Eugene V. Debs (left) & Seymour Stedman (right), courtesy of Indiana State University
Seymour Stedman was a Chicago-based lawyer and a Socialist Party leader. Among his long list of clients were Russian-born feminist Rose Pastor Stokes, labor activist /presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, and African-American leader A. Philip Randolph, who, in 1963, organized the Civil Rights March on Washington.
In July 1901, Stedman went to Indianapolis, Indiana, to meet with several Christians, Jews, utopian reformers, labor leaders, farmers, intellectuals, feminists, black activists, child welfare workers, Marxists, political progressives, and middle class Americans, who were inspired by Edward Bellamy's best-selling book Looking Forward. This diverse group of men and women from across the political spectrum formed the Socialist Party. However, communist elements on the left-wing fringes almost immediately began to sow the seeds of party disunion.
During the Progressive Era, the Socialist Party was one of the largest third parties in American history, and Seymour Stedman rose in prominence along with the party. Socialist candidates did well in the early decades of the 20th Century, an era when child labor, the Ku Klux Klan, Anti-Semitism, brutal labor strikes, sprawling urban slums, and uncompensated industrial accidents were common. On April 6, 1915, Seymour Stedman lost to ‘Big Bill’ Thompson, a machine politician and alleged friend of organized crime, who became the 33rd Mayor of Chicago. In 1916, Stedman fought another uphill battle for the office of Illinois governor and again lost.
At the onset of World War I, the Justice Department began a series of escalating attacks on Socialists, which exacerbated pre-existing divisions in the party and ultimately destroyed it. After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, nationalists such as the millionaire husband of Rose Pastor Stokes, J. G. Phelps Stokes, quit the Socialist Party.
That summer, President Woodrow Wilson signed the infamous Espionage Act, which stated, in part:
(1) Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or to promote the success of its enemies … (2) and whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause … insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States … (3) or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States … to the injury of the service or of the United States … shall be punished by a fine of not more that $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both. [1]
Around the end of Wilson’s first term, Congress made the Bureau of Investigation the official investigative arm of the Justice Department. The youthful J. Edgar Hoover rose to prominence as special assistant to both of Wilson’s attorney generals, Thomas Watt Gregory and Alexander Mitchell Palmer. During Wilson’s second term, the primary focus of the Bureau of Investigation was the investigation of alleged communists and anarchists.
The Espionage Act came about as a response to Woodrow Wilson’s War Message to Congress on April 2, 1917. [2] It went into effect on June 15, 1917. In May 1918, a companion law known as the Sedition Act strengthened the existing federal espionage statute. The Sedition Act of 1918 ultimately became as unpopular as the Sedition Act of 1798 that helped bring Thomas Jefferson to the White House in 1800. [3] In essence, the Espionage Act echoed the domestic war aims of President Wilson. [4]
In May 1918, Seymour Stedman acted as head defense attorney in the United States v. Rose Pastor Stokes. The case was officially about a letter Mrs. Stokes had written to Ralph E. Stout, the editor of the Kansas City Star, which stated:
To the Star:
I see that it is, after all, necessary to send a statement for publication over my own signature, and I trust that you will give it space in your columns.
A headline in the evening’s issue of the Star reads: ‘Mrs. Stokes for Government and Against War at the Same Time.’ I am not for the government. In the interview that follows I am quoted as having said ‘I believe the government of the United States should have the unqualified support of every citizen in its war aims.’
I made no such statement, and I believe no such thing. No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.
I expect my working class point of view to receive no sympathy from your paper, but I do expect that the traditional courtesy of publication by the newspapers of a signed statement of correction, which even our most Bourbon papers grant, will be extended to this statement by yours.
Yours truly,
Rose Pastor Stokes [5]
This evidently was enough of an affront to the security of the United States that it qualified as a felony. U. S. District Attorney Francis Murray Wilson stated on the record that he wished to expose “the venom that [was] in the heart of this foreign-born woman.” [6]
During the trial, Francis Wilson had attacked Seymour Stedman’s patriotism. Wilson preached:
[Stedman] injects and seeks to impress upon this jury an evasion as a defense. The only thing left for her to do is to evade the natural consequences of her own act in writing and mailing this letter, and causing it to be published in the Star. The first instance of such character of defense being interposed was in the very twilight of creation when there were but three human beings on the face of this earth; when Cain had slain his brother Abel, he was questioned by the Lord, “Where is thy brother?” He could not plead an alibi, he could not plead self defense or insanity, and so he said, “Lord, Am I my brother’s keeper?” If there had been a socialist lawyer there, possibly defending a socialist – [7]
It was of little consequence that Stedman was not on trial. [8] An all male jury of farmers convicted Rose Pastor Stokes, in short order, of violating three sections of the Espionage Act, which earned her a thirty year prison sentence from United States District Judge Arba S. Van Valkenburgh.
In March 1920, Stedman convinced the United States Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in St. Louis, Missouri, to overturn the Stokes verdict, yet, the three judges were apologists for Van Valkenburgh. They commended his intense patriotism while at the same time deriding him for placing “too heavy a burden upon the defendant in her endeavor to meet the evidence.” [9] They left open the possibility for a new trial, which the Justice Department did not seek.
Regarding the Stokes ordeal, Eugene V. Debs fumed, “The United States under the rule of the plutocrats is the only country which would send a woman to the penitentiary for ten years for exercising the right of free speech.” [10] Of course, federal prosecutors did not see things as Debs saw them.
