Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 138 - Eugene Debs

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Eugene Debs organizes the working class and fights back against American entry into WWI. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fiery-socialist-challenged-nations-role-wwi-180969386/ https://debsfoundation.org/index.php/landing/debs-biography/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/wilson-eugene-debs/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. solidarity forever solidarity forever and me still not knowing what I'm doing this is a great cold opening so everybody sees like the behind the scenes of how incompetent I am and how much our producer saves my fucking ass you're gonna have to do a third Kedorn-ing

no more Kedorta at this point i am just gonna decimate myself uh so hello welcome to yet another episode of the lines of my donkey's podcast i'm joe and with me today is labor attorney and part-time labor historian when i need him to be carrie shocky what up dude i'm you know recording here from my uh my uh um you know secret location uh as i sit here and uh sit here in quarantine i mean thankfully a little bit more comfortable than when nick had to do what i think but uh probably you know because i'm not just getting like a food tray of whatever scraps came from like the uh from the chow hall you know like every like 24 hours you're now the third person who's recorded on the show while in quarantine myself nick and now you

congratulations we we have a hat trick for uh well you know we we just thought you know there was uh someone uh what was it like a month ago now someone created that account that was uh uh specifically just saying that they really fucking hated the sound of your voice until they heard mine and that was even worse uh i mean as someone who has to hear my own voice i also hate my voice which is why i don't add up my own podcast right yeah and i've never listened it's actually a pain in the ass i've been on so many episodes because now like you know every so often i'll i won't be paying attention and uh my podcast app will go to a new episode it'll be me on it and have to recoil away and fucking horror hey at least it's not the genocide one um i know people have been people have been sending me uh messages uh regarding why Nick has not been on the show.

No, Nick has not been fired. I don't think legally one of us could fire the other one. And we are both members of the IWW. So I feel like there's a grievance procedure at play. But he's moving. And it requires him to get internet. And he will be back on the show, whatever that is possible. So, yeah, I miss him, too.

He'll be back. I just want him back. God damn it. I feel like shit. Just want him back. And this is this is a disclaimer. I understand this is a military history podcast and we will be talking about military history. However, we'll be talking a lot about labor history today and a guy named eugene v debs so it's gonna be a very political episode um i know sometimes somehow uh the political stance

in this show is kind of i don't know unknown to some listeners uh but we're all different shades of leftist on this show um spoiler alert uh so we're gonna be talking about something that uh me and carrie uh both are really interested in uh and again after four weeks of genocide episodes i kind of want to talk about something i want to talk about like just a lie joe can have something that isn't like a war crime as a treat i mean there is unfortunately there's crimes against humanity yeah well yeah fewer fewer war crimes significantly fewer and and and many uh and many people are saying this um and a lot less people die at least um unfortunately unfortunately no one

tases themselves in the nuts, but you know. No, I don't think a taser has been invented yet. But yeah, if you're someone who comes to listen to just stuff about military battles, this episode probably won't be for you. But maybe it will be. Maybe you'll be turned on to one of the most successful left-wing politicians in American history. And labor organizers, for that matter. Which is admittedly not a broad category. No, it's a very, very short list of people. And I promise this will have something to do with military history.

So stick around. You may learn something. God forbid. So, Shox, I wrote this script for somebody else um admittedly because like normally i have a i have a co-host uh and it starts off with have you ever heard of eugene v debs um and i'm willing to bet that answer is yes for you yeah yeah it's uh i'm actually uh i'm enough of a nerd that i was actually like a pretty young little like leftist which it actually makes me really happy that twitter wasn't around around the time that i

was 13 because i probably would have been like an insufferable fucking tangy for at least some of it but uh amongst us am i right yeah yeah i mean you know it's definitely like i'm glad that you know my uh my little commie like live journal journal postings from 2002 don't exist anymore. Yeah. No, I mean, I got suspended from school for running a school as student body president as a communist. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. I actually won an election for office when I was in high school by doing a parody version of Khrushchev's speech. Was it the kitchen speech or whatever, where he slams his shoe on the table? Oh, yeah. But I guess that's just growing up in communist Massachusetts. I definitely know who Eugene Debs is.

He's not one of my favorite of the American leftists, but he's definitely someone who just kind of... Even I feel like in some history books that are a little bit more mainstream, he just kind of pops up often enough that he's probably someone who might have been on your radar if you didn't sleep your entire way through history class. That's my brand. That's the only class I didn't sleep through. And I mean, like I already said, and maybe someone thought I was joking, I am a member of the IWW. So my thoughts on Debs are probably a little bit stilted. But I do try to call it my bias is what I noticed them. And I didn't learn about him in uh grade school i did learn about him a lot in college uh and because i took a history of american labor movement class yeah which was fucking

outstanding uh it was probably one of my favorite classes and a lot of it was deb's yeah and i think you know we'll talk about this a little bit later on i think he is he would not like how famous he is for one yeah and uh for two i think he is a creature of circumstance and that is if woodrow wilson didn't fucking hate him so much history would have forgotten about him yeah i mean and you know and it's it's difficult too because i feel like it's one of those things where he kind of existed during uh he was not a particularly colorful character compared to a lot of his contemporaries and he's a very normal guy who could just speak well yeah and you know he didn't really like you know i'm sure he did some writing but you know he's not really known as like you know having developed a lot on his own,

necessarily. He wrote one book while he was in prison. Yeah. He was kind of, in a way, very much like a yeoman of the labor left during the late 1800s and early 1900s, which is kind of interesting because he's not someone anyone's ever going to make a movie about because it'll put everyone to sleep over three hours. Also, it would be very hard to find an actor who looks like him because he kind of looks like a turtle, but not in the Mitch McConnell way. An elegant turtle.

He's a damn fine turtle. I like Eugene V. Debs' story because it's a very normal story, in my opinion, and I think that's why it makes it so interesting. So, Eugene Victor Debs was born November 5th, 1855 in Terre Haute,

Indiana. And I don't know if I pronounced that right. Terre Haute. I mean, I've been to... That's where the federal death penalty is now. I know that. Yeah, exactly. Because every time anyone's been put to death in the last six months, you get to hear headlines from Terry Haught to... Terry Haught.

Terry Hatcher. I don't know. I've been to Indiana twice, and I can't recommend it either way. Yeah. Shout out to Indiana for making the news in the worst way possible. So he was born to French immigrant parents. I believe they're from Alsace. Certainly nothing bad would happen

to that region anytime soon. And his family was actually very wealthy once upon a time, but it was way before Eugene Debs was born. But by the time he was born, they were pretty much destitute. So he would hear stories from like his dad about uh back in the day and when we had money so like eugene debs is like i'm having a turnip

for dinner again i really don't care about the old country uh and uh like it was it was very common uh for kids of the lower class back in the day. And depending on where you live today, also today, you're kind of expected to drop out of school and get a job in order to help provide for the family. I also had to do that, though I managed to not drop out. So I was able to balance my shitty job when I was 14 and 15, and also my shitty high school. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that my high school didn't really care if I turned anything in and they would still pass me. But Debs dropped out of school when he was 14 to get a job. And it was super common, like paper boys and things like that. And this is child labor. It's still totally

legal. Not only legal, but essentially a key component of the economic system at that point. Yeah. It's it's 100 percent good and fine, actually, to have five year olds shoving their hands into machinery. And when he was 14, he left high school and began to work in the railroads, a sector or a work sector that would pretty much define his entire life. He began his job cleaning grease from tracks, which was a job I was not aware existed. And sounds miserable.

As someone who's just cleaned grease from a trap in a bakery, that's bad enough. I can only imagine that doing it in a fucking rail yard is probably not a lot of fun. I've had to deal with industrial grease on yard is probably not a lot of fun. I've had to deal with industrial grease on tanks because there's a lot of it. It keeps track tension and things like that. Whenever it

explodes and gets everywhere, it's disgusting. I can imagine it's that hard to clean up. I assume 14-year-old Eugene Debs worked much harder than I did while I was in the Army, though. A terrible work ethic. We had it, too, when I worked on a little buoy tender.

