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WHAT TO EUGENE DEBS WAS THE FOURTH OF JULY?  
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Jeffrey C. Isaac
July 2, 2026
Dissent Magazine
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_ Few figures on the left have been as committed to realizing the
democratic promise of American politics as Eugene Debs. _

Eugene Debs delivers an antiwar speech in 1918., Bettmann/Getty
Images

 

Eugene Debs delivers an antiwar speech in 1918. (Bettmann/Getty
Images)

It has been regarded as a patriotic duty for Americans, on the 4th of
July, to apostrophize Liberty and to select from the vocabularies of
all languages eulogistic words to describe its value and its glory,
and when words failed to express those essential attributes of liberty
which made life itself an inferior blessing, bonfires have blazed,
cannons have belched their thunder, banners have waved, drums have
throbbed, and bugle blasts have called the people to assemble and
rejoice together over God’s inscrutable decree in bestowing upon
Americans blessings denied to all other peoples, kindreds, and tongues
since time began. Nor do I doubt that on this anniversary such
exhibitions will be repeated, but it will be a hollow mockery. The
stage will be gorgeous with scenery for the play of liberty, but
liberty will be absent—only its ghost will appear, only its
“canonized bones” will be present.

_—Eugene V. Debs, “Liberty’s Anniversary,” July 4, 1895_

This July 4 there will no doubt be a plenitude of fireworks displays,
air shows, military parades, rockets’ red glare, and bombs bursting
in air to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary. Donald Trump decreed
as much within days of his 2025 inauguration, via an executive order
that promised “to provide a grand celebration worthy of the
momentous occasion of the 250th anniversary of American Independence
on July 4, 2026,” and “to take other actions to honor the history
of our great Nation.” Ever the showman, Trump will produce a
scripted, televised, and livestreamed extravaganza of Americanism,
featuring a UFC fight that epitomizes his concept of politics and
culminating in what he has called “the most spectacular birthday
party” for the country. He will wrap himself in the Declaration of
Independence as part of a broader effort to frame anyone who
criticizes him as a dangerous menace to the American way of life.

Central to this agenda is a determined effort to erase the American
left, both figuratively and literally. The figurative erasure was
inaugurated with an executive order on “Ending Radical
Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling
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which mandated the termination of “radical, anti-American
ideologies” and the promotion of educational policies designed “to
instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the
values for which we stand.” This edict was followed by a second one,
“Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History
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and a wholesale assault on universities across the country.

The effort to literally erase the left began with Trump’s summer
2025 deployment of federalized National Guard troops and U.S. Marines
to Los Angeles to suppress protests of ICE detentions, following
similar deployments in Chicago, Memphis, and Washington, D.C. That
September, Trump issued a memo on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and
Organized Political Violence
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and then held a convocation of hundreds of the highest-ranking
officers in the U.S. armed forces, who were informed that they might
soon be fighting a “war from within” against the violent hordes
who had taken over cities “run by the radical left Democrats.”
Finally, in December, the administration began Operation Metro Surge,
sending roughly 3,000 Department of Homeland Security agents to
Minnesota’s Twin Cities in a mass deportation campaign that led to
thousands of arrests and the killing of two protesters, Renee Good and
Alex Pretti.

These measures represent the fulfillment of promises proudly announced
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by Trump during his campaign. In a 2023 Veterans Day speech described
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by the _Washington Post_ as “echoing dictators,” Trump declared:
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists,
fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the
confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. . .
. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy
America and to destroy the American Dream.”

As _Dissent_ readers know, it is in fact Trump and his allies who are
resolutely destroying American democracy. Far from being a threat to
democracy, the American left has historically played an indispensable
role in the democratization of American politics and society, from the
abolitionist, women’s rights, and labor movements of the nineteenth
century to twentieth-century Progressive and New Deal reformers—many
inspired by socialist ideas—and the postwar civil rights, women’s,
and peace movements.

Nobody on the left epitomizes the deep and sincere commitment to
realizing the democratic promise of American politics more than Eugene
Debs, the legendary turn-of-the-twentieth-century Socialist Party
leader who was twice imprisoned for his political advocacy, ran five
times for president, and consistently battled reactionary invocations
of American nationalism. Debs, who lived his entire life in Terre
Haute, Indiana, was about as culturally mainstream a Midwesterner as
can be imagined, as is made clear in Nick Salvatore’s classic
biography, _Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist_ and the 2019 PBS
documentary _The Revolutionist: Eugene V. Debs_, which draws heavily
on Salvatore’s work. And yet Debs’s experiences—as a locomotive
fireman and railroad worker, an industrial union organizer and strike
leader, and eventually as the preeminent leader of the Socialist Party
of America—brought him face to face with the hypocrisy, injustice,
and political corruption of Gilded Age America, and instructed him on
the dignity of the struggle to make America greater by making it freer
and more just.

