman, this in effect allowed the government to criminalize much of the Left. (My new book, Rebel Cinderella, follows the career of Rose Pastor Stokes, a famed radical orator who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.)

Censorship was central to that repressive era. As the Washington Evening Star reported in May 1917, “President Wilson today renewed his efforts to put an enforced newspaper censorship section into the espionage bill.” The Act was then being debated in Congress. “I have every confidence,” he wrote to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, “that the great majority of the newspapers of the country will observe a patriotic reticence about everything whose publication could be of injury, but in every country there are some persons in a position to do mischief in this field.”

Subject to punishment under the Espionage Act of 1917, among others, would be anyone who “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.” 

Who was it who would determine what was “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive”? When it came to anything in print, the Act gave that power to the postmaster general, former Texas Congressman Albert Sidney Burleson. “He has been called the worst postmaster general in American history,” writes the historian G. J. Meyer, “but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general.”

Burleson was the son and grandson of Confederate veterans. When he was born, his family still owned more than 20 slaves. The first Texan to serve in a cabinet, he remained a staunch segregationist. In the Railway Mail Service (where clerks sorted mail on board trains), for instance, he considered it “intolerable” that whites and blacks not only had to work together but use the same toilets and towels. He pushed to segregate Post Office lavatories and lunchrooms.

He saw to it that screens were erected so blacks and whites working in the same space would not have to see each other. “Nearly all Negro clerks of long-standing service have been dropped,” the anguished son of a black postal worker wrote to the New Republic, adding, “Every Negro clerk eliminated means a white clerk appointed.” Targeted for dismissal from Burleson’s Post Office, the writer claimed, was “any Negro clerk in the South who fails to say ‘Sir’ promptly to any white person.”

One scholar described Burleson as having “a round, almost chubby face, a hook nose, gray and rather cold eyes and short side whiskers. With his conservative black suit and eccentric round-brim hat, he closely resembled an English cleric.” From President Wilson and other cabinet members, he quickly acquired the nickname “The Cardinal.” He typically wore a high wing collar and, rain or shine, carried a black umbrella. Embarrassed that he suffered from gout, he refused to use a cane.

Like most previous occupants of his office, Burleson lent a political hand to the president by artfully dispensing patronage to members of Congress. One Kansas senator, for example, got five postmasterships to distribute in return for voting the way Wilson wanted on a tariff law.

When the striking new powers the Espionage Act gave him went into effect, Burleson quickly refocused his energies on the suppression of dissenting publications of any sort. Within a day of its passage, he instructed postmasters throughout the country to immediately send him newspapers or magazines that looked in any way suspicious.

And what exactly were postmasters to look for? Anything, Burleson told them, “calculated to… cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny… or otherwise to embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war.” What did “embarrass” mean? In a later statement, he would list a broad array of possibilities, from saying that “the government is controlled by Wall Street or munition manufacturers or any other special interests” to “attacking improperly our allies.” Improperly?

He knew that vague threats could inspire the most fear and so, when a delegation of prominent lawyers, including the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow, came to see him, he refused to spell out his prohibitions in any more detail. When members of Congress asked the same question, he declared that disclosing such information was “incompatible with the public interest.”

One of Burleson’s most prominent targets would be the New York City monthly The Masses. Named after the workers that radicals were then convinced would determine the revolutionary course of history, the magazine was never actually read by them. It did, however, become one of the liveliest publications this country has ever known and something of a precursor to the New Yorker. It published a mix of political commentary, fiction, poetry, and reportage, while pioneering the style of cartoons captioned by a single line of dialogue for which the New Yorker would later become so well known.

From Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg to Edna St. Vincent Millay and the young future columnist Walter Lippmann, its writers were among the best of its day. Its star reporter was John Reed, future author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a classic eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. His zest for being at the center of the action, whether in jail with striking workers in New Jersey or on the road with revolutionaries in Mexico, made him one of the finest journalists in the English-speaking world.

A “slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope,” the critic Irving Howe later wrote, The Masses was “the rallying center… for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture.” But that was no protection. On July 17, 1917, just a month after the Espionage Act passed, the Post Office notified the magazine’s editor by letter that “the August issue of the Masses is unmailable.” The offending items, the editors were told, were four passages of text and four cartoons, one of which showed the Liberty Bell falling apart. 

