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Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest

“Liberty”

by Jonathan Rees, PhD

Date: 1895

Author: Eugene V. Debs

Genre: Speech

Summary Overview

The American trade union leader, orator, and Socialist Party activist Eugene Debs was a master at making what might look today like radical political ideas seem as American as apple pie. A student of history as well as politics, Debs regularly invoked the memory of the Founding Fathers to make his policy suggestions seem more acceptable. Motivated by an unyielding sense of justice, he often tried to shame authorities to do what he thought was right. Whether addressing audiences at a labor rally or on the campaign trail, Debs invariably came back to a sharp critique of the American political system, touting the virtues of his brand of Socialism. His goal as a politician was not necessarily to win elections but instead to inspire listeners by his own example and to win converts to the Socialist cause. In a country with no Socialist legacy—unlike many European countries where Socialism was established—it is really quite remarkable that Debs had any success at all as a politician. That success was due in no small part to the power of Debs’s oratory and prose. In his speech “Liberty,” delivered in 1895 after his release from prison for support of the Pullman Palace Car strike, Debs connects the labor struggle with that of the Revolutionary era Patriots.

Defining Moment

The Pullman strike was an effort to organize workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company of Pullman, Illinois. As part of the strike, ARU members nationwide decided to boycott all trains that carried the company’s famous sleeping cars in an effort to force them to recognize the union. As a result, rail traffic stopped nationwide. In response, railroad companies deliberately placed mail cars on trains with Pullman Palace Cars in order to encourage government intervention in the dispute. The legal injunction issued by a federal judge in response to the boycott essentially shut down the strike and destroyed the union. In 1895 Debs was convicted of interfering with the mail as a result of his refusal to abide by that injunction. Debs’s political views were greatly affected by the Socialist literature he read during his short stay in jail. Indeed, this incarceration would prove to be the pivotal point of his entire life.

Upon his release Debs announced his conversion to Socialism.

Eugene Debs’s fame began during his prison term following the Pullman strike. Countless people sought his opinion during his imprisonment. Since the jail was actually just a room in a local sheriff’s house and his jailer gave him and the other ARU leaders imprisoned with him an incredible degree of freedom, Debs had the opportunity to read and to communicate with the outside world through correspondence and newspaper interviews. Upon his release, many newfound fans were excited to hear what he had to say about the modern world, especially about the government that had incarcerated him. While Debs had resisted adopting the Socialist label before his imprisonment, his embrace of the term at this juncture was extremely fortunate for the American Socialist movement. It not only gained a famous adherent, but it now also had its most eloquent spokesperson.

Author Biography

Eugene Victor Debs was a trade union leader, orator, and frequent Socialist Party candidate for the presidency of the United States. He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855. While working his way up through the hierarchy of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, an important railroad union, he was elected city clerk in Terre Haute in 1879. He also served one term in the Indiana state legislature in 1885. In 1893 Debs cofounded the American Railway Union (ARU), an industrial union that, unlike most exclusive railroad brotherhoods of the era, admitted railroad workers of all skill levels. As the leader of that organization, Debs led the infamous Pullman strike of 1894, discussed above..

He also changed career paths from being a trade union leader to being a political leader. Debs would serve as a Socialist Party presidential candidate five times: 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. His best showing occurred in 1912 when he came close to garnering a million votes. That was 6 percent of the total votes cast in that election. In 1918 Debs was convicted of sedition for a speech he had given in Canton, Ohio, earlier that year. Debs had to run his final campaign for president as a protest candidate from his jail cell. A famous campaign button from 1920 read “For President—Convict No. 9653.” Between elections Debs toured the country giving speeches and writing articles that critiqued the American capitalist system and championed the cause of Socialism. Debs died in 1926 at the age of seventy.

Debs represented a vision of Socialism in America that got lost in the anti-Communist hysteria of the cold war era. His political beliefs, though Socialist, were grounded in American ideals like justice, equal rights, and Christianity. Debs’s willingness to go to prison for the causes he championed greatly increased his appeal and the popularity of his ideas. While many other figures in American Socialism were immigrants from European countries like Germany, where Socialism was more in the mainstream, Debs attracted native-born Americans to the Socialist cause. His success as a politician came as the result of hundreds of thousands of Americans entertaining the possibility of radical change in American life in an era when the adverse effects of industrialization had made them unhappy with the existing political system.