Debs was a withering critic of July 4 hoopla. He articulated this in
the epigraph to this essay, written from a Woodstock jail in 1895, and
even more powerfully in a speech delivered in Chicago on July 4, 1901.
“I am not of those who worship the flag,” Debs said.

I am a patriot, but in the sense that I love all countries. I love the
sentiment of William L. Garrison: “All the world is my country and
all mankind are my countrymen.” Thomas Jefferson once said: “Where
liberty is, is my country.” That is good. Thomas Paine said:
“Where liberty is honored, that is my country.” That is better.
Where liberty is not, Socialism has a mission, and, therefore, the
mission of Socialism is as wide as the world.

Debs made clear he is an internationalist, yet he invoked three
Americans who took their bearings from the American Revolution. “I
like the 4th of July,” he concluded, because “it breathes a spirit
of revolution.” Indeed, as Salvatore’s pathbreaking biography made
clear, Debs consistently saw himself as an heir to a distinctly
American tradition of civic republicanism and dissenting radicalism,
and frequently cited a wide range of American historical figures that
included Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine,
Elijah Lovejoy, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, Thaddeus
Stevens, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln.

This commitment to the spirit of 1776 is central to two of Debs’s
most important speeches: “Liberty,” given upon his release from
prison in 1895 for his role in the Pullman Strike, and his address to
the jury at the close of his 1918 trial
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for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which resulted in his
conviction. In these speeches Debs speaks as what historian Ernest
Freeberg has called “democracy’s prisoner”—a man figuratively
and literally on trial for his political convictions. He powerfully
condemns the American political system for its violation of his rights
and for its hostility to the demands of workers. And yet in each of
these speeches Debs also speaks _as_ _an American_, committed to
realizing the egalitarian promise of the American Revolution carried
forward by generations of dissenters, whom he proudly claims as his
forbears.

At a time when a rhetoric of American greatness was being deployed to
break strikes, disrupt and disperse public demonstrations, and harass
and prosecute dissenters, Debs refused to be silenced—but he also
refused to cede American liberty to his reactionary opponents.

 

LIBERTY, LOST AND REGAINED

On November 22, 1895, after spending six months in prison, Debs
addressed a large crowd of supporters at Battery D in Chicago. As
president of the American Railway Union (ARU), Debs had been one of
the leaders of the Pullman Strike of 1894, which brought interstate
rail transport to a standstill. U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney,
working in tandem with Pullman managers and allies, obtained a court
injunction against the union and deployed federal troops to break the
strike, over the public objections of Illinois Governor John Peter
Altgeld (whom Debs later memorialized in a 1902 obituary). The union
offices were ransacked; upward of a dozen people were killed and over
fifty wounded during the violent escalation; and a number of union
leaders, most famously Debs himself, were arrested, convicted of
violating the injunction, and sentenced to prison terms for their role
in organizing the boycott, a move upheld by the Supreme Court.

“Liberty” is a rhetorically complex speech. It evokes the spirit
of liberty heralded by the Declaration of Independence and the promise
of an egalitarian form of collective economic freedom yet to be
realized by American workers. As Salvatore argues, the speech marked
an important moment in Debs’s evolution from a labor activist with
radical republican leanings to the country’s leading socialist.

Debs’s speech denounces the collusion of the Pullman Company and its
allies with the federal judiciary, the White House, and the troops
under the president’s command. “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,”
he said. “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.”

Debs framed the suppression of the Pullman Strike as an attack on
working-class Americans, successfully prosecuted by a government in
league with “money power” and “plutocracy.” While condemning
the violation of his constitutional liberties, he also defended the
ARU as a necessary and legitimate organization of workers, and the
strike as a legitimate means of pursuing justice. The union “threw
down no gauntlet to courts or armies—it simply resisted the invasion
of the rights of workingmen by corporations . . . and defied the power
of corporations.”

The speech’s central reference point is the Declaration of
Independence. The first half of the speech centers on the theme of
“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.” Paying tribute to
the republic’s founding, Debs proceeded to wax poetic, for eight
long paragraphs, about the enduring resonance of the 1776
proclamation, the indivisibility of liberty, and the “more than
satanic crime of stealing the jewel of liberty from the crown of
manhood and reducing of the victim of the burglary to slavery or to
prison.”