Soon after, Burleson revoked the publication’s second-class mailing permit. (And not to be delivered by the Post Office in 1917 meant not to be read.) A personal appeal from the editor to President Wilson proved unsuccessful. Half a dozen Masses staff members including Reed would be put on trial — twice — for violating the Espionage Act. Both trials resulted in hung juries, but whatever the frustration for prosecutors, the country’s best magazine had been closed for good. Many more would soon follow.

No More “High-Browism”

When editors tried to figure out the principles that lay behind the new regime of censorship, the results were vague and bizarre. William Lamar, the solicitor of the Post Office (the department’s chief legal officer), told the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, “You know I am not working in the dark on this censorship thing. I know exactly what I am after. I am after three things and only three things – pro-Germanism, pacifism, and high-browism.”

Within a week of the Espionage Act going into effect, the issues of at least a dozen socialist newspapers and magazines had been barred from the mail. Less than a year later, more than 400 different issues of American periodicals had been deemed “unmailable.” The Nation was targeted, for instance, for criticizing Wilson’s ally, the conservative labor leader Samuel Gompers; the Public, a progressive Chicago magazine, for urging that the government raise money by taxes instead of loans; and the Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register for reminding its readers that Thomas Jefferson had backed independence for Ireland. (That land, of course, was then under the rule of wartime ally Great Britain.) Six hundred copies of a pamphlet distributed by the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, Why Freedom Matters, were seized and banned for criticizing censorship itself. After two years under the Espionage Act, the second-class mailing privileges of 75 periodicals had been canceled entirely.

From such a ban, there was no appeal, though a newspaper or magazine could file a lawsuit (none of which succeeded during Burleson’s tenure). In Kafkaesque fashion, it often proved impossible even to learn why something had been banned. When the publisher of one forbidden pamphlet asked, the Post Office responded: “If the reasons are not obvious to you or anyone else having the welfare of this country at heart, it will be useless… to present them.” When he inquired again, regarding some banned books, the reply took 13 months to arrive and merely granted him permission to “submit a statement” to the postal authorities for future consideration.

In those years, thanks to millions of recent immigrants, the United States had an enormous foreign-language press written in dozens of tongues, from Serbo-Croatian to Greek, frustratingly incomprehensible to Burleson and his minions. In the fall of 1917, however, Congress solved the problem by requiring foreign-language periodicals to submit translations of any articles that had anything whatever to do with the war to the Post Office before publication.

Censorship had supposedly been imposed only because the country was at war. The Armistice of November 11, 1918 ended the fighting and on the 27th of that month, Woodrow Wilson announced that censorship would be halted as well. But with the president distracted by the Paris peace conference and then his campaign to sell his plan for a League of Nations to the American public, Burleson simply ignored his order.

Until he left office in March 1921 — more than two years after the war ended — the postmaster general continued to refuse second-class mailing privileges to publications he disliked. When a U.S. District Court found in favor of several magazines that had challenged him, Burleson (with Wilson’s approval) appealed the verdict and the Supreme Court rendered a timidly mixed decision only after the administration was out of power. Paradoxically, it was conservative Republican President Warren Harding who finally brought political censorship of the American press to a halt.

A Hundred Years Later

Could it all happen again?

In some ways, we seem better off today. Despite Donald Trump’s ferocity toward the media, we haven’t — yet — seen the equivalent of Burleson barring publications from the mail. And partly because he has attacked them directly, the president’s blasts have gotten strong pushback from mainstream pillars like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, as well as from civil society organizations of all kinds.

A century ago, except for a few brave and lonely voices, there was no equivalent. In 1917, the American Bar Association was typical in issuing a statement saying, “We condemn all attempts… to hinder and embarrass the Government of the United States in carrying on the war… We deem them to be pro-German, and in effect giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” In the fall of that year, even the Times declared that “the country must protect itself against its enemies at home. The Government has made a good beginning.”

In other ways, however, things are more dangerous today. Social media is dominated by a few companies wary of offending the administration, and has already been cleverly manipulated by forces ranging from Cambridge Analytica to Russian military intelligence. Outright lies, false rumors, and more can be spread by millions of bots and people can’t even tell where they’re coming from.