We had to grease all the wire rope and everything else there. We had to use something that we used to call Smurf Jizz. It was literally the color of a fucking Smurf. You just have to scoop it out with your hands with like a you know glove on and like use that to grease the wire rope so i yeah can't imagine it was fun yeah um and he he made about 50 cents a day uh doing this um and i found a conversion rate uh for this for over the years and you know 50 you're like oh well 50 cents a day in the 1800s must have been pretty good that's actually about 10 a day uh for some very hard physical labor for a 14 year old child um so it's not good even for then but um well he just needs a side gig

right yeah he just needs to work for a fucking i don't know carriage uber um to be fair this is considered much better than some shitty uh child jobs of the day uh you could certainly make worse money but that doesn't mean it's good right but it's the mid-1800s and uh debs didn't exactly have a lot of options open to him like he couldn't like quit and get a better job this is the best thing he could hope for uh so he kept working and eventually he got promoted to painting the trains which honestly sounds like shit but it does sound better than cleaning up grease um but he eventually hit pay dirt uh when one of the train's firemen got showed up to work drunk and got fired uh so they promoted Debs to his position been there I mean yeah I've been promoted dumber ways I guess

now a fireman isn't like you know you call 911 and a fireman shows up it's the guy who shoveled coal into a steam engine which it's a much harder and more dangerous job than anything he had done before

so in case people are unaware sometimes boilers fucking explode if you didn't do the job correctly. And sometimes they exploded even when you did do it correctly. Yeah. And this is an era before there's any sort of workers' comp, which I think really only started in the... You get some forms of it in of in the mid 1800s, but like it was not very prevalent at the time that Debs was working. Tort law was also like not really what you would expect. So essentially like if you died on the job,

it was just like, oh, well that sucks. Find us a new boy. Yeah. You know, like, oh,

let's blew this one up. But well, you know, better just like scrape them off and get a new one. And that's like, he was part of the fireman's union which was the first union he was a part of and that's like at bare minimum is

what they did is like if you die they'd give your family money yeah but his job is terrible but it did double his pay immediately so that's that's good so he worked his way up to that fireman's union and eventually worked his way up to like he's like the grand treasury.

And then he did do a single term in the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat. But this is like, you know, early 1900s Democrats now. Yeah. Which, you know, was not great. No. I mean, like these are, you know, the rest of your party is essentially just everyone down South who just recently got their right to like vote and hold office, but you know,

back or actually probably at that point, not even because reconstruction was still going on. So like, like the guys are working with probably own slaves. Yeah. Like 100%. But this is, you know,

Debs, the younger. And But this is, you know, Debs the Younger. And at this point, Debs is absolutely not the person he'd go down in his history as. Now, at the time, rail unions were much different than what we would think of when we think of rail unions

in the 1900s, and especially what we think of unions in general today. For example, they were not really a method of collective bargaining. In fact, the concept of collective bargaining. In fact, the concept of collective bargaining was illegal. You were forming an illegal combination and

restraint of trade. Yeah. They were pretty much a hangout, like an Eagles Club or something, where dudes could ditch out of... Ignore it without hanging out with their families and going hang out their fellow rail workers after work um this is the organization that debs rose up with it uh just for just for an example uh the union's motto is benevolence sobriety and industry yeah it was more of like some like sort of like horatio alger like bootstraps shit like combined with like a drinking club like you know the idea that like any sort of union that would actually be legal was like still very much like

a an unconventional concept and like there's no you know I mean federal labor law is still like you know 50 years away in the 30s so you know and particularly with the railroad you're going against guys who just have like all the fucking

power in the world. Right. Not to mention, the time that he is coming up in is like Standard Oil was just created and commands an incredible amount of power. There's Pacific Rail and things like that. So he is born

right in the heyday of american oligarchs uh and titans of industry as we i too kindly call them sometimes yeah yeah and i mean this is yeah this is this is an era where antitrust law like really hasn't been developed yet like in a in a real way uh i mean like you know you kind of have the rise of these first capitalist barons, which are the former. The rich people we see today really didn't exist in the same vein in the US until this period. It was a period of just extreme inequality, where you have these guys, you have a lot of the magnets of industry just cornering the market in various different ways. And everyone else is just... I mean, as you said, he was still only earning about $10 a day for an entire day's worth of what I assume to be backbreaking work.

He has like 16 to 18 hours a day. Yeah. I mean, it was in here without any employment regulation whatsoever, any labor regulation whatsoever. And extreme boom and bust cycles is the other big part of that. Yeah. And that's one of the things we'll talk about when he gets to striking. Yeah. Throughout this whole period, even more than the past 10 years, you would just have absolute bank collapses every three to five years or so. And so you just have periods of relative prosperity. And then just kind of, as Joe was saying earlier, like as you were saying earlier about his family did have money at one point and then, you know, had about a turnip

between them towards the time that he was born. I mean, that kind of like, that was pretty common. Like you could gain and lose fortunes really fucking quick. Thankfully, that doesn't happen anymore. Right. Yeah. Anyway, everyone just hear that Tesla is now worth more than the other 12 top car makers in the world combined. Yeah, I can't wait until he invents Mars apartheid. Yeah. If he does, I'm going to actually have to sue him because I put that in a sci-fi novel

and I did not mean for it to become reality. Just to underline how different Debs is at this point in his life than what he'd come up to be, he said, quote, labor and capital are friends yeah and he also didn't think strikes were a good idea however like most socialists or people who'd become leftists in some flavor another debs arrived at radical ideas out of his experiences operating within capitalism of course the railways really liked unions the way that they were.

That is, not having collective bargaining powers and only kind of paying out death benefits if you get blown up on your shitty maid boiler. And it gave gifts and favors to the union leadership to make sure the union stayed that way. Now, I don't mean to say that Debs was a sellout. He wasn't. He was just naive. He thought if the powers of capital saw how hard he worked and how hard his fellow

laborers worked, they'd be treated fairly and paid well. Another one of the reasons he took the path at first is because, remember, collective bargaining wasn't a thing. And every time you tried to collectively bargain, the state would use horrible violence to try to make sure you couldn't. This included the Pinkertons, the National Guard, random dudes with guns, strike breakers. Yeah, just militia. You would be killed.

Yeah. And quickly, and maybe also your family. Yeah. So it was a hell of a step to be like, no, we should you know collectively bargain because you will have violence visited upon it's not a matter of how many of you they're going to kill it's like when does it start yeah um because like you know for fuck's sake during a miners uh union strike they were planning to drop bombs on them with fucking air force planes this is no fucking joke yeah and i mean you know or you know if it's uh even more than now i mean

we've all been obsessed with uh you know jimmy you know the disappearance of jimmy hoffa for like fucking 60 years now uh just about i mean 50 years but um the just having your union leader you know or like even just the guy who spoke at the work just disappear on a regular basis, particularly in some of the company towns that various different industrial powers would set up. I mean, you would just disappear or just end up in a ditch. Maybe you're hung from a streetlight as a warning to others. I mean, all sorts of shit like that. It's the implication. Right.

Now, as anybody who has ever taken a class or a look at early American industrial history, or I don't know, had a job at one point in your life, could have told Debs that licking the company boots probably wouldn't get him or his workers what they needed, what they thought they needed. This led the firemen's union and Debs to authorize the first strike in the union's history in 1888. Unfortunately, the Burlington strike was a complete failure, but it did lead Debs to learn some things. And that is to understand craft workers should unionize together, not along specific job lines. So what happened during the Burlington strike was he was in the firemen's union. Specifically, only firemen could be part of that union, the coal shovelers. They allied with other very specific unions. But what the company did, instead of caving to union demands, divide and conquer. They bribed the other unions to strike break for them yeah so whoops um so he

started the american railway uh whale railway union holy shit i can't read um which was america's first ever industrial union that means everyone who works in a rail yard joins this one union they can no longer be divided and conquered into the firemen and the brakemen or whatever now you have to deal with everybody in a united front and uh and together in 1894 they uh did another strike with the great northern railway and they won concessions for the workers one of the things is like grievances something that simple like yeah holy shit we could actually complain about our bosses um and like you know death benefits and things like that these aren't

people like demanding at 50 an hour they're like we would rather not die at work please yeah i i like not to be used as fuel after i collapse on the job yeah and if you die in the job they actually just use you for track grease right yeah yeah I'd like not to be melted down please in my like you know in my death yeah uh and this led to probably the second biggest thing that Debs is known for that is the Pullman strike of

1894 um the Pullman strike is the Pullman strike took place in the Pullman Palace Car Company which is a very fancy name for a company that made train cars. But for upper class people who were traveling. Literal coach building. Yeah.