It is for this crime that Debs morally indicts the railroad magnates
and their federal government allies. And he insists that it is the
labor movement that embodies “the spirit of ’76”: “To the
unified hosts of American workingmen fate has committed the charge of
rescuing American liberties from the grasp of the vandal horde that
have placed them in peril, by seizing the ballot and wielding it to
regain the priceless heritage and to preserve and transmit it without
scar or blemish to the generations yet to come.”

The ballot, Debs notes approvingly, quoting an abolitionist poem,
“has been called ‘a weapon that executes a free man’s will as
lighting does the will of God.’” Debs rhapsodizes in almost
religious tones about the power of democratic elections:

There is nothing in our government it cannot remove or amend. It can
make and unmake presidents and congresses and courts. It can abolish
unjust laws and consign to eternal odium and oblivion unjust judges,
strip from them their robes and gowns and send them forth unclean as
lepers to bear the burden of merited obloquy as Cain with the mark of
a murderer. It can sweep away trusts, syndicates, corporations,
monopolies, and every other abnormal development of the money power
designed to abridge the liberties of workingmen and enslave them by
the degradation incident to poverty and enforced idleness, as cyclones
scatter the leaves of the forest. The ballot can do all this and more.
It can give our civilization its crowning glory—the cooperative
commonwealth.

A brilliant orator, Debs was also a strategist. Far from being naive
about the limits of the electoral process and the enormous obstacles
facing radical social movements and political parties, Debs fully
appreciated the importance of organizing, movement building, political
education, and direct action. But he also appreciated the power of the
dissenting American political tradition, and he understood that civil
liberties and regular democratic elections represented genuine if
precarious political progress, which could further social and economic
justice.

“Liberty” ends with the hope that “American lovers of liberty
are setting in operation forces to rescue their constitutional
liberties from the grasp of monopoly and its mercenary hirelings.”
That hope was not in vain—even if the Pullman Strike was suppressed,
and Debs’s imprisonment was the harbinger of arduous struggles
ahead, both for him and for the movement he helped to found.

 

THE CANTON SPEECH AND THE ESPIONAGE CONVICTION

By the time the United States entered the First World War on April 6,
1917, Debs had become a well-known and outspoken radical and a
co-founder of the Socialist Party of America. He had run for office
four times as the party’s presidential candidate, receiving over
900,000 votes, or 6 percent of the total, in 1912. A strong critic of
the war since its start in 1914, and an enthusiastic supporter of the
Russian Revolution—both the February 1917 overthrow of the Russian
Czar and the Bolsheviks’ October seizure of power—Debs was one of
many fierce critics of U.S. entry into the war, as Michael Kazin
explores in _War Against War_.

On June 16, 1918, Debs famously delivered a staunch antiwar speech
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Socialist Party state convention in Canton, Ohio. As a result, he was
arrested, prosecuted, and ultimately convicted of violating the 1917
Espionage Act by interfering with the draft. As commentators have
noted, Debs well understood his legal vulnerability when he spoke at
Canton, and he was careful not to explicitly advocate draft
resistance. At the same time, the speech offered a relentless attack
on the hypocrisies of the war, the authoritarian tendencies it
unleashed, and the treatment of workers as the cannon fodder of
inter-imperialist rivalry. Debs denounces “the gentry who are today
wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the
housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their
magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of
disloyalty,” insisting that “in every age it has been the tyrant,
the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak
of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the
people.”

The speech was radical in its condemnation of the war and its promise
of socialist revolution. And it contained none of the references to
the American revolutionary heritage—Jefferson, Paine,
Garrison—that had marked the 1895 “Liberty” speech and so much
of Debs’s rhetoric in the ensuing years. Yet in Debs’s address to
the jury in his 1918 trial, quoted in Scott Nearing’s 1919 pamphlet
“The Debs Decision
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these themes boldly reappear. Proudly defending his sympathy for the
Bolshevik Revolution, Debs pivots to the fact that America itself was
born in revolution. He reminds the jury that “there was a time
when George Washington, who is now revered as the father of his
country, was denounced as a disloyalist, when Sam Adams, who is known
to us as the father of the American Revolution, was condemned as an
incendiary, and Patrick Henry, who delivered that inspired and
inspiring oration that aroused the colonists, was condemned as a
traitor.” He then shifted to the “mighty agitation” associated
with the abolitionist movement, declaring himself to proudly stand in
a tradition of dissent much more serious about liberty than those
hypocritical “patriots” who carry the flag while they trample
freedom afoot.

