Pins from Eugene Debs's various presidential campaigns.
"One hundred years ago this month, the American Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, reported to a penitentiary in Moundsville, W.V., to begin a 10-year prison term. Debs had been convicted the previous fall of violating the Espionage Act, which had been enacted shortly after the United States entered World War I with the ostensible aim of punishing citizens who provided aid to the enemy. By the time Debs went to prison, scores of his fellow Socialists had already been imprisoned under the act’s provisions. Approaching his 64th birthday in ill health, depressed and dreading separation from family and friends, Debs did not crave martyrdom. But he knew he had a role to play, one he had freely chosen, and thus remained outwardly defiant. 'Tell my comrades,' Debs declared on beginning his sentence in April 1919, 'that I entered prison doors a flaming revolutionist, my head erect, my spirit untamed and my soul unconquered.' ..."
NY Times
New Yorker: Eugene V. Debs and the Endurance of Socialism
W - Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Debs speaking in Chicago in 1912.
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