So there was a boom, like Shox talked about, and then there was a bust. So they built a ton of cars for this company. And then there was the bust came when they made fucking too many of them. This, of course, led to the biggest thing that Debs is known for, the Pullman Strike. Now, the Pullman Strike took place against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which is, you know, the palace is in the name. They built literal coach cars, but they're like upper class coach cars. And like Shox talked about, there's a boom and then there's a bust so they built too many goddamn cars and then they had to cut wages in order to make up for the losses because they couldn't sell anymore unfortunately when they cut wages for its workers in order to work for the pullman palace car

company you had to live in drum roll please the pullman palace company town and live in pullman palace company housing and shop at pullman palace company stores um so when they cut wages for their workers they did not cut prices of any of the things within the company uh within the company town so effectively made them homeless and destitute while working full-time Perfect. Now, this is the problem, I think maybe the first time we've ever talked about company script or company towns in this show. So I'll go over it a little bit. So bear with me for a bit if you already know.

So during this time, especially in places like mines or rail yards, it was not uncommon for workers to be paid in company script, not money. Think of it as monopoly money. The script workers to be paid in company script not money think it was monopoly money uh the script could be spent only in company towns um and like company owned stores effectively creating their own really fucked up economy with the money going right back to the company effectively creating their own industrial fiefdom that the workers couldn't leave because

their money was in train bucks or whatever which is in particular the reason why you see it in uh mining in particular is because obviously a lot of mining was done in uh areas where you know just because of where the mine was set up you wouldn't already have a lot of um other infrastructure so you know you essentially had you know unless you wanted to try you wanted to try to travel 20 miles away by a fucking horse, there was nowhere else that you could really do your shopping. So the company used your immobility against you to force you to shop in their stores. Yeah. And you couldn't leave because your whole life savings is in coal dollars. And because you're probably working six and a half days a week or something.

Yeah. And sometimes the companies would pay people in real money, but then force them to live in company housing, effectively laundering the money right back to themselves bit by bit. And I think that was the case with Pullman, is that they paid people people actual wages but then forced them to live in company housing. Yeah. So they cut their real wages but then didn't cut their rent. And that ended up being the step too far after being

fucked over for years. If that seems familiar to you, it's because it's essentially what we've been doing in the United States for the last six months. So get ready for that. Thankfully, there hasn't been any social upheaval at all. Yeah. Things have been really fucking normal this week. Yeah.

Yep. Totally good and fine. Now, the strike worked to an extent. They made alliances with other unions that covered other parts of the railway and effectively crippled the national transportation system. And then rather than be like, maybe these people have a point, maybe we should talk to them and pay them fairly and treat them like human beings, the government called in thousands of cops, soldiers, and strike breakers who were deployed to crush the strike.

And it was broken by force, killing 13 people. Eugene Debs was in the middle of all of this, and it was a radicalizing moment for him, who prior to this would never have called himself a socialist, just a normal dude who wanted to live a decent life. This is from... Eugene Debs wrote this in 1902. Quote, The combined corporations were paralyzed and helpless.

At this juncture, they were delivered in wholly unexpected quarters, a swift succession of blows that blinded me for an instant and then opened wide my eyes. And the gleam of every bayonet and flashes every rifle, the class struggle was revealed. This is my first practical lesson in socialism, though wholly unaware it was called that by name. Yeah. So good job, cops. Well, I mean, you know what I mean? There's the apocryphal phrase, like, you know, you get the union that, you know, employers get the union that they deserve. And, you know, I mean,

you have to imagine that the chief, the legal instrument that's at work here is injunctions. And so the way that, you know, the law would function during this period is that employers were allowed to get injunctions to stop strikes. So even now, as shitty as our labor law is, you can't actually force – I mean, you can economically try to starve folks out, but you can't just force them back to work through the power of an injunction. I mean, there are public sector limitations to that. But I mean, in general, most labor law has an anti-injunction provision, at least for private sector. The injunction's very weird. It's like the judge said, you have to stop striking now.

Yeah. Otherwise, you're committing a felony. Like, well, that's dumb. Why would I listen to that? Yeah. Yeah. So that was the kind of legal tool that they would use to then call in troops and essentially force folks back to work at the point of a bayonet, if not a bullet. Sometimes both. Right. So while now a self-described socialist, Debs was also arrested and thrown in prison on federal charges due to the strike. He was charged with a few things.

One of them was the injunction, but the other one was mail obstruction due to the fact that several of the trains that the strike had held up also included federal mail. So, yeah, just trying to tack things on. Though times are much different, and he only served six months. During this time in jail, his politics only went further and further to the left. People were sending him endless amounts of books and theory, which he read constantly.

And he realized what he wanted to do when he got out. Though he still stayed true to just talking to people that they're human and how to better themselves and their material conditions rather than screaming theory at them. Might be a good idea. So when he got out, he formed the Socialist Party.

There's a few other things before that, but I'm going to skip ahead a bit. I think there's the Democratic Progressives or something stupid like that. But eventually morphed into the Socialist Party. And then he began running for president pretty much all the time. Yeah. He was kind of the Ralph Nader of the late 1800s. But I think he actually did better. Yeah.

I mean, he was more of a legitimate... He was probably a more legitimate candidate at that point than Ralph ever was or the Green Party in general ever has been. Yeah. I think he won more votes than the Green Party in general ever has been. Yeah, I think he won more votes than the Green Party did this year, I think. Yeah. Or last year, rather. Now, obviously, we know he didn't win, but he was one of the most successful third-party candidates of all time and certainly the most successful candidate from any party calling itself socialist um in one case he came in second place in florida ahead of eventual president william howard taft and for president teddy roosevelt

and he was winning he was winning like five to nine percent of the popular vote yeah yeah i mean i know the population's much smaller but god damn well and you know i mean part of it too and in certain states you you have to think is just due to the kind of immigrant population that come over from Europe, where all these ideas were treated as just kind of like a normal part of the political spectrum, even if it was something that they got forced to flee their fucking country over. But it was at least something that folks were talking about. And most major cities at this point would have a socialist newspaper or something to put out ideas.

And there was this entire ecosystem that is hard to imagine now in comparison. Yeah. During this time, a lot of people in the socialist party did get elected to things like the house. One guy in New York was in the house, uh, the house of representatives as a member of the socialist party of America, which is like crazy to think about now. Uh, but yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there was, you know, like, uh, Wisconsin in particular, you know, had like a fairly like active, like socialist movement for a long time. And I think the, the mayor of Milwaukee was a socialist, you know, I mean, it was, you know, not, it was something that probably was not repeated really until the last, I would say, 10 years

when you started to see folks from DSA start to run for things. And even then, most of the time, this is members of the Democratic Party. They're not running as socialists, which is very weird. And I mean, obviously, we all know why that's the case. So during the same time he also helped start the industrial workers of the world or the iww sometimes known as the wobblies which i am a member of um and uh certainly nothing bad happened to members of the wobblies simply for

being socialists no no no centralia it was it was really weird like as a member of the iww in washington and someone who lived like 30 minutes away from the centralia massacre where members of the iww were shot by members of the american legion for you know being socialist yeah uh that every single year on the anniversary uh they just like argue over who's at fault like it's been a hundred years guys yeah when i know that like the local wobblblies show up every year and do a commemoration, which is nice. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The American Legion is fucking toxic. We've talked about them before. And yeah, they're mostly the problem here. Yeah, and I mean, kind of have been through history. I mean, even subsequent VSOs that have opened up have generally opened up have generally opened up because their members didn't want to join the uh the american legion yeah or the vfw who's yeah i don't know if they're any better um yeah i mean i don't think any of them are great

at this point but i mean that's just no you know another 10 years they'll all be died out because it's just full of old dudes yeah uh so unfortunately unfortunately for America and, you know, all of humanity, it was during this time that a little shindig called World War I started. Long story short, some inbred people were beefing over turf and tens of millions of people died as a direct result. And it was bad. Taking a really bold stance here. Yeah.

