by Nancy McCammon-Hansen
At the risk of sounding like an ultimate history geek, I’m
going to encourage you to read more history in 2014. There are a number of
books out now about facets of history that most of us never learned in school,
and two works that I have read this fall have references to Indiana.
“The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His
Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in America” by Thomas Healy has a
lot to say, particularly if you’ve been following the “Duck Dynasty” flap in
the media. What we take for granted—you can say just about anything you want as
long as it doesn’t endanger others and you’re willing to suffer the
consequences—wasn’t always so.
Alan Dershowitz, writing a review of Healy’s book in
the “New York Times” on August 22, 2013, says that Supreme Court Justice “Holmes had been a strident and often
thoughtless defender of the power of government to punish controversial speech
— or as Healy puts it, ‘to render the First Amendment toothless.’ In 1915, he
handed down a unanimous decision affirming the conviction of a newspaper owner
who had editorialized in favor of nude swimming in isolated areas. And yet in
the fall of 1919 he wrote a dissenting opinion arguing that all expressions
were protected by the First Amendment ‘unless they so imminently threaten
immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an
immediate check is required to save the country.’ Holmes’s Olympian leap from
protecting prudes against seeing bathers ‘with merely the clothes nature gave
them’ to saving the country from imminent harm surely requires explanation, and
Healy offers an intriguing one.”
The United
States in the early 20th century was undergoing remarkable change.
You can read more about that change in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s work “Bully
Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of
Journalism”. (Brace yourself for a good…but very long….read at 750 pages before
the footnotes.) Many of the issues that were dealt with then are being rehashed
today—poverty, big business, worker’s rights, the value or lack thereof of
going to war. In other words, history DOES repeat itself.
But back to
freedom of speech.
Eugene V. Debs
was the self-proclaimed “father of the Socialist movement”. He grew up in Terre Haute, IN. and served as
that city’s clerk from 1879-1883 as well as being elected to the Indiana
legislature in 1885. As a labor organizer, he was imprisoned in Illinois for
his role the Chicago Pullman Palace Car Company strike.
“During his prison term at Woodstock,
Illinois, Debs was deeply influenced by his broad reading—including the works
of Karl Marx—and grew increasingly critical of traditional political and economic
concepts, especially capitalism. He also saw the labour movement as a struggle between classes.
Sympathetic toward Populist
doctrines, he campaigned for the Democratic-Populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896. After announcing his conversion to socialism in 1897, he led the establishment of the Socialist Party of America. Debs was the party’s presidential candidate
in 1900 but received only 96,000 votes, a total he raised to 400,000 in 1904.
In 1905 he helped found the Industrial Workers of the World, but he soon withdrew from the group because
of its radicalism.
“Debs was again
the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1908, 1912, and 1920 (he refused
the nomination in 1916). His highest popular vote total came in 1920, when he
received about 915,000 votes. Ironically, he was in prison at the time, serving
a sentence for having criticized the U.S. government’s prosecution of persons
charged with violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. He was released from prison
by presidential order in 1921; however, his U.S. citizenship, which he lost
when he was convicted of sedition in 1918, was restored only posthumously in
1976.”
Debs took upon
himself a speaking tour of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio in 1918 in an effort to
bait the government about the Espionage Act and its limitation of free speech.
According to Claude Bowers, who heard Debs’ speech in Fort Wayne, “Debs did not
utter a word to which the most supersensitive patriot could take exception. It
seemed to me that he had prepared his speech with the realization that every
word would be microscopically examined by secret agents”.
Holmes would
have, at one time, being strongly opposed to Debs’ speech. While noting in an
opinion about a case involving Debs that there was no problem with Debs
promoting socialism, which the Espionage Act did not prohibit, Holmes coined
the phrase “clear and present danger” when referring to an intimation from Debs
that the draft should be opposed.
But according
to Dershowitz, Holmes changed his mind following a “lively debate — both
written and oral…joined by other luminaries, like Harold Laski, Felix
Frankfurter and Zechariah Chafee, all of whom lobbied Holmes to change his mind
about freedom of speech. At the time, several important cases, growing out of
protests against World War I, were pending before the court. Ultimately
Holmes’s friends persuaded — bullied? — the old man to accept the view espoused
by Learned Hand.”
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One of the best
quotes from Goodwin’s book concerns Lincoln Steffens, a writer for McClure’s
magazine, featured prominently in “Bully Pulpit” as a look at journalism in the
Progressive Era as well as the presidencies and lives of Theodore Roosevelt and
his friend William Howard Taft. Steffens wrote among other works “The
Shame of the Cities”. He became friends with Roosevelt when Roosevelt was
police commissioner in New York City.
