The Debs Decision
()
Read more from Scott Nearing
Socialism in Practice: The Transformation of East Europe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCivilization and Beyond Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Next Step: A Plan for Economic World Federation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Super Race: An American Problem Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe American Empire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCivilization and Beyond: Learning from History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBars and Shadows: The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe New Education A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Debs Decision
Related ebooks
Body Shell Girl Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTrespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEvil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Identity and the Second Generation: How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA New Scotland: Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLanguage, Resistance and Revival: Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLaboratories of Learning: Social Movements, Education and Knowledge-Making in the Global South Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Paradox of Urban Revitalization: Progress and Poverty in America's Postindustrial Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWatershed Politics and Climate Change in Peru Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFreedom in Solidarity: My Experiences in the May 1968 Uprising Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour under Neoliberal Authoritarianism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMarxist Left Review #23 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSignal: 08: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUkraine: voices of resistance and solidarity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCommon Sense Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prison and Social Death Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe spatial contract: A new politics of provision for an urbanized planet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Eighty-One Years of Anarchy: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFighting Authoritarianism: American Youth Activism in the 1930s Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBase Encounters: The US Armed Forces in South Korea Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJeannie’s Demise: Abortion on Trial in Victorian Toronto Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPrivatising Justice: The Security Industry, War and Crime Control Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGrassroots Economies: Living with Austerity in Southern Europe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGlobal Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDirect Action in Montevideo: Uruguayan Anarchism, 1927–1937 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPeople Power: Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Reviews for The Debs Decision
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Debs Decision - Scott Nearing
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Debs Decision, by Scott Nearing
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Debs Decision
Author: Scott Nearing
Release Date: February 25, 2007 [EBook #20666]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEBS DECISION ***
Produced by Fritz Ohrenschall, Tamise Totterdell, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE DEBS DECISION
By
SCOTT NEARING
Published by
THE RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
New York City
Copyright
RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
7 East 15th Street
New York
1919
THE DEBS DECISION
By
SCOTT NEARING
1. THE SUPREME COURT
The Supreme Court of the United States on March 10, 1919, handed down a decision on the Debs case. That decision is far-reaching in its immediate significance and still more far-reaching in its ultimate implications.
What is the Supreme Court of the United States?
Article III, Section I of the Constitution provides as follows:
The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court.... The judges shall hold their offices during good behavior.
The judges are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate (Article XII, Section II). That is all the constitution provides with regard to the Supreme Court.
At the present time, there are nine judges on the Supreme bench. It might interest you to know some facts about the nine. All of the judges are men. The chief justice is Edward D. White, who was born in 1845 and admitted to the bar in 1868. He is seventy-three years of age. His birth-place was Louisiana. He served in the Confederate Army, in the State Senate, in the State Supreme Court and in the United States Senate. He has been a member of the Supreme Court for twenty-five years. Joseph McKenna is the second member in point of seniority. He was born in 1843. His birth-place is Philadelphia. He was a county District Attorney, a member of the State Legislature, a member of the national House of Representatives, attorney-general of the United States and a United States Circuit Judge. He has been a member of the Supreme Court for twenty-two years. Oliver W. Holmes, the Justice who read the Debs decision, was born in Boston in 1841. He is seventy-seven years of age. He was admitted to the bar in 1866. Justice Holmes served in the Union Army; he was a member of the Harvard Law School Faculty. He has been a member of the Supreme Court for seventeen years. Those are the three oldest men on the Supreme bench. They are the three men who have been on the bench longest, but their political background is typical of the political background of the other members of the Supreme Court, with the single exception of Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who as far as I know, held no public office at all before he was appointed a justice of the Supreme Court three years ago.
The nine members of the Supreme Court are all old men. Four of them were born before 1850; eight of them were born before 1860; one of them was born since 1861, that is, James C. McReynolds, who was born in 1862. There is not a single member of the Supreme Court bench born since the Civil War. The oldest man on the bench is Justice Holmes, seventy-seven; the youngest man on the bench is Justice McReynolds, fifty-seven; the average age of the justices of the Supreme Court is sixty-six years. These men all began practising law while we were children, or before we were born. Three of them began the practice of law before 1870; six of them began to practice law before 1880; nine of them before 1884. The last member of the Supreme bench to be admitted to the practice of law, Justice McReynolds, was admitted in 1884.
The Supreme Court Justices were educated in the generation preceding the modern epoch of financial imperialism. They were mature when the industrial order as we know it today, was established. They are the men whose word is the word of final authority in all the affairs concerning the government of the United States.
The Supreme Court, not because the Constitution grants it the power, but because successive decisions of the Court have established that precedent, has the right to veto any piece of legislation passed by Congress and signed by the President. The Supreme Court is the voice of final authority in the affairs of the government of the United States. After it has spoken, there is no further authority under the machinery of this government.
The Debs Case came before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has given its decision. Eugene Debs goes to jail for ten years. Under the existing order of government, there is no appeal from this decision, except an appeal to arbitrary executive clemency.
2. THE CANTON SPEECH
The Debs Case arose over