World War I. Bad, actually. Yeah yeah it turns out looked into it and uh not great yeah uh turns out no wars are really necessary uh weird um but at first america stayed out of it in uh 1914 debs joined thousands of other americans demanding uh that america keep its policy of neutrality firmly in place. And that is kind of what happened at first. At the start of World War I,

most of America held Debs' anti-war beliefs at the time, though not his socialist critique of the war, but that was something he was like, you know what? Close enough. Fine. Debs believed that the war was uh between the ruling classes of nations that the working class shouldn't have anything to do with

it uh he said quote i know of no reason why the workers should fight for what the capitalists own debs wrote to novelist friend upton sinclair or slaughter one another for countries that belong to their masters which uh, uh-huh. Yep. But I mean, that was still, you know, I mean, the, you know, I mean, as, as well, unfortunately I have to get into, but I mean, it's, uh, it caused a big split. Like, you know, I mean, at first really more with like a lot of the European socialist parties, but you know, like whether or not to support nationalism kind of ended up being like a wedge issue for a lot of folks during this period. Yeah.

And they were certainly drug along by some government stuff we'll talk about. And Americans' opposition to the war wasn't like, fuck the monarchies and them sending their subjects to their deaths in Europe. It was like, why does this have anything to do with us? Fuck off. Which is also valid. Well, and it's something that when you think about the military industrial complex as really being a creation of World War II, and this is a period where with the exception of clashing with European powers, Spain most recently in this particular case but you know the united states was you know a lot more of it uh internally domestically focused

or at least you know uh domestically colonialist um then you know we would be able to recognize it today and there's you know very small standing army like you know no like real federal 100,000 people yeah and even in general, the federal infrastructure, the administrative state was fucking tiny. Washington DC was very much still like a fucking backwater. Yeah. World War I and the development of the

American Expeditionary Force that we would send is pretty much the final death throes of federalism. Yeah. And it would centralize a lot of military power upon the federal army uh but yeah america is not even considered a military power by anybody except maybe mexico because we've already fucked with them a couple times um well and you know yeah because even really like our our uh we hadn't really intervened anywhere in like

central america at this point yet, with the exception of Cuba. In the Spanish-American War, we were still using state reserve. Volunteer forces. Yeah, that was the banner under which my great-grandfather committed some light war crimes in the Philippines. I mean, whom's amongst us? Am I right? Yeah, just some light ones. I mean, who's amongst us?

Am I right? Yeah. You know, just, you know, just some light ones. Uh, I believe it was a member of the Nebraska volunteers that started the entire insurrection for the most part.

Oh, really? Yeah. He, he shot at random unarmed, uh, Philippine soldier. Oh,

cool. Yeah. I mean that, yeah, that about checks out while shouting the N word because of course he did. Yeah. Because of course he was. Yeah, because of course he was. Yeah. So.

And like, so when I say that America was broadly anti-war at the time, it's mostly guilty of circumstance. The concept that America is going to go fight in a European war is very weird for most Americans. And not to mention, we simply lack the military to do so like when we finally do ramp up and start recruiting an army like there's not enough rifles to go around and people are training with sticks yeah i will we'll talk a little bit about that too um and while america was neutral quote unquote it didn't mean they wanted they didn't want to make some money uh we were flooding the allies with supplies. But we did see ourselves as a peacemaker. This is still 1914-1915, very early on in the war. but also to try to get the war to stop by bringing all the sides together

and to negotiate. But because it's 1914-1915, and not to mention this wouldn't really matter a few years even in the future from this, every side thought that they could win in short order so they didn't want to talk peace. So it didn't really work. This began to change

when the Germans blew up the Lusitania. It was a passenger ship and killed hundreds of civilians. And it was framed asusitania uh the it was a passenger ship and killed hundreds of civilians uh and it was framed as a cowardly attack an unarmed passenger ship which it was but the lusitania is also full of ammunition being brought to europe to be used against the germans uh that was definitely one of the biggest things that i think i've learned in the last few years that it was not something that i learned in like either middle school or high school was that no like i that was definitely, the party line was still very much like,

oh, America had to avenge the Lusitania. I was like, no, that was super just- And if I remember correctly too, Germany definitely either targeted or raided or whatever out several other American ships before that. So it was essentially just like a moment of opportunity for Wilson to go to war. Yeah, it was mostly,

um, they, we were, they had attacked merchant ships, but, uh, you know, hence they brought up,

you know, unrestricted submarine warfare needs to go, blah, blah, blah. But the Lusitania was very obviously a passenger ship. Yeah. Um,

which is wrong, but you can also say blowing up civilians is bad. But using them as human shields for your war material puts them in that situation. Everybody here sucks. Now, that wasn't exactly what pushed Wilson to war. What did was in 1917 when Germany sent the Zimmerman telegram urging Mexico to invade the United States. Now, this is hardly realistic for Mexico to do. They were still in the middle of a civil war, not to mention they didn't have the military capacity to do so.

And the United States is fucking huge. It's simply not going to work. But it did show that the Germans were totally fine with war against the U.S. And if they managed to defeat the allies in Europe after everything the U.S. had done in order to aid their war effort, there's a very good chance Germany would make war against the US and if they managed to defeat the allies in Europe after everything the US had done in order to aid their war effort there's a very good chance Germany would make war against them anyway now there were some debates over whether the

telegram was real or not for instance when it was presented in US media it was said like we intercepted this or this was given to us by Mexico or whatever but reality is intercepted by or this was given to us by mexico or whatever but reality is intercepted by british intelligence and given to us uh so that started a conspiracy theory somewhat that the british placed it uh in order to lure us into the war but uh no that's not what

happened uh imperial german foreign minister arthur Arthur Zeman admitted a few months later, yeah, I said that. And this is like while they're still at war, like, yeah, that's my bad, bro. Whoops. Now, there's a lot of anti-German sentiment, not to mention a lot of anti-Mexican sentiment, which thankfully America's never had again involved in this. Mostly the fact that there's already been raids across the border in regards to Pancho Villa on both sides. We've sent entire expeditionary forces to try to hunt them down.

Not to mention that I think it's Carranza was in the middle of a civil war at the time. And I think all this area had only become the United States 60 years previously, within a couple of generations. So know you gotta imagine that there's still like a lot of bad blood you know there's still motherfuckers quoting you know kicking around who had probably like been at the alamo or not at the alamo but you know like certainly mexicans had probably been around all the americans get shot yeah so sorry all the texans uh they weren't americans uh yet or ever slavers members of a slave rebellion again um yeah so it's weird to think that that like fear of a war with mexico is what drove us to world war one because it's really not we weren't we weren't realistically

afraid that mexico was was invaded because it wasn't a military reality. It was more of a, okay, I guess Germany fucked around. Now they have to find out. It's all very stupid. There's also some writing saying that the US was kind of worried that if they didn't

get involved, the British and the French wouldn't be able to pay their loans back. I've also heard of it being kind of like a way to try to consolidate the nation on the part of nativists just out of promoting nationalism as a way

of kind of creating I mean this was just before this kind of second resurgence of the Klan so there was definitely a lot of trying to create a white identity as we would currently understand it. Oh yeah. Wilson showed,

uh, the first ever movie screened in the white house is a KKK movie. Yeah. Yeah. Birth of a nation. Yeah. Yep. Um,

yeah, there's a lot of reasons why the U S entered world war one. Uh, Wilson wanted, also wanted a, uh, a voice at the negotiation table to push his own agenda, which all failed. So, you know, whatever.

Anyway, the U.S. found itself in the middle of war, but it didn't really have an army to go to war with. In the lead up to the entry of World War I, the U.S. pretty much knew they had nothing in regards to an army that could realistically be sent off to Europe in order to fight with its peers and against its enemies there, especially not on the same footing. Even as the start of the war in 1914, the government knew they were fucked if they actually had to get involved. They knew that they wanted a federal army rather than relying on the National Guard and volunteer units like they had done in their war against Spain, which showed themselves terribly. And really, the only reason why we won is because the Spanish army is even worse shaped than we were. like they had done in their war against Spain, which showed themselves terribly. And really the only reason why we won is because the Spanish army is even worse shaped than we were. Right.

Like for instance, during one invasion, a Spanish island didn't even know they were at war. And I can't remember the fucking island now. I think it was Guam maybe. That sounds right. But the American Navy fired on them island now i think it was guam maybe um that sounds right but the we uh like the american navy fired on them and the spaniards sent out a boat requesting ammunition because they thought

it was simply a salute and they wanted to be able to return it they had no idea they were at war so oh fuck yeah uh i mean they had they had plans for a draft uh all the way back in 1914 and 15 and it was a limited one and honestly it's a much better plan and much better draft than anybody's come up with in american history before or since so starting in 1915 they wanted to draft 600 000 men a year uh but just long enough to be given basic military training and then sent back home to go work their normal jobs and be part of reserve units with the active federal army only being used to train draftees that came into service.