Steffens believed, according to Goodwin, that “the
past was not a list of dates to be memorized but a series of questions to be
continually debated”.
McClure’s Magazine was founded by Samuel McClure, who
spent his childhood after his father’s death, in Indiana. McClure worked as a
teen for two years for Dr. Levi Cass, a wealthy Valparaiso doctor, to earn room
and board to attend the new high school in that city. Roosevelt, McClure,
Steffens and other notables of the twentieth century would all become forever
linked with the Progressive Era and the “muckrakers”.
Goodwin, in an interview with NPR on November 4,
2013, said, “The echoes of the past, it just seems, are so clear in today's
world and that turn-of-the-century world. Because what you had at the turn of
the century was a growing gap between the rich and the poor, a growing set of
mergers that produced trusts that seemed to be snuffing out the possibilities
of small businessmen; you had people moving from the country to the city, you
had the pace of life speeding up in ways that it hadn't before, and most
importantly you had the big question ... what should government's relationship
be to the problems created by the age? Roosevelt answered that it should be a
positive force, and this was the first time that really the government stepped
in to have a real role in the economic and social problems of the age.”
In the 1900 presidential campaign, where Roosevelt
had been relegated to the lesser role of candidate for vice president (in an
effort by the Republican Party to rein him in so to speak), he set about
touring the United States and made a stop in Fort Wayne. Sitting presidents did
not campaign, or so McKinley believed, and thus “Roosevelt became ‘the central
figure, the leading general, the field marshal.’ Breaking every record, ‘he
traveled more miles, visited more States, spoke in more towns, made more speeches
and addressed a larger number of people than any man who ever went on the
American stump.’”
 |
| Information on the back of this postcard says this is "Crowd listening to Theodore Roosevelt, Fort Wayne, Clinton and Holway Streets" The dates of the talk vary and so are listed as c. 1901-1910. |
A document in our archives entitled “When Teddy Came
to Town” by Ben Meek tells of Roosevelt’s visit. William Jennings Bryan,
Democratic candidate for president, had visited the city on September 10, and
Debs, the Socialist candidate, on October 3, speaking at the Princess Rink on
the southeast corner of West Main and Fulton. The building was a skating rink
that was also utilized for public meetings.
“The young and
super-energetic Republican Vice-presidential Candidate and Governor of New York
State, Theodore Roosevelt, arranged a swing through the pivotal state of
Indiana by train on October tenth, eleventh and twelfth, 1900. Beginning at
Hammond, he proceded (sic) to Lafayette by train and then on to Frankfort,
Logansport, Peru, Wabash, Huntington and ending with an evening speech and
rally at Fort Wayne.
“ “The “Fort
Wayne News”, the local Republican organ, devoted much copy to the plans for
Roosevelt’s visit. According to the “News”, the Rough Rider Clubs with an
enrollment of over one thousand men, were organized in Allen County and several
local stores advertised Rough Rider Uniforms for sale. To generate interest and
excitement in the visit of the ‘Hero of San Juan Hill’, a flag pole raising was
held on Spy Run Avenue on October fifth. Several speeches were delivered,
including some in German.
“On the great
day, there were two parades, one in the afternoon and a larger one in the
evening which started at the Barr Street Market and continued down Main Street
to the Rink. The marchers included first, the mounted Rough Riders followed by
their dismounted brothers, all of whom were in uniform. The Tippecanoe Club
members, dressed in plug hats and uniforms, the older men in carriages, formed
the Fremont and Lincoln Voters Section. There were the McKinley and Roosevelt
Junior Clubs, members of which were boys and girls. The large German population
was represented by the German Republican Club and was followed by the Colored
Republicans and the Railroad Men’s Republican Club. There were two bands. Most
of the marchers wore uniforms and probably carried kerosene torches, making a
colorful procession.
“Roosevelt’s train
was an hour and a half late so he arrived somewhat fatigued. However the
overflow crowd at the Princess Rink invigorated him. The “Fort Wayne Journal”
described his appearance, ‘Teddy lost no time in mounting a chair where he
could be seen from every part of the hall. He stood for a moment with his
shoulders braced back and his chest out, the cynosure of all eyes. Then he
opened his lips and grinned and his white gleaming teeth could be seen from
every part of the room. The crowd went wild.’”
Bryan and his
running mate, Adlai Stevenson, carried Allen County by 10,601 votes to
McKinley/Roosevelt’s 8,172. But the state as a whole was won by McKinley, who
would die from an assassin’s bullet in the fall of 1901, making Roosevelt the
youngest president in US history.
In addition to the works referenced in this blog post, other sources include
- Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, by Nick Salvatore, 1982, University of Illinois Press
- Eugene V. Debs, Spokesman for Labor and Socialism, by Bernard J. Brommel, 1978, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company