This torrent of untruth flooding in through the back door may be far more powerful than what comes through the front door of the recognized news media. And even at that front door, in Fox News, Trump has a vast media empire to amplify his attacks on his enemies, a mouthpiece far more powerful than the largest newspaper chain of Woodrow Wilson’s day. With such tools, does a demagogue who loves strongmen the world over and who jokes about staying in power indefinitely even need censorship?

Adam Hochschild, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of 10 books, including King Leopold’s Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. His latest book, just published, is Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, The Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2020 Adam Hochschild

Interview: Labor Historian Nick Salvatore on Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders, and Socialism in Modern American Politics

Interview: Labor Historian Nick Salvatore on Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders, and Socialism in Modern American Politics

2016 has been a banner year for socialism in American political discourse. In January, 43 percent of respondents to a Bloomberg/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, taken of likely Democratic caucus-goers, said they would use the word ‘socialist’ describe themselves. Recently, a majority of Democrats polled said socialism has “a positive impact on society.” Conservatives, including those at the American Action Network, who commissioned the latter poll, have used socialism’s increasingly prominent place in American political life to animate their base, claiming that Bernie Sanders’s success in the Democratic primaries has pushed Hillary Clinton to the left on economic and social issues.

Sanders, for his part, embraces the “Socialist” and “Democratic Socialist” labels often applied to him by the right, and by the mainstream press. His success recalls the only other Socialist presidential candidate in history to receive nearly any mainstream attention: Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party of America’s perennial presidential candidate in the early 20th century. Early in his career as a writer and politician, Sanders produced a documentary about Debs with the intent to air it as an educational special on public television. In it, Sanders’ voices Debs, despite the accent mismatch.

Much has been made of Sanders’s efforts to make mainstream an acceptance of socialist programs and ways of thinking. I spoke to Nick Salvatore, Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, and author of a biography of Debs, on Debs’s heritage in our politics.

The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Let’s start with some basic background on Eugene Debs’s career as a presidential candidate? What was his most defining campaign?

He ran 5 times between 1900 and 1920. The only one he didn’t make was in 1916, when he was recuperating from a variety of illnesses. And I think by far the most important was the 1912 one, and not just because he got the most votes (that’s when he got roughly 6 percent — 900,000 votes). The movement, in one way, was really approaching its height. And so there were plenty of people who didn’t vote for him. In many states, the Socialist vote in 1912 rose significantly over 1908, so that was seen as a “we’re on the road, we’re on the way” kind of thing.

But there were an awful lot of people who were attracted to Debs who came to the rallies and came to the speeches but who weren’t quite ready to pull the lever for the Socialist candidate. So 1912 was important in itself in terms of its numbers and its reach. But there was also an expectation that in 1914 — in the off-year election — they could really see an improvement. It turned out to be very different, but that was an expectation. 1912 was in many ways the apex of the electoral effort of a known Socialist candidate, certainly into the 1970s or 80s.

Who were his supporters? And what would describe someone attracted to Debs’s message, but unwilling to pull the lever for him?

The overwhelming majority of working class people did not vote for Eugene Debs. In fact, his vote totals declined in most of the eastern dates, which were the most heavily industrialized states, between 1908 and 1912. He picked up strength in the southwest and west. And in the southwest — in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas — it was primarily farmers who were in the midst of experiencing industrialization on the farm, as, from the late 1880s and ‘90s forward, corporate farming had developed in a major way in that area: by corporations buying up the land, hiring labor to farm the land, and using the latest technology from companies like International Harvester and others.

And they were also buying up the land themselves, these corporations, so that’s where he got a real boost. In the east, it wasn’t that he got no votes, but the voting dropped off from 1908, and part of that was because I think we always underestimate — in 2016 as well as in 1912 — the power of the American political culture on Americans, whether the be working class or middle class. I heard once something to the effect of “Poor Gene, he gave his heart to this movement and the voters never paid attention to him.” And I think that’s true. So Gene Debs in 1912 finished 4th out of 4 presidential candidates.

I do think that was something that, at a point later in his life when he was feeling despondent, Debs said something like — and this isn’t a direct quote — “The people can have anything they want, but the problem is they don’t want anything.” And he was really despondent. It may have been when he was in prison in Atlanta in 1920.