In any case of emergency, the reserve units could be activated. This is literally a much better way of drafting than the U S ever used in real life. Yeah. Well, and then you think about like, you know,

how a lot of drafting ended up getting used where it was like towards the end of World War II, where it was just, all right, you've been in for 60 days and you're in Europe. Yeah. Or during the Vietnam War, where people would be drafted for 13 months. Yeah. Just long enough to get them through boot camp, get them over for a year, and then you get back and you get discharged. Yeah. It's all very stupid. This system works much better i'm actually i'm actually um much better with the system than the one that we currently have um because it would come it would it would defang the the united states military but it would give us an effective defense force that's what i want yeah i mean i think it's

um is it kind of similar to like uh like what switzerland does i think so but i don't know enough about this that's fair and i don't want to talk on my ass about it yeah yeah now once the u.s had finally officially entered the war uh they kind of hoped that so obviously that draft program that i just talked about never happened uh and when they entered the war most people were on the side that like, okay, we want to volunteer army. We want people to volunteer for active service. And they hoped that the thrill and adventure in wartime service would drive hundreds of thousands of men into the ranks with the ultimate goal of 1 million men in uniform. And to be fair, this worked for a lot of countries, though those countries were in

Europe where the idea of this war could be in their front door if they didn't win was very real. So in the US, instead of having a million men in uniform, within six weeks, only about 150,000 people volunteered. Hell yeah. Because remember, the war is not popular. Yeah. And it's been going on for a couple of years at this point. popular. Yeah, and it's been going on for a couple years at this point, so everyone knows they're not just going to go cover themselves

in glory and lead a fantastic cavalry charge, even in the United States. Yeah, like the lies that could be told in France and England in the very beginning, like, home by Christmas! They're like, yo, this is going to suck. Would you like to sign up? Yeah. All you've been reading about are newspaper

articles about people just dying in the mud for the last couple years. Wouldn't you like to do it too no yeah like these these guys have the benefit of opening up a newspaper and reading about the battle of the psalm and be like i don't want i want no part of this yeah like you know after like the the fucking pals battalions just got like you know the pals armies got the shot shit out of it or shit shot out of them like i don't know yeah i wouldn't want to fucking like hey man you want to go fucking the list together fuck you asshole yeah i i would take a toe off to escape the trenches for sure oh yeah because you're gonna lose it anyway so i mean fuck it might as well get it out of the way early yeah um so instead of waiting on this volunteer army we got the

selective service act of 1917 uh and credit where credit's due it did fix some of the problems with the last one during the civil war where you could buy your way out of the draft um or hire someone to go for you yeah yeah you couldn't do that anymore um but along with the draft law uh came with a massive propaganda campaign to drum up support for the war because like i said nobody wants to do this shit right and with those came the espionage and sedition acts both passed in 1917 um and the house the laws passed unanimously with the exception of one nay vote cast by a guy named meyer london who happened to be a member of the socialistist Party from New York. So credit where credit is. Now, in Congress, some people did vote against it, but he was the only one in the House.

You mean in the Senate? Yeah, in the Senate. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, he was the only one in the House who voted against it. Now, while the government had been churning out propaganda, this was the weapon they needed to round out the political repression in order to shut up all

these people saying that the war is bad um this gave the government sweeping powers to throw pretty much everyone i didn't like in prison for saying so much as like maybe we shouldn't be fighting this war yeah and like you know and was like very heavily targeted towards like fucking immigrants and i think actually if i remember correctly one of these one of these sedition acts uh even created the the captain of the port role that the coast guard has now which allowed them to like post guards around uh major shipping areas and like arrest people at like a federal level for it pretty much yeah it was used as like so it was a weird it was a weird weird law. For instance, even speaking out against President Wilson himself would be considered illegal in some cases. And it was very decentralized. The Attorney General left it up to local US attorneys to bring charges as they saw fit. There was no federal stormtroopers kicking down your door or anything. left up the local authorities uh now the excuse for that was your local authority you'll know who the threat is in your local area however this meant

that the laws were almost always used to target racial and religious minorities as well as left wing organizations especially the wobblies yay and also a lot of black people yes yeah i mean pretty much it was just used to like you know as, as with any of these laws, it was just used as a cudgel to like, you know, go after, you know, what kind of, you know, enemy of the state or enemy of capital have it exist in a particular area. Well, I mean, that's no matter what the reason for whenever political repression tools come out, whether it's this acts or the Patriot X wherever it's the the repression always starts on the right and exerts outwards it's never any other way like you know obviously we see this now

where it's almost always used against minorities and socialists and anarchists or whatever but like the Patriot Act was empowered federal authorities to infiltrate just random mosques and sewing and reading circles from like old ladies and shit who maybe also talked about the war not being good in Iraq. Yeah. Like Quakers, like the anti-war movement in like 2003, 2004,

WTO protesters, ELF, folks who like... And of course, disproportionately, you get prosecutions and you just get even just general harassment, folks coming to your house and whatever. Meanwhile, during the same period, you had the rise of the, as Joe knows very well, the Michigan militia movement and whatever during the 90s and into the 2000s and somehow that's what you know which uh is something that uh was left primarily unchecked and definitely hasn't come back to bite us in the ass in the course of like the last you know uh seven or eight days yeah the only thing that anybody ever cared about the michigan militia ever is when timothy mcveigh got involved because obviously we know how that ended right but i don't know and i mean like uh it's one of those things, too, where that's why, you know, I have to laugh every time that, you know, someone brings up, you know, what, you know, you can't advocate for this, you know, or you shouldn't you shouldn't laugh at this. You know that these tools, these tools of censorship, you know, Trump getting kicked off of Twitter, that'll, you know, that that'll get used against the left one day. And it's like, motherfucker, it already does.

you know that that'll get used against the left one day and it's like motherfucker it it already does it already happens every single bit it always it always is and they know that because most people i mean the left is generally politically engaged or the ones like eugene debs constantly going on speaking tours having meetings organizing normal people don't do that shit so it won't affect them yeah well and it's just like they they know this and it's one of those things so like you know every time i mean i'm not like advocating for like you know additional like statues i think that's fucking dumb and like i'm not saying that you know the state needs to be provided with more like tools at its disposal to like grind you under its heel but it's definitely one of those things where if you pretend that like oh no like what happens if this is going to get used against the left? Whatever you're talking about has probably already been used against the left. So the fact that it is at all ever used against the right is something to at least gain some amount of schadenfreude joy out of it.

And the idea that's like, oh, no, we need more statues and more tools. Like, weird. Only if we didn't already have all these local, state, and federal laws against arming yourself and storming government buildings. It's weird that we had this blind spot in our legislation that allowed this to happen. Or maybe it's just because people have been screaming for years something was going to happen, and they got fucking ignored. Well, and it's also like, I mean, it's the same reason why if you steal 20 bucks from a liquor store, it's a fucking felony. You go to jail for five years. And if you loot a fucking entire company saddle with a bunch of debt and then sell it and have it go bankrupt, you get like Rotarian of the year at the local fucking award ceremony in December. you get like Rotarian of the year at the local fucking, you know,

the award ceremony in December. I mean, it's like the guy who stole, uh, the guy who kicked in Nancy Pelosi's door and stole mail and shit might face like a year in prison. And there was like BLM activists who are facing life in Utah for pouring red paint on somebody's doorstep.

