A president, his paperboy & the socialist. (Flashback: To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero).(Brief Article)

Once upon a time, before the American small town had been reduced to a quaint prop in beer and truck commercials, its residents possessed a common understanding and mutual sympathy so strong as to overcome differences like those that separate hawk from dove, lefty from righty, even President of the United States from leader of the Socialist Party.

The Socialist, in this case, was Eugene V. Debs, the radical Railway Union leader from Terre Haute, Indiana. During the First World War, Debs told a Canton, Ohio, audience, "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles." After sardonically noting that "it is extremely dangerous to exercise the Constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world," Debs defiantly proclaimed, "I would a thousand times rather be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets."

He got his wish. Convicted of violating Woodrow Wilson's Espionage and Sedition Acts, Eugene V. Debs became the most celebrated of the 15,000 Americans whom even Wilson called "political prisoners." Debs was confined to the federal prison at Atlanta; in 1920, he ran for President from his cell and won almost 1 million votes, many from decidedly bourgeois non-socialists who admired his courage. (H.L. Mencken, after mocking Debs for "his naive belief in the Marxian rumble-bumble," praised him as "fair, polite, independent, brave, honest, and a gentleman.")

President Wilson, a Princeton intellectual, was vindictive in the manner typical of the theory class. "This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration," Wilson said of Debs. Chimed in the New York Times. "He is where he belongs. He should stay there."

Wilson's successor was Warren Harding, the affable owner of Ohio's Marion Star. Harding lacked Wilson's intellect as well as his mean streak. The kindly Buckeye asked his venal Attorney General Harry Daugherty to meet with Debs in March 1921, so the prisoner was shipped northward on a train to Washington, where he met with Daugherty and Harding gofer Jess Smith.

These Doublemint twins of GOP corruption were charmed by Debs. Although Daugherty opposed a ...