1912 is enigmatic in a way. It’s certainly the height of Debs’s electoral career and the party’s electoral success. There were 20 new state reps, some mayors… But over the next three years, the Socialist Party’s membership dropped from about 120 or 130,000 to 80,000. So they were even losing some of their core members: not just those who pulled the lever on election day because they were moved by Debs’s speech but didn’t want to join the party per se, but the core party members began to fall off. It’s an apex and at the same time the beginning of the decline of the Socialist Party.

What was Debs’s message? And do you see any similarities between that and what Bernie Sanders is saying today?

From about 1909, 1910 through 1913, if there was one phrase that gets used repeatedly in lecture and speech after speech after speech, it’s the following: “I’m not a labor leader, I wouldn’t lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, somebody else has to lead you out. But someone else will lead you out. You have to use your head as well as your hands and get yourself out of your present circumstance.”

Time after time after time, he emphasised — and it’s a classic American emphasis — the role of the individual in taking action to correct whatever the situation is. He is not negating socialism here: what he’s saying is that there’s no quick fix. And you as the listener have to figure out ways of working with others to engage the issue and to do something about it.

There was a lot of infighting in the Socialist movement in 1910, 1911, and a lot of it had to do with the Industrial Workers of the World. And Debs was terrible whenever serious tension arose and conflict arose. He headed for a closet to go hide in. He was a serious leader in other ways, but his avoiding the conflict and avoiding really seriously working for a resolution of some kind was really debilitating. With him disappearing, all sorts of other people could do what they wanted to do.

He wrote letters to friends about how scared he was of the Milwaukee Socialist congressman Victor Berger, who was and a leader in the Milwaukee and Wisconsin movement and a power in the Socialist movement. But Debs, who was very bureaucratically-oriented, would never take him on despite good friends of his saying “Gene, you should do it.” In other words, he was really a human being. He has a lot of foibles and I wish he didn’t, but I didn’t lose my respect for him.

Do you see any similarities between what Debs’s did and what Bernie Sanders is doing now?

I’m going to suggest the major difference between the Debs era and what Bernie Sanders is dealing with now has less to do with socialism than it has to do with capitalism. When Debs was organizing — and he began formally as a Socialist in 1897, at the tail end of the 19th century into the first quarter of the 20th century — capitalism was in a process of beginning to solidify itself. And by the end of the 19th century, you really did begin to have the major corporations — many of whom are still with us today even if their names have changed — more firmly established.

But for the working people, many of them, as industrialization and major corporations and major forms of industrial production began to migrate, not just in large cities, you had more and more people experiencing industrial capitalism for the first time. And I don’t mean this in a silly way, but they were in something of a state of shock, because they took the small entrepreneur, the small businessman, the artisan who has his own shop, as well as the farmer.. they’re used to being self employed. They have an identity that’s part of the American identity. They’re self-employed, they do good work, et cetera, and all of a sudden now they find they can’t compete economically: That they’ve been bought out, essentially, and in the process of that they’ve lost the niche that they had. Some of them are drawn to socialism because they see in socialism the possibility of regaining a value in their work that they feel has been taken from them in this transition.

The difference between then and now is enormous. We have lived in an advanced capitalist society since at least the end of World War II. That society has framed our culture. It’s framed our politics and it continues to do so. We always think about the 1960s, but without capitalism, we wouldn’t have our music. Its freaky to think about, actually: We thought in the ‘60s that we were creating a new culture, but that didn’t quite happen that way.

So I look at Bernie now and I’m not particularly enthused by him. It’s very ironic because I’ve never voted for Hillary Clinton. I’ve always had difficulty with her and with her husband, but Bernie actually scares me, because there’s no substance to what he’s seeing. There’s a lot of words but whenever anyone asks him “how are you going to pay for this?…” Sympathetic economists say it will cost $77 billion. And he kind of smiles and just keeps on going on. But that’s not responsible. You can’t do that.

So I think between the really different stage of capitalism, the global market, a tremendous transformation of the nature of work in the last 30 years… I’ve listened numerous times, but I’ve never heard Bernie address the world that I know actually exists. So that doesn’t encourage me to be honest. I mean that’s at the core of what he’s got to address to me, and it’s got to be done in a way that is credible, and I haven’t seen that yet. I’ve not been active in any shape or form in supporting him.

What about the importance of labor unions? What role did they play during Debs’s time, and how has their role in American politics changed? What were the general rates of union participation in the workforce?