Yeah. Yeah. Shut the fuck up. I don't care. It's just, I don't know. I mean, I, yeah, just the dumb up i don't care it's just i don't know i mean i yeah just the dumbest fucking shit yeah let's not pretend that these laws are applied fucking evenly and also you know what you know what else uh happens from time to time when this occurs paramilitaries get involved

shocks uh so that happens here too uh yeah as it as it always fucking does because you know like the minute you give a little tin pot dictator like an inch of fucking power they take it it's weird it's almost like when you empower unhinged people um who you know want to enforce the law with their own hands and brutalize their political opponents that's just what they'll do um and if you feed them enough they'll blow up in your face. So it wasn't just the government cracking down on everybody or in everything who might speak out against the war. The American Defense Society, a right-wing vigilante group,

pulled anti-war speakers off soapboxes in New York City and beat them to death. The American Protective League, a national group of 250,000 volunteers acting on the blessings of the US Attorney General Thomas Gregory, kicked open their neighbors' homes and searched their mail and reported allegedly disloyal behavior, many of whom were arrested and thrown in prison. Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's a dumb aside, but it's one of the few things that I've been able to get any joy out of over the course of being inside for the greater part of the past 10 months

i was occasionally playing uh forza and you know just like on an xbox that i bought just you know in particular for that purpose and one of the things i'm always struck by is the sheer number of motherfuckers who like want to make every single fucking car that you can have in the game into a cop car like it's like a deep fucking sickness when you like you look at like i don't know some fucking lamborghini or something and like man what if i made into a cop car like what the fuck is wrong with you how far have you like put that boot down your throat where like you can't like i don't know just like enjoy like a dumb car game for what it is you got to even pretend to be a fucking cop in it have you ever throat fucked a boot so hard the toes come out of your ass i mean i mean if that's

your kink i mean it's fine but like jesus fucking christ like you know i mean it's like the joke they make on uh you know trash future a bunch about like volunteer fucking border force i mean that's what all these fucking assholes are yeah it's like the again going back to the capital even though I'm trying not to do that it's like there's a hundred percent chance that there is a blue line flag within five feet of a cop being beaten to death yeah like or being warned by one of the fucking people who's doing it like I don't know

yeah yeah we're a diseased people man now kind of like what we talked about during the Iraq war with you know whoever part of whatever federal organizations, infiltrating reading circles and anti-war groups, regardless of their politics, it also happened here. There were some conservative groups that were targeted, mostly like Quakers and other religious groups. But the anti-war activists ran the gamut from leftist to isolationist conservatives, and they were all targeted though.

Most of the Quakers and conservatives did not go to prison. Not so much for the leftists. Fuck. And one case, 2000 war protesters were arrested for the crime of inspiring resistance to military recruitment. One of these was noted socialist speaker, Kate Richards O'Hare,

uh, who was sentenced to five years in prison for giving an anti-war speech in North Dakota. The government also blocked everything it considered anti-war or against the war effort, from actual anti-war leaflets and newspapers, of which there was tons, to a movie about the Revolutionary War because it made their allies, that being, you know, the British, look bad. Just so fucking stupid uh just for comparison so we know where the priorities are for the u.s government at the same time this is happening the supreme court struck down a law banning child labor yeah

yeah yeah no that's we're just know, just firing on all fucking cylinders. Just like some super like fucking turbocharged capital is shit. Well, most of this is going on. Debs was secluded away in his house in Indiana. He would see Debs was sick. He had a lot of health problems. And he spent his time writing for a lot of the newspapers that would find his articles being censored out of them, and then those newspapers just getting closed down.

This eventually began to piss him off more and more as he realized that the freedom of speech was gone, not to mention expression and one's airing of grievances with the government. And a lot of his friends were getting arrested. O'Hare was a very close friend of his. So he was saying, fuck this. I'm as healthy as I'm going to be. I'm going to hit a speaking tour of the Midwest.

He was dealing with heart failure, and he was just an all-around weak dude most of the time. Can't imagine why. It's not like he was working in a rail yard since he was 14 prior to this and spinning random fits and starts in jail

and a lot of people worried that it would kill him and everybody that wasn't worried that the speaking toward kill him was more worried that he'd almost certainly be arrested and Debs to his credit kind of understood that would happen he said quote I'll take two

jumps off and they'll nail me, but that's all right. And though he did, he was a smart dude. He read the acts that he was going to be protesting as closely as he could and purposefully made speeches that he thought would not run afoul, meaning he would not

tell people, like, burn their draft cards or tell President Wilson to eat his ass or anything like that. But the law was very unevenly applied. For instance, O'Hare gave the same speech that got arrested in North Dakota

in a different state the day before and nothing bad happened to her. And the same thing kind of happened to Debs. He spoke in Illinois and Indiana with no incident whatsoever. But then he traveled to Canton, her. And the same thing kind of happened to Debs. He spoke in Illinois and Indiana with no incident whatsoever. But then he traveled to Canton, Ohio. And like most things in life, the joy had to end when he went to Ohio. He went to a socialist party gathering. Ohio people, you know I had to. You know I had to. I'm contractually obligated to. So he went to a gathering at the Socialist Party building

that he knew would be heavily infiltrated by cops, as they pretty much always were. Good thing that doesn't happen anymore. Cops were there in plain clothes and moved through the crowd demanding to see military-aged draft mail, or sorry, military-aged mail's draft cards. And if they

did not have them on them, they were hauled away. Now, not having your draft card on your person was not illegal. However, that did allow them to pull them away for questioning. Cool. Because that seems illegal.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and once again, I mean, this is, you know, you don't realize how much a lot of the things that we really take for granted and like in our current society are things that were like developed relatively recently. Like, you know, Miranda warnings weren't going to be anything until the 60s. Like the Fourth Amendment really like, I don't know, has very little power at this particular juncture. Like a lot of the shit that we would think is kind of part and parcel of like criminal law and criminal procedure are just like not a fucking factor.

Yeah. Like I at this point, I honestly assume going into this because, again, I'm not American history major. I think I've made that apparent. But I assume that like child labor had been banned by now. But I was like, holy shit. Really? Yeah. Not like the 30s.

17, you know? Yeah. No, like not till the 30s. It's like 1917. Yeah. Not until the 30s do you start getting... Really not until FDR do you get any sort of real regulation about anything about employment whatsoever that's at all favorable

to employees. I think we've got maybe 15, 20 years left until somehow... Actually, if you're 12, you can go to work with your parents or something. If you're 12, you can work for Uber Eats and your bike. Yeah. That's very solidly like Ben Sass and fucking Ted Cruz and shit. Like Ted Cruz legitimately believes in child labor.

Ah, Truman of character. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the Canton, Ohio speech is pretty fucking legendary. And I would actually encourage you, and I'll put the link where you could read the entire thing for free in the show notes. And I picked out choice bits. I can't read the whole thing cause it's so fucking long,

but it's really good. Like I've pointed out before, I'm not much of a theory or a speech guy. However, this speech fucking slaps. I encourage everybody to read it because a lot of it fucking resonates today. So he starts

off by saying three of our most loyal comrades are paying the penalty of their devotion to the cause of the working class. They have come to realize that's extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world. And

everybody laughed. Do not worry over treason to your masters be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth and he was talking about the three people there's something called the workhouse which is which is like an old timey word for a jail who like

was speaking outside the jail and got arrested the day before so that's who he was talking about the master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has nothing to gain and all to lose, especially their lives. They have always taught and trained you to believe in your patriotic duty to go to war and have yourself slaughtered in their command. But in all the history of the world,

you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war. And strange, it certainly appears that no war of any nation of any age has ever been declared by the people. And here, let me emphasize the fact, and it cannot be repeated too often, that the working class fight all the battles. The working class make the supreme sacrifices. The working class who freely shed the blood and furnish the corpses have never yet had a voice either in declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that inevitably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. He also attacked the super rich in America, the robber barons of the age, who encouraged Americans to grow their own food and ration. He said, cultivate war gardens,

while at the same time, a government war report just issued that shows practically 52% of all arable tillable soil is held out of use by landlords, speculators, and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. They would not if they could. These are the gentry who are today are wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots and have their magnifying glasses and hands scanning the country for any evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brain of treason

to the men who dare to even whisper the opposition to junk or rule in the United States. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind or at least their prototypes. For in every age it seems to be a tyrant, the oppressor, and the exploiter who has wrapped themselves in the cloak

of patriotism or religion or both to deceive and overawe the people. Good thing that one didn't happen. Yeah. Now, Debs purposely went out of his way, like I said, not to attack the president or the ward directly.

So he's not trying to follow the laws that already claimed several of his friends. He even said as much in the beginning of his speech. He's like, comrades, I have to be very careful. Otherwise, I'll join our friends next door and things like that. And he didn't want to go to prison, though he did understand that's a very real possibility. But unfortunately for Debs, much like thinking he could follow the rules and be treated with respect by his old rail yard bosses, the government wanted to arrest him. So he was fucked before he even set out.