Historical Document

Manifestly the spirit of ‘76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty and as despisers of despotism. I comprehend the significance of this demonstration and appreciate the honor that makes it possible for me to be your guest on such an occasion. The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.

Speaking for myself personally, I am not certain whether this is an occasion for rejoicing or lamentation. I confess to a serious doubt as to whether this day marks my deliverance from bondage to freedom or my doom from freedom to bondage. Certain it is, in the light of recent judicial proceedings, that I stand in your presence stripped of my constitutional rights as a freeman and shorn of the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship, and what is true of myself is true of every other citizen who has the temerity to protest against corporation rule or question the absolute sway of the money power. It is not law nor the administration of law of which I complain. It is the flagrant violation of the constitution, the total abrogation of law and the usurpation of judicial and despotic power, by virtue of which my colleagues and myself were committed to jail, against which I enter my solemn protest; and any honest analysis of the proceedings must sustain the haggard truth of the indictment.…

Dismissing this branch of the subject, permit me to assure you that I am not here to bemoan my lot. In my vocabulary there are no wails of despondency or despair. However gloomy the future may appear to others, I have an abiding faith in the ultimate triumph of the right.…

Liberty is not a word of modern coinage. Liberty and slavery are primal worlds, like good and evil, right and wrong; they are opposites and coexistent.…

The theme tonight is personal liberty; or giving it its full height, depth and breadth, American liberty, something that Americans have been accustomed to eulogize since the foundation of the Republic, and multiplied thousands of them continue in the habit to this day because they do not recognize the truth that in the imprisonment of one man in defiance of all constitutional guarantees, the liberties of all are invaded and placed in peril. In saying this, I conjecture I have struck the keynote of alarm that has convoked this vast audience.…

Strike the fetters from the slave, give him liberty and he becomes an inhabitant of a new world. He looks abroad and beholds life and joy in all things around him. His soul expands beyond all boundaries. Emancipated by the genius of Liberty, he aspires to communion with all that is noble and beautiful, feels himself allied to all higher order of intelligence and superstition, a new being throbbing with glorious life.…

It is in no spirit of laudation that I aver here tonight that it has fallen to the lot of the American Railway Union to arouse workingmen to a sense of the perils that environ their liberties.

In the great Pullman strike the American Railway Union challenged the power of corporations in a way that had not previously been done, and the analyzation of this fact serves to expand it to proportions that the most conservative men of the nation regard with alarm.

It must be borne in mind that the American Railway Union did not challenge the government. It threw down no gauntlet to courts or armies—it simply resisted the invasion of the rights of workingmen by corporations. It challenged and defied the power of corporations. Thrice armed with a just cause, the organization believed that justice would win for labor a notable victory; and the records proclaim that its confidence was not misplaced.

The corporations, left to their own resources of money, mendacity and malice, of thugs and ex-convicts, leeches and lawyers, would have been overwhelmed with defeat and the banners of organized labor would have floated triumphant in the breeze.

This the corporations saw and believed—hence the crowning act of infamy in which the federal courts and the federal armies participated, and which culminated in the defeat of labor.…

From such reflections I turn to the practical lessons taught by this “Liberation Day” demonstration. It means that American lovers of liberty are setting in operation forces to rescue their constitutional liberties from the grasp of monopoly and its mercenary hirelings. It means that the people are aroused in view of impending perils and that agitation, organization, and unification are to be the future battle cries of men who will not part with their birthrights and, like Patrick Henry, will have the courage to exclaim; “Give me liberty or give me death!”

I have borne with such composure as I could command the imprisonment which deprived me of my liberty. Were I a criminal; were I guilty of crimes meriting a prison cell; had I ever lifted my hand against the life or the liberty of my fellowmen; had I ever sought to filch their good name, I would not be here. I would have fled from the haunts of civilization and taken up my residence in some cave where the voice of my kindred is never heard. But I am standing here without a self-accusation of crime or criminal intent festering in my conscience, in the sunlight once more, among my fellowmen, contributing as best I can to make this “Liberation Day” from Woodstock prison a memorial day.

