[Eugene Debs was born in Indiana in 1855. A militant trade unionist, he became the leader of the Socialist Party. He is best known for his working-class and internationalist opposition to World War I.
[After the U.S. entered the World War, Debs continued to speak out opposing the war. In 1918 he was sentenced to ten years in prison under the Sedition Act. He ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket from his jail cell in 1920 and received nearly a million votes.
[The following is an excerpt from a September 11, 1915, article called “When I Shall Fight,” which appeared in the Socialist Party’s newspaper Appeal to Reason.]
I have been asked if I was opposed to all war and if I would refuse to be a soldier and to fight under any circumstances, and to make my answer through the Appeal to Reason.
No, I am not opposed to all war, nor am I opposed to fighting under all circumstances, and any declaration to the contrary would disqualify me as a revolutionist. When I say I am opposed to war I mean ruling class war, for the ruling class is the only class that makes war. It matters not to me whether this war be offensive or defensive, or what other lying excuse may be invented for it, I am opposed to it, and I would be shot for treason before I would enter such a war. If I were in congress I would be shot before I would vote a dollar for such a war.
Capitalists’ wars for capitalist conquest and capitalist plunder must be fought by the capitalists themselves so far as I am concerned, and upon that question there can be no compromise and no misunderstanding as to my position. I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world. I would not violate my principles for God, much less for a crazy kaiser, a savage czar, a degenerate king, or a gang of pot-bellied parasites.
But while I have not a drop of blood to shed for the oppressors of the working class and the robbers of the poor, the thieves and looters, the brigands and murderers whose debauched misrule is the crime of the ages, I have a heart-full to shed for their victims when it shall be needed in the war for their liberation.
I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of the plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight from the ruling class, but I will not wait to be commanded to fight for the working class. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.
Eugene Debs
