Democracy's Prisoner

Notwithstanding the glowing blurbs on the dust jacket by three eminent historians, Ernest Freeberg's smoothly written narrative of the federal government's decision to prosecute and to punish the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs for his opposition to U.S. participation in World War I adds little detail to a well-known subject. Readers familiar with Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross (1940) or Nick Salvatore's splendid life history, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982), will discover little new in Freeberg's work. Readers of William Preston's Aliens and Dissenters (1963) or Paul Murphy's World War I and the Origins of Civil Liberties in the United States (1979) will find a familiar story about federal repression of radicals and dissenters before, during, and after the Great War. What Freeberg does exceedingly well is reexamine a familiar tale in sparkling prose. His book should interest general readers and undergraduates, alerting them to the precariousness of First Amendment rights in the past and serving as a warning about government's tendency to abuse its authority during wartime

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