President Wilson himself hated debs and considered him a traitor openly and in notes so there was no way he was not going to get arrested which is kind of incredible that like the president of the united states who's fighting an overseas european war at this point it's like you know what that dude in indiana minding his own business fuck that guy yeah you would think that he would have better fucking things to concentrate on it's just like that what everybody has that one guy who irks them like you know not only was deb's not racist he was also anti-war and um and that was just one fucking step too far yeah like wait you don't hate black people and you want fair pay and time off get the cops. If the FBI had been invented

yet I'd call them. If there's anything that will ever get you beaten in America it's those two things. Get me yield silver shirts. So of course Debs was arrested when he was about to enter his next speaking

engagement and charged with 10 counts of violating the Espionage and Sedition Acts. And honestly, I read his speech looking for what 10 counts those could be and I could not find them. Yeah. I don't have like my 1900s lawyer glasses on

but like I try to read it pretty openly. I don't know. I couldn't find it. But Debs also knew that it didn't matter. At Debs' trial in Cleveland in September of 1918, the prosecutor argued that Debs' speech was, quote, calculated to promote insubordination and propagate obstruction to the draft.

Debs' lawyer conceded the facts of the case, and Debs spoke on his own behalf. The main reason for this is Debs knew that there was no point. He knew that there was no chance that he was going to step his foot, like step one single foot in court and be allowed to walk free. So he did not even try. When confronted with his charges, he pretty much just tried to argue the illegitimacy of the acts he was being charged under,

which sure, but he was never going to get him off right um he said quote i've been accused of obstructing the war i admit it i abhor war i had to oppose the war if i stood alone if the espionage law stands and the constitutions of the united states is dead he was then of course found guilty yeah i mean but you know it's like i mean for all the folks at this point, there really was never really very much of any fucking doubt once they arrested you. It just meant that they wanted you in jail. Yeah. He knew he wasn't going to go home. By the way, he's married this whole time. He doesn't have any kids.

He just has a very unhappy wife, I assume. Yeah. He doesn't have any kids. He just has a very unhappy wife, I assume. Yeah. After he was found guilty, Deb said, Your Honor, I have stated this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government, and I am opposed to the social system in which we live,

and I believe in change of both, but in perfectly peaceful and orderly means. I'm thinking this morning that the men in the mills and the factory, I'm thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out for their lives of the lives of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and their early and tender years are seized by the remorseless grasp of my mom and forced into the industrial dungeons there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved of body and soul your honor i am asked no mercy i plead for no immunity i realize finally that i am right and I must prevail. I never more fully comprehend now that the great struggle between the powers of greed on one hand and upon the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In a due course of time, they will come into their own. They don't need me. course of time they will come into their own they don't need me unfortunately he was wrong about that last part um but the judge didn't care and sentenced him to 10 year in prison uh and after

that he said his most memorable quote of his entire life quote i listen to all that was in this court and i support the justification of this prosecution but my mind remains unchanged i look upon the espionage laws a despotic enactment and flagrant conflict of democratic principles of the spirit of free institutions. Your Honor, years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I have made up my mind that I am not one bit better than the meanest man on earth. I say then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it it and while there's a criminal element I am of it and while there is a soul in prison I will not be free

yeah and then he went to prison because unlike movies when you give a really cool speech you don't get found innocent unfortunately or get given like time served well you know and then his conviction was you know he appealed it and it was upheld and it was upheld and it was upheld by the Supreme Court ultimately, including everyone's favorite early liberal justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, said that essentially he saw no problem with upholding Debs' conviction.

Yeah. Strangely enough, the one person who seemed to be against it was the US Attorney General, Michael Palmer. So strangely enough, the one person who seemed to be against it was the U.S. Attorney General, Michael Palmer. Now, because when the war ended, a lot of these political prisoners, they call them prisoners of consciousness, I believe, were commuted. They were let out. Debs was not. Because Woodrow Wilson fucking hated him. For instance, there was numerous requests for clemency, not a pardon.

Debs never asked for a pardon. But every bit of clemency was always refused by Wilson, to include a personal plea from the U.S. Attorney General Michael Palmer, who noted that he's very sick and he might die. We can't have a political

prisoner die in prison in the united states it would look terrible um and he sent it uh to the president who sent it back with simply the word no written on it fuck uh while eugene debs was in uh prison he ran for president one more time despite not being able to campaign in any fucking way possible he still won nearly one million votes yeah which i mean you know and which i think was uh it's like around three percent of the vote at that time which like i think it was a little bit higher than that yeah yeah but i mean you know which is just amazing to think about i mean i think i'm trying to think of i don't know like you try to think about like uh other american political figures who've like run for shit from prison.

Oh, they go nowhere. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not like Northern Ireland where they actually might win a parliamentary seat. Well, I mean, it is kind of like Northern Ireland in that it's also happened in Boston because of the James Michael Curley. But that's about the only one that immediately springs to mind. I'm curious. I'm pretty sure he beat the Green Party results in 2020. Yeah.

I mean, I wouldn't doubt it. I mean, also, even at that point, the Socialist Party was a lot more of a legitimate party than the Green Party probably is now. But that's just my own personal opinion. No, I don't disagree with you. So in 2020, Howie Hawkins of the Green Party won less than 0.5% of the popular vote. What about in 2016? Oh, you mean the Bugaboo Jill Stein? Yeah. Oh, boy. Which everyone always talks

about her. No one ever talks about what's-his-nots, the fucking libertarian candidate, Johnson, Gary Johnson. She won 1% of the popular vote. Yeah, so they tripled the percentage. Though, to her credit, she did win about 400,000 votes more than Eugene Debs from prison.

But yeah, eventually, though, Debs did get out of prison, but he had to wait for Woodrow Wilson to leave office. to wait for Woodrow Wilson to leave office. When Warren G. Harding came to office, he commuted Debs' sentence pretty quickly. It was within a few months in 1921. And he invited Eugene Debs to the White House afterwards to meet him personally. And when

they met, Harding greeted him with, quote, I've heard so goddamn much about you. I'm glad to have finally gotten the chance to meet you personally. Though if Debs was overly gracious of Warren Harding, you'd be wrong. He said that he seemed like a good person,

but he's still of the master class, and therefore a bad person. I'm pretty sure Debs would have been perfectly fine just dying in prison. Right. I mean, you know, when you have the courage of your convictions that fucking deep yeah i mean like he like there's a very good reason why he never asked for a pardon he's like i'm guilty i did the shit out of that yeah i did i did those crimes and like even

harding is like there's no doubt of his guilt. If you asked him, he'd tell you he's guilty. It really seemed like President Wilson wanted to leave him in prison until he died. And he almost got his wish. He died a couple years after he got out at the age of 70. I think it was like 1925 or 1924 or something like that.

So he only made it a couple years after because like I said, he was very, very sick when he went into prison. And prison, I mean, it's terrible now, but it was even worse then and only made him sicker and sicker. And unfortunately, when Debs got out, the socialist party that he helped build, along with most of the labor unions he helped build, were pretty much dead when he got out. Well, or at least're being actively persecuted still through the uh yeah first red scare yeah so he he spent most of his time in his home in indiana trying to regain his health but he he died um i mean unfortunately this doesn't have like a super happy ending because i mean that this is from 100 years ago of course the guy died

um but yeah i mean it's it's really interesting we've covered um this is the second guy we've covered as far as anti-war people who end up having horrible consequences um first was obviously the white rose which you know they got beheaded with a fucking guillotine so i suppose it could be worse yeah but it's also saying like woodrow wilson not technically as bad as the nazis cool well and it's also uh one of the things too that um yeah i mean that's a little fucking bar but right it's also just like one of the interesting things is and i feel like it's just because so much about uh like anti-war activism kind of feels like it you know just ends up happening almost in a vacuum

because you kind of you with the exception of kind of the mythologizing of the hippies, like during the Vietnam war, you don't really hear that much about any other anti-war activism from any other war. Like you don't hear anything about it during World War II at all. You hear very little about it during World War I. You know, like Korea, you don't really hear about any of like the anti-nuke activists, like from the 80s or anything really, at least you didn't like Korea, you don't really hear about any of like the anti, uh, anti-nuke activists like from the eighties or anything really, at least you didn't like when I was going through school. So it's kind of always interesting to see the way that, you know, particularly with world war one, you kind of learn that America went in reluctantly and then just kind of,

uh, and then, you know, one world war one for the good guys. And you never really learned why we were the good guys. You never really learned why the other side were the bad. And you certainly never learned that anyone ever opposed it for any real reason. So it's... And obviously, my relationship with World War I is much different, especially because my family wasn't in the United States yet. Right. And I suppose I simply just wouldn't exist if the other side had won. But from an American perspective, it's always very weird to me that I never heard much about this in school, even in college. I only heard about Eugene Debs because of one specific class in college.

one specific class in college. And yeah, I think going back to that quote that he said that the master class wraps himself on the flag, then perches up on high with a magnifying glass, looking to stamp anybody's head with traitor. That's what you get. Especially as a veteran on the left who is also very anti-war, more specifically anti-Iraq and Afghanistan war, the global war on terror, whatever you want to call it, I get that all the time, where you have people who are trying to out-patriot one another, calling themselves patriots. And I oppose the war that I fought in. Therefore, I'm either a pussy, I didn't actually fight, or I was never even in the military at all. They have to immediately discredit you rather than attempt to detangle your argument

and see why you might be against the war. Yeah. And that's kind of what... I mean, that's obviously why you have political repression like the Espionage and Sedition Acts. These people are traitors. You don't have to listen to them.