In September 1918, Stedman unsuccessfully defended Debs in a Cleveland, Ohio, federal court. Justice Department lawyers and a jury of business leaders nailed Debs for violating both the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. [11]
President Wilson found it especially important to keep Debs in prison as long as possible, [12] because he was a perpetual annoyance to Wilson’s vision of progressivism. In 1912, Debs had fought for the U. S. Presidency on the Socialist Party ticket against Wilson – the Democratic candidate, William Taft – the Republican candidate, and Theodore Roosevelt – the “Bull Moose” candidate and impressively earned about 900,000 votes. [13]
J. G. Phelps Stokes and other prominent intellectuals sent a petition to President Wilson asking for “pardon and amnesty” for Debs. [14] The president and his attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, flatly refused to show any mercy to the prisoner. [15]
In the winter of 1919-20, Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover arrested scores of immigrant radicals and American-born labor union activists in the infamous Palmer Raids. An act of Congress expelled duly elected Socialist Party members from the U. S. House of Representatives and replaced them with Democrats and Republicans. Even strict conservatives like future Republican President Warren G. Harding considered Palmer an anathema. According to a Justice Department spy, an unidentified laborer accused Palmer of being “the greatest Red in the United States.” [16]
Although Stedman was white, he successfully defended a black pacifist, A. Philip Randolph, who was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters labor union and the editor of a publication called the Messenger. Some apparently racist federal authorities believed Randolph was the most dangerous black man in the United States. World War I ended just one day before Randolph was to enter military service as a draftee. Although he was under a lot of pressure, Randolph refused to assist communist agitators, who were escalating their efforts to split up the Socialist Party. The communists probably had had less concern for the plight of African-Americans than for advancing Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Although Seymour Stedman fought for social justice, he also had a cynical side. Despite being a utopian socialist, the lawyer had a lust for political power and personal wealth. In 1919, he transferred ownership of all Socialist Party property to a private corporation consisting of himself and six other members. No doubt inspired by events in Europe, the left-wing of the Socialist Party abandoned their parent party and became the Communist Party U.S.A..
In 1920, the Socialist Party once more nominated the now imprisoned Debs for President. Seymour Stedman was Debs’ running mate. In August 1920, Stedman addressed the Wisconsin League of Women Voters, whose members had just won the right to vote for president.
In November 1920, the Socialist ticket won a total of 919,799 votes, which was the party's largest ever total. However, party membership had been decimated by wartime harassment and the communist defection of 1919.
During the Roaring Twenties, Stedman and the party he loved fell into obscurity. At the beginning of the decade, Socialist Party membership had fallen from a peak of 100,054 men and women to just 26,766. By the early 1940s, Stedman joined the Communist Party U.S.A., which his famous client, Rose Pastor Stokes, had helped establish in 1919.
[1] Espionage Act, U.S. Code, vol. 3, sec. 31 (1926).
[2] Wilson delivered his famous “Call to War” before Congress on April 2, 1917. The speech was a plea to the men of Congress for more authority. Woodrow Wilson, President Wilson’s Addresses, ed. George McLean Harper, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1918) , 241-252. Wilson stated:
Indeed it is now evident that [Germany’s] spies were here even before the war began; and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture but a fact proved in our courts of justice that the intrigues which have more than once come perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country have been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and even under the personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Government accredited to the government of the United States.
Ibid., 248-249.
[3] “World War I Propaganda and Civil Liberties, 1917-1918,” Gale Research-Discovering U. S. History (1998) ; Zechariah Chafee, Jr., Free Speech in the United States (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1942), 50-51.
[4] “Bill of Exceptions,” United States vs. Stokes (1918), C 3536, KC, USDC-WM, RG 21, B 82, NA-CPR, book bound.
[5] Quoted in Kansas City Star, 20 March 1918; Lawyers read and re-read Stokes’ letter to the editor in the transcripts of the criminal case. “Bill of Exceptions,” United States vs. Stokes (1918), p. 419, C 3536, KC, USDC-WM, RG 21, B 82, NA-CPR, book bound; “Brief for Plaintiff in Error,” Stokes vs. United States: Transcripts of Records and Briefs, p. 1228, C 5255, Saint Louis [StL], United States Circuit Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit, RG 276, B 558, , Vol. 698, December Term 1919, NA-CPR, book bound; Thomas Watt Gregory to Wilson, Washington, D. C., 25 June 1918, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link and others, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), 422-423; United States Attorney General Gregory curiously did not underline Stokes’ words where she did. Part of the evidence federal prosecutors used against her was that she underlined certain words. Gregory apparently was not as concerned about it as Francis M. Wilson and Elmer Silvers had been. “Bill of Exceptions,” United States vs. Stokes (1918), C 3536, KC, USDC-WM, RG 21, B 82, NA-CPR, book bound
[6] Quoted in “Bill of Exceptions,” United States vs. Stokes (1918), pp. 359-360, C 3536-KC, USDC-WM, RG 21, B 82, NA-CPR, book bound.
[7] Quoted in Ibid., 349.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Stokes v. United States, 264 F. 22,26 (8th. Cir., 1920).
[10] Quoted in Lawrence H. Larsen, Federal Justice in Western Missouri, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 125.
[11] The case, United States v. Eugene V. Debs, galvanized the nation. It was a foregone presumption that the jury of well-to-do senior citizens (worth $50,000 on the average and averaging seventy years old) would convict him. Debs lost his appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Source
[12] Larsen, Federal Justice, 125; Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: a Brief Biography (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), 118.
[13] Nell Irvin Painter. Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877-1919 (New York: WW Norton and Company, 1987), 257, 266, 270, 335.
[14] From Charles Edward Russell and Others to Wilson, New York, 25 March 1919, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol.56, ed. Arthur S. Link and others, 282-283.
[15] From Alexander Mitchell Palmer to Wilson, Washington D. C., 4 April 1919, Papers of Wilson, Vol.56, ed. Link and others, 619.
