While American soldiers were off fighting a “bourgeois war” on the Continent, Eugene Debs—a railroad union leader and outspoken socialist politician—delivered an incendiary, anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio. Immediately following his June 16, 1918 speech, Debs was arrested and tried for, and ultimately convicted of, “sedition” against the United States Government.
The following is a contemporary performance of Debs’ 1918 speech.