Just shove them into some federal prison where hopefully they'll get consumption and die. And obviously, that doesn't happen so much anymore for the anti-war activists anyway. But you can even see, I mean, even like in more recent history, if you look at the political history of the United States from the beginning of the global war on terror to the present day, and for all that we're told that we have to forgive Democrats in particular who were for it before they were against it, as Kerry said when he ran for president in 2004. Fucking John Kerry, man. He's the pinnacle of die hero, live long enough

to see yourself become the villain yeah i mean and so like you you hear so much about how we have to you know forgive everyone who voted for iraq because they didn't know better somehow as like grown-ass adults like you know in congress uh you know in the early 2000s um but very few people have like you know and like we have to you know and we we have to allow like david french and like from and like other fucking dickheads into play society um but we never really we should pull the people who live in uh missoula and how they feel about those people still holding government seats yeah well and you know and but meanwhile like if you look at a lot of the folks who opposed the war back then i mean they've mostly been sidelined so you know and you know and you even with uh

i mean one of my own personal pet peeves with, and I know why people do it, I get it, of criticizing Trump for being a putative war hawk, but then also at the same time dodging the draft back in the day. Dodging the draft is the most human action I've ever seen him do. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, like, and also you don't want to you know accidentally uh back into making i don't know military service a fucking litmus test for whether or not you get to you know participate in you know in uh in society which is like you

know you're kind of seeding so much ground by making those sorts of attacks um that it's becoming the becoming fucking uh robert heinlein to own the conservatives yeah like it's just it's like such a fucking bad look and you just like everyone needs to fucking stop it um like you know like it doesn't the other side doesn't matter if you point out hypocrisy and all you're doing is help introduce this idea that you have to like be this fucking you know you have to be like a uh that person of color, head of Raytheon, is the kind of liberation that you want to see in the world. And it's just such a poor fucking look. Yeah, I'd love to slap a Black Lives Matter sticker on my Predator drone.

So we can change the topic and end this on something of hopefully later on maybe not Shox we do something on the show called questions from the Legion if you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion you can donate a dollar to the show get access to our discord patreon and then just slide into my DMs

or email me or whatever send a put a message in a bottle float it towards towards Hawaii. If I get it, I will ask a question out of here. Messenger pigeons, also fine. Today's question is what is your favorite conspiracy theory? Not necessarily one that you believe,

but what is your favorite? I don't know. Someone on... I'm trying to remember. Someone on fucking... I think it was Dwight maybe on Twitter had like a good thing recently that was some of my some of my favorite conspiracy theories it was like what's your favorite one

that's what it was it was if you could know the truth about a conspiracy theory which one would you pick which I guess is kind of similar and I chose I mean because I am who I am I chose Hoffa I also I chose Hoffa. Hoffa's a good one. I also have a Hoffa one.

Yeah. I mean, like, I would definitely like, Hoffa would be definitely kind of cool. And, you know, like some of, and my favorite conspiracy theory about that, you know, about like all the, you know, he's buried under a fucking farm somewhere or like that he got spirited away entirely and has been living in witness protection for this long. he'd be like a hundred years old wouldn't he

yeah i mean he'd probably be dead by now i just mean like you know like when i when i first started reading about that but uh i would say my other general favorite conspiracy theories are like each and every single one about uh that involves the bermuda triangle like the fucking trainer flight off of florida that disappeared uh like all the fuckinguda triangle like the fucking trainer flight off of florida that disappeared uh like all the fucking you know like ghost ships and whatever else that just disappeared in the you know bermuda triangle i mean it's definitely a little bit disappointing when you read about them now and you're like they don't know what happened and then you read that it was like a uh a 50 year old uh like coal ship that was like bending in half every single fucking

journey and you're like i'm pretty sure I know what happened there. I'm pretty sure it just fucking sank. But yeah, any sort of alien abduction shit or just portal to a different land or whatever shit that involves a beautiful triangle, I'm here for. That one's solid. I guess since we've brought it up,

I'll do the Hoffa one. And mine has a personal connection since my stepdad was UAW forever until he retired. But one of the jobs that he had for the UAW, which is the United Auto Workers Union for someone not from the Midwest who doesn't know what that is.

When he was a kid, which is forever ago for him because he's like 70 now. One of the jobs that he had was crushing cars. And then after crushing the cars, they'd put them in an incinerator, which they would leave nothing left. go for him because he's like 70 now uh one of the jobs that he had was crushing cars and then after crushing the cars they'd put him in an incinerator which they would leave nothing left um and you know back in the day detroit mobs pretty much controlled the uaw and therefore controlled most auto worker factories and uh he he firmly believed uh because like one of the

things that he was told is when they brought a car in you're not allowed to go through it because like they're afraid that these like kids are going to steal shit from him because he was like you know 19 or whatever 19 or 20 yeah uh he's afraid they're going to part out this car or whatever and make the company look like you can't go through it don't open the trunks don't do shit just put it in the crusher burn the cube

so he so he was like i there's a there's like there's a 50 chance i burned jimmy hoffa and i have no idea so it's like yeah stepdaddy killed jimmy hoffa i'm on it yeah like i backed that um a hundred percent was it it's not a conspiracy theory but i'll i'll leave with a uh a very boston uh conspiracy anecdote which is uh i had a i worked I worked at the Apple store on Boylston Street for a couple years back when I was an undergrad. One of the cashiers there told me once that she had been working at the candy store that used to be on Newbury Street. She said that at one point when

she was working there, she looked across the street and swears to the hand of God that she saw Whitey Bulger sitting in a parked car right on Newbury Street. And he was just looking straight at her. And to her telling, he just put his finger to his lips, making the shush motion and then drove right off. And so she swears that she saw Jimmy Hoffa that one day. Or not Jimmy. Fuck. Whitey Bulger. shush notion or motion and then drove right off. So she swears that she saw Jimmy Hoffa that one day. Or not Jimmy, fuck, Whitey Bulger. And so I back the conspiracy theory because I back all personal conspiracy theories. Kind of like my grandmother saying that my great-grandfather ran booze for the Kennedys back during Prohibition.

That'd be rad. Wasn't Whitey Bulger being protected by an FBI agent? Oh, yeah. That's well documented. He was being protected by John Connolly, and John Connolly actually went to fucking jail for it. Because you literally have to aid and abet a fucking serial killing

mob boss for decades in order to go to jail as an FBI agent in this country. Yeah. All of that just so he could hang on the coast, get arrested, and get beaten to death by a lock and a sock by another mobster in prison. Yeah. Well, because of course, that's the whole thing. Was Jimmy or was Whitey Bulger a snitch for the FBI or was the FBI a snitch for Whitey

Bulger? And that's the thing that depending on what side you believe, no one's ever been able to figure out. The FBI is just Whitey Bulger's all that's the thing that, uh, you know, depending on what side you believe no one's ever been able to figure out the FBI, just Whitey Bulger's all the way down. Yup. Uh, shocks.

Thanks for joining me in lieu of Nick. Um, my, the, the Boston, Nick, um, the Boston cryptid. That's what I'm going by now.

And, uh, uh, I, until next time, uh, don't, I don't know.

Do arrested. Do oppose war. Do it. Yeah. Do oppose war. Don't get arrested. There we go.