In 1910, 10 percent of the non-agricultural workforce was in a union. In 2016, 6.6 percent are in a union. Not a good tradition. The union movement didn’t grow until 1935, in the middle of the depression, because that’s when the organizing drives began to take effect in the CIO — the industrial union — and there were separate institutions of industrial unionists in auto, in steel, in rubber, et cetera. And it rose to, in ‘54 or ‘55, 35 percent.

There wasn’t a public sector at that point. Public sector unions aren’t allowed to organize until 1962 or ’63, so it’s just the private sector. And then after that, the two public and private sectors begin to organize. But they never get much above 35.5 percent, maybe 36 percent. But nothing beyond that. By themselves, the public sector has organized maybe as much as 37 percent. But when you put them together with the dropping rates in the other sectors, it drops the whole thing down.

So you’ve got 26 states now that have right to work laws, including Wisconsin and just recently, the 26th state was West Virginia — the birthplace, essentially, in terms of the struggle of the United Mine Workers, which doesn’t exist anymore because people are mining coal with fewer and fewer miners, if they’re mining coal at all.

It’s a whole different world. You know, the person who comes to mind for me in this regard, is Sara Horowitz, who is in New York and is the head of the freelancers Union. She’s a McArthur Fellow, she’s an incredibly inventive trade unionist who is working outside the framework because she’s attempting to, frankly, organize people like you who don’t work in the traditional job categories that usually get organized, if they get organized at all. She’s been doing this for 10 years — and she’s had some really pretty interesting successes.

It’s not that there won’t be any industry here, but it will be more and more difficult to organize, because, as the UAW found in Chattanooga in early 2015, even VW — which traditionally, because of the way its German firm is structured, has a strong labor presence on the board — finally said, “You come to organize our Chattanooga plant — we’re neutral. But we’re already thinking about sending the next model production down to Mexico. We’ll stay neutral in this, but the writing is already on the wall.”
I remember in the Chattanooga case, when they opened the plant in 2011, they had something like 80,000 applicants for 2,000 jobs because the rate of pay and the benefits they were offering were almost unheard of in Tennessee. They were being offered what was considered a good union contract. But the reason there were so many applicants was because of the incredible poverty. So, I see Bernie as a kind of…I know this is not popular to say, but his time has passed some time ago and that’s why I think of Sara Horowitz: because she’s trying to think out new ways of organizing people and reaching out in ways that the AFL-CIO has lagged to say the least, in even trying to think about it. So, sorry. I wish I had a happier story to tell.

Was Debs involved in voter registration and get out the vote efforts in the same way that politicians are today?

Some of the local parties may have tried to do that, but mainly Debs was an incredible speaker. There’s no recording of him so I can’t tell you how good he sounds but by all of the reports, he could hold an audience. He had an audience of 20,000 people but there’s no microphone. Not everybody could hear him, but there’s some magnetism in this guy that… I’m thinking particularly of an open air speech in Chicago, and there was a reporter who went through and started asking people, “What are you doing here?” And person after person said something to the idea of, “That’s Gene Debs, I can feel what he’s telling me.” He had a magnetism that his reputation created but also perhaps was a result of the way he held himself and gestured. But mainly, it was speeches by him and by others, and as I said, local party efforts to get out the vote.

But they didn’t, as far as I know, go door-to-door in the way we would do today: go up to people who you may know from voting records that you have that say that ‘they didn’t vote for our guys last time, but we want to go see if we can get them interested this time.’ That was not done back then, as far as I know.

In the Democratic Party, in the cities, usually there was a Democratic club in each ward, in each neighborhood, but also there was a saloon that was also a sort of subsidiary of the Democratic club run by the guy who had very tight ties to the club. And that’s where working people got their support. I mean, you were down on your luck and you would maybe get a job, if you were loyal to the party and showed up and voted and did all that sort of stuff. You could get a loan, a variety of turkeys at Christmas, free of charge. And so there was a way in which the Democratic Party really tried to — and they were in fact rather successful — organize the working people.

They were literally offering cash on the ballots in different ways, but it was support that was often desperately needed and was really appreciated. Any alternative party was working against that kind of a system, and most major cities had that kind of system. So they didn’t do that. They did have the large rallies and sometimes got really impressive numbers.

By 1917, Debs had voiced his opposition to joining the war, against Woodrow Wilson, who said he would never pardon him. How did he position himself against the war? Can you describe the nativism or nationalism that existed in the United States at that time?