Glossary

the haggard truth of the indictment: the ugly truth, as Debs sees it, behind the circumstances of his and others’ imprisonment following the Pullman Strike

threw down no gauntlet: presented no challenge

usurpation: taking control from legitimate authority

Document Analysis

The speech begins with a tactic that was already a hundred years old when Debs used it, connecting modern labor struggles with the fight of the Patriots during the American Revolution. The idea was that modern workers struggled against the oppression of their employers in the same way that the American colonists fought the oppression of the British. Historians now call this concept “artisan republicanism.” Since Debs believed that taking on rich corporations was a patriotic American thing to do, this tactic suited him well. He connects the American Revolution directly to his case later in the speech by equating his personal liberty to political liberty in the United States. At one point he even quotes the Revolutionary leader Patrick Henry, whose cry “Give me Liberty or give me death!” certainly fits the themes of Debs’s career.

In the second paragraph, although being released form prison, Debs expresses concern that he might be plunging into a different kind of bondage—he is still living in a United States which condemned he and his fellow activists to imprisonment. “It is not law nor the administration of law of which I complain,” says Debs, but rather “it is the flagrant violation of the constitution, the total abrogation of law and the usurpation of judicial and despotic power, by virtue of which my colleagues and myself were committed to jail. The entire Constitutional system on which the republic rests, he is saying, has been corrupted. But this is not a new thing.

This battle between the forces of good—in which Debs has “an abiding faith in the ultimate triumph of the right”—is as old as time itself. Debs persuaded people to entertain his views by connecting his politics to the teachings of the Bible, and he does this often in this speech. Debs relates the battle between liberty and slavery to the battle between good and evil in the world and suggests, as the Bible does, that the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Christian imagery supplies the structure of Debs’s vision of citizenship. More important, like Saul, who would become the apostle Paul after a conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Debs uses this occasion to suggest that in jail he had seen the light. Such Christian imagery served as a way for Debs to explain his ideals and inspire others to see the world as he now saw it.

Debs also speaks to the specific situation which the laboring forces of the United States find themselves and of the daunting forces arrayed against them. The American Railway Union took an unprecedented stand against corporate power, Debs explains. Crucially, he explains in the ninth paragraph, that the union, during the Pullman Strike did not challenge the government. Its enemy was the enemy of the working class—the corporations. If the battle had been between corporations and the power of the American workers, the workers would have prevailed. However, this “defeat of labor” was the culmination of the federal government—particularly the courts and the military—working in collusion with the railroad and other corporations that proved too steep a challenge for the workers.

This speech is important for understanding Debs’s sense of justice and his willingness to take on what he deemed unjust laws. Debs makes no apologies for violating the injunction that led to his arrest. Indeed, in the course of his speech he directly attacks the judge and the institutions that supported him. This is in line with his readiness to criticize government in general whenever it supported corporations over the rights of its own citizens, as he did earlier in his speech. Debs deftly elevates the Constitution at the same time that he criticizes the forces he sees as a threat to the rights contained in that document, drawing a distinction between the principles at the foundation of the United States and the way those in power have corrupted those principles and misused their authority.. His main goal here is to rescue American liberty from domination by the forces of monopoly, a major political issue during this era.

Essential Themes

A key idea that emerges in Debs’s 1895 speech on Liberty is that the workers of the United States—in the case of the Pullman Strike, railroad workers in particular—have been drawn into battle not only with the corporations that abuse their labor and their rights but also the federal government that supports its corporate citizens (the Supreme Court, in a number of cases, proclaimed that corporate entities had the same rights as individuals) over its laboring citizens. Thus, while the workers of the American Railway Union did not seek to be in conflict with the federal government, did not seek to take on the court system or the Army, this was the battle in which they now found themselves.

Here, Debs lays out not only the conflict between workers and corporations, but between American citizens and the dangerous combination of forces—corporate and political—that seeks to undermine the Constitution and citizenry’s political freedom as well as their economic freedom. To the workers who participated in the Pullman Strike, who had to face the rifles and bayonets of American soldiers, this speech represents a call to further action.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

1 

Burns, Dave. “The Soul of Socialism: Christianity, Civilization, and Citizenship in the Thought of Eugene Debs” in Labor, vol. 5, no. 2 (2008), pp. 83–116.

2 

Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press: 1949).

3 

Papke, David Ray. The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1999).

4 

Schneirov, Richard, et al. (eds.) The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Rees, Jonathan. "“Liberty”." Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest, edited by Aaron Gulyas, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=DDProtest_0089.
APA 7th
Rees, J. (2017). “Liberty”. In A. Gulyas (Ed.), Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Rees, Jonathan. "“Liberty”." Edited by Aaron Gulyas. Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.