"Christianity in Action"

"In 1918, Debs was convicted under the recently minted Espionage Act for questioning America's entry into World War I; before that, free speech protections were more a matter of custom, easily dispensed with during wartime, than of high legal principle. But his 10-year sentence raised 1st Amendment issues with unprecedented force. Sixty-three years old and in poor health, Debs faced the prospect of dying in prison. His drama played out against a backdrop of revolutionary violence both here and abroad: While he was serving his sentence, a bomb planted by anarchists ripped through a busy Wall Street intersection, killing more than 30 people and injuring 200.
"Freeberg shows that in the end it was Debs' popularity, not a knockdown legal argument, that compelled politicians, the mainstream media and eventually federal judges to reconsider the government's power to jail dissidents."

Peter Richardson reviews Ernest Freeberg's Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent in the Los Angeles Times.