Wilson ran on a no war, peace platform in 1916 and then by April he was joining the Allied Forces. But Debs and many socialists protested.

The kind of nativism that Donald Trump specializes in is not just a new invention. For example, in 1917, in community after community, especially throughout the Midwest, people of German descent were called out into the street and told to burn their books. There was one miner in a county over from where Debs grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana, who was murdered because he refused to burn his books, even though he protested that he was an American. He was German-born like many immigrants.

So there was an ugliness in the culture that was appearing again and Debs, in June of 1918 — he was sick much of that year — went to the Ohio state Socialist picnic, an annual event, and he gave a stirring anti-war speech. It was his first speech in months — he had spent months still recuperating. He was on the rote for like 40 years, did a lot of drinking, a lot of carousing, and his body was suffering. But he was getting his strength back and really wanted to be part of the anti-war movement, especially because many socialists were refusing induction for example or protesting the war and suffering consequences for it.

He went and he actually gave a fairly careful speech. He didn’t argue for immediate and total resistance or anything of that nature, but he heavily critiqued the war and the politics of it and the impact of it. He was arrested and ultimately was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and he traveled first to West Virginia and after a month there he’s transferred to a federal prison in Atlanta, where he was for about 3 years. In 1921, the Republican president, Warren Harding, not only gives him a Christmas pardon but tells the warden to put Debs on a train to Washington: “Have him come to the White House, I want to meet him.” It’s absolutely bizarre. The president just wanted to meet him. He was a fellow Midwesterner who had completely different politics, but he just wanted to meet this guy who he’d heard about.

What effect did prison have on Debs?

Debs came out of jail weakened. He only had one picture in his prison cell — or a cut out — of the crucified Christ, and it was that only picture he had up. It was a very tough period for him.

There’s an incredible story I’ve heard that explains Debs’s human persona: the day Debs was released from prison, the warden opened all of the cells, and the other prisoners all came to the side of the prison where they could see the winding road leading form the main gate out to where he would be picked up by the car to go to the depot. And Debs had apparently been this incredible, kind angel. He had nothing to offer in any material way — he didn’t have special privileges there or anything like that, but just his interactions over three years, even when he was really depressed, made an impression. And reports say that the cheering from the prisoners was just overwhelming. He just turns around — and there’s a soundless video of it — and waves to them, and gets into the car. I think he really tried to live in many ways — not all ways — his socialist beliefs on the human level.

And he was very very good on the speeches and very very good at the rallies, and dynamic in the days he had his strength, from all accounts. But he was never a theoretician. He always backed away from political conflict, even within the Socialist Party. It scared him, somehow. I mean, he was Gene Debs, but he often wouldn’t fight for the principles he stood for. He was scared by some of the powers of the party. As I said, he was a very human human being.

So he was in jail during the 1920 election.

And he ran. He got more numerical votes but less of a percentage of the popular vote, because 1920 was the first time women voted in America. And so the size of the electorate rose enormously. And I think he got 3 percent of the total vote, although he got maybe 100,000 more over 1912. And then he’s active for about 3 years. And he first, in his enthusiasm, embraces the Bolshevik revolution and the Communist Party and that lasts less than a year, in fact maybe not even half a year. And then he retracts all of that, but stays a Socialist. But the world has changed dramatically by that time. And then he gets sick again, and this will be a sickness that begins in 1924 and continues on and off into 1925, when he’s finally entered into a hospice care in Chicago, and that’s where he dies in 1926.

He was born in 1855 — was formed in a 19th century world — and he tried to adapt as best he could to a 20th century reality. By that, I mean the large rallies and all that were one of the major ways they did their politics in the 19th century. And by the 20th century, they’re beginning to move into what we would see as the beginning of the whole modern approach, part of which has to do with what you were talking about — direct contact with the voters — as opposed to the mass rallies. The Socialist Party’s advertising was never large. They put material out but were not in any way as engaged as the Democrats or Republicans.

Are there any lessons we can draw today from Debs’s career or placement along the political spectrum?