Debs noted the irony of an American government that was prosecuting
socialists in the name of “democracy”: “Isn’t it strange that
we Socialists stand almost alone today in defending the Constitution
of the United States?” And he closed by refusing to recant a single
word of his Canton speech. “What you may choose to do to me will be
of small consequence after all,” he told the jury. “I am not on
trial here. There is an infinitely greater issue that is being tried
today in this court, though you may not be conscious of it. American
institutions are on trial here before a court of American citizens.
The future will tell.”

 

DEBSIAN PATRIOTISM

The future did tell. Debs was convicted and sentenced to prison for
ten years; his conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court in a
unanimous decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.; and
he served over two years in a federal penitentiary before his sentence
was commuted by President Warren G. Harding. More important, the
Socialist Party and the socialist left more generally were decimated
by the Wilson administration’s wartime crackdown and the Red Scare
to which it gave rise. In _American Midnight_, Adam Hochschild
considers the potentially widespread effects of this suppression of
the Socialist Party: “Had it not been so hobbled, even with a
minority of voters it might have been able to push the mainstream
parties into creating the sort of stronger social safety net and
national health insurance systems that people take for granted in
Canada and Western Europe today.”

At the same time, Debs remained unbowed in his strenuous advocacy of
both democratic civil liberties and a genuinely democratic socialism.
And through his efforts, he helped lay the foundation for a socialist
tradition that eventually gave rise to this very magazine in 1954, and
that more recently has experienced a resurgence in the electoral
successes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani,
Katie Wilson, and the hundreds of socialists, most members of the
Democratic Socialists of America, who hold state and local office
across the country.

This history is complicated, and it is not my purpose here to assess
the many ways that Debs has figured and still figures in debates about
left political strategy. My only point is that at a time when a
triumphalist history of the United States is being promoted with a
vengeance, we can clearly see how Debs’s greatness resided in his
courageous activism in the face of real repression, vindicating the
very ideals that the ideologues of the MAGA movement regularly
trample.

Debs appreciated the rhetorical power of flag-waving, but he adamantly
resisted the use of patriotic symbols to police dissent and repress
the labor movement, and he suffered for his refusal to bend the knee
to the rhetoric of “America, right or wrong.” At the same time,
while Debs refused to pledge allegiance to the flag upon demand, he
did not reject “the republic for which it stands,” or at least for
which it has sometimes stood and might yet stand. He said as much in
the opening line of his “Liberty” speech: in spite of the
hypocrisy and the repression, “manifestly the ‘spirit of ’76’
still survives” wherever and whenever “lovers of liberty” and
“despisers of despotism” act collectively to advance the cause of
freedom.

Debs actually walked the walk of liberty in a way that few others in
American history have done. And by refusing to cede the spirit of the
Declaration to the economic and political elites of his day, he played
a crucial role in advancing workers’ rights, the right to dissent
and protest even in time of war, and the possibility of ongoing
contestation that is at the heart of any meaningful form of democracy.
Debs, in short, was one of the great democratizers of
twentieth-century America.

To insist on this is not to sugarcoat Debs or to present him as
someone easily incorporated into a reassuring liberal narrative of
steady progress. Debs was a labor radical. He was a rabble-rouser who
challenged the economic and political prerogatives of capital and
disrupted the conventional politics of his day in the way he combined
direct action, mass protest, and electoral politics. And what he stood
for—_socialism_—was outside the American mainstream then, and
remains so now, despite the impressive victories noted above. And yet
what he stood for is an essential part of the ongoing history of the
United States. His agitation, his repression, and the partial
incorporation of his demands are all central to the contentious story
of American democracy.

This July 4, Trump and his supporters will seek to conscript “the
spirit of ’76” in the name of their bitter, authoritarian,
gold-plated vision. And yet Debs reminds us that the tradition of
radical dissent in the United States has always been contested. Those
who have done the most to honor its legacy are those who have refused
to keep silent in the face of injustice, and who have insisted that
redeeming the promise of the Declaration of Independence’s noble
words is an ongoing struggle.

_JEFFREY C. ISAAC is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at
Indiana University, Bloomington. A longtime member of Dissent’s
editorial board, he has written many books and articles, and he
comments regularly on current affairs at Common Dreams and on his
two blogs, Democracy in Dark Times and Defending Democracy’s
Declaration. He dedicates this essay to the memory of Nick Salvatore,
a great historian, and Raymond Franklin, his old Queens College
economics professor and mentor and inspiration in everything related
to socialism. He would also like to thank his friends Bob Ivie, Bob
Orsi, and Jeff Goldfarb for their comments._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has
published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A.
Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin,
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Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and
many others._

_Dissent is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We publish the very
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* Civil Liberties
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* patriotism
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