I’m not certain. Let me put it this way: From roughly 1904-1905, when Debs went on a southern tour, he refused to give his socialist speech to segregated audience because socialists aren’t immune from racism, either. They had blacks and whites separated in Mobile and other spots along the southern tour and he refused to speak. He said, “No this isn’t socialism.” This is one area that Bernie is less than eloquent on. Again, I think because the eras are so different politically and economically, it’s difficult to make a direct comparison. In 1912, Debs’ socialism was still a viable promise or certainty for many in that political culture and many parts of the world, but I don’t think today we can say anything approximating that here or anywhere else in the world.

The fate of socialism is very different at this point. But I think that’s profoundly different to me. So far, to me at least, even the most conservative Republican commentators I’ve come across haven’t gone after Bernie as a socialist. It’s almost as if it doesn’t make a difference. I think if he becomes the nominee, it’ll be different. Bernie and I grew up with the Soviet Union being shoved down our throats because we had to hide under our desks for drills. The point is, we are, in that regard, in a different place. He hooks them, earning to the “1 Percent,” but that’s not a full socialist program. Then again, I don’t think there is such a program at this point either.

Photo: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) takes part in a rally to preserve union pensions in Washington

Turkish Leader Offers Condolences To Armenians Over Massacre

Turkish Leader Offers Condolences To Armenians Over Massacre

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered condolences to Armenian descendants of massacre victims in a message ahead of the 99th anniversary of the atrocity that Turkey still refuses to describe as a genocide.

The statement issued in seven languages and published widely in Turkish media laments the “shared pain” inflicted on those of all religions and ethnicities whose forebears were killed during the expulsions and brutalities that occurred as the Ottoman Empire collapsed during World War I.

“The 24th of April carries a particular significance for our Armenian citizens and for all Armenians around the world, and provides a valuable opportunity to share opinions freely on a historical matter,” the statement said of the start of the years-long atrocity. “It is indisputable that the last years of the Ottoman Empire were a difficult period, full of suffering for Turkish, Kurdish, Arab, Armenian and millions of other Ottoman citizens, regardless of their religion or ethnic origin.”

Erdogan called for an end to disputes over “hierarchies of pain,” a reference to Armenian criticism of Turkey’s equation of other peoples’ suffering with their own in the atrocities committed by Ottoman soldiers that some claim took 1.5 million Armenian lives.

The prime minister’s statement was hailed by Turkish scholars as historic for its more conciliatory tone but derided by Armenian social leaders as little changed from nearly a century of genocide denial by modern Turkey.

“Ending a 100-year-long denial gives hope to everyone. Following a strict denial policy by Turkey, it is hopeful to get a message of condolences from the prime minister himself. It is the start of healing,” Turkish lawyer and human rights activist Orhan Kemal Cengiz told Today’s Zaman newspaper. “It is a very important step that for the first time a prime minister has extended condolences without adding a ‘but’ on April 24. From now on, the Armenian issue will be discussed in Turkey more freely.”

The head of the Armenian National Committee of America, however, dismissed Erdogan’s statement as a “cold-hearted and cynical ploy” to diminish the suffering inflicted on Armenians in what many countries consider the first genocide of the 20th century.

“Increasingly isolated internationally, Ankara is repackaging its genocide denials,” Aram Hamparian, the Armenian group’s executive director, said in a statement posted on the committee’s website.

Erdogan reiterated in his statement Ankara’s call for a joint historical commission to study what happened a century ago “in a scholarly manner.”

“Having experienced events which had inhumane consequences — such as relocation — during the First World War should not prevent Turks and Armenians from establishing compassion and mutually humane attitudes toward one another,” Erdogan said. “In today’s world, deriving enmity from history and creating new antagonisms are neither acceptable nor useful for building a common future.”

AFP Photo/Adem Altan

Debt Ceiling Questions, Answered

A helpful primer for those who haven’t been following too closely:

Q. This sounds like an odd system. Do you mean that Congress can pass a budget that requires borrowing, and then argue later about whether to approve that borrowing?

A. That’s right. The system goes back to World War I, when Congress first put a limit on federal debt. The limit was part of a law that allowed the Treasury to issue Liberty Bonds to help pay for the war. The law was intended to give the Treasury greater discretion over borrowing by eliminating the need for Congress to approve each new issuance of debt. Over the years the limit has been raised repeatedly, to $14.3 trillion today from roughly $43 billion in 1940. But outside observers have noted that the failure to make increases in the debt limit part of the regular budget process can be risky.