Eight years after Robert M. La Follette founded this magazine in 1909, the Republican Senator from Wisconsin emerged as one of the two most politically prominent figures in the movement opposing the rush to engage the United States in World War I.
The other was Eugene Victor Debs, the union leader who in 1912 had earned close to one million votes in his run for President. La Follette and Debs held nothing back as they advanced the anti-war cause in 1917. And it cost them dearly.
After delivering one of the greatest anti-war speeches in the history of the Congress—an April 4, 1917 address in which he declared, “The poor, sir, who are the ones called upon to rot in the trenches, have no organized power, have no press to voice their will upon this question of peace or war; but, oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard!”—La Follette was threatened by his colleagues with expulsion from the U.S. Senate, censured by the Wisconsin State Legislature, and denounced as disloyal by the state’s newspapers. Attacked as a “traitor,” hung in effigy, and abandoned by close allies, the Senator became a political pariah, as pundits predicted the end of his career.
It was worse for Debs. Following a June 16, 1918, anti-war address in Canton, Ohio—where he argued that draft-age young men were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder”—Debs was convicted in September of that year under the Espionage Act of 1917, as amended and expanded by the Sedition Act of 1918. Sentenced to ten years in federal prison, he asked for no mercy and declared: “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on Earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
The brutal assault on political dissent by the administration of President Woodrow Wilson during the war is the subject of Eric T. Chester’s new book, Silencing “Fighting Bob”: The Attack on Antiwar Progressives During the First World War. Despite its title, this is a book about much more than La Follette, or Debs for that matter.
Monthly Review Press
Monthly Review Press, 216 pages. Publication date: January 1, 2026.
In a series of vignettes on efforts by the Wilson Administration and its allies to punish the exercise of First Amendment rights by war foes, Chester—who was the 1996 Socialist Party nominee for Vice President—recalls the targeting of Forverts, The Jewish Daily Forward, and other voices of Jewish dissent on the Lower East Side of New York City; efforts by federal and state officials to upend the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace, a coalition of war critics founded with encouragement from La Follette that included radical economist Scott Nearing (another target of prosecution under the Espionage Act) and Emily Greene Balch (who in 1946 would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom); moves by Minnesota officials to derail the radical Nonpartisan League that gained political traction in that state and neighboring North Dakota; and the targeting of “Fighting Bob,” as La Follette had come to be known.
Chester weaves a nuanced story of heroic activism and governmental abuses that extended all the way to the office of the President. He recognizes the complexities of the circumstance and does not look away from the compromises by La Follette and others as they faced overwhelming pressure to get in line with the war effort. The editor of The Forward would eventually announce that the paper was “absolutely loyal” after the United States entered the war. As 1917 gave way to 1918, the Senator from Wisconsin took a lower profile, stopped giving fiery speeches and, finally, softened some of his criticism of Wilson.
After the war, however, La Follette renewed his outspoken critique of U.S. foreign policy, as a knowing critic of Wilson’s plans for a League of Nations that would sustain British colonial power in Ireland, India, and Africa. Debs would gain more than 900,000 votes in a 1920 presidential bid waged from behind bars, and his prison sentence was commuted the following year. In 1924, with backing from Debs and the Socialists, La Follette gained 4.8 million votes—almost 17 percent of the national total—as an independent progressive whose platform denounced “the mercenary system of foreign policy under recent administrations in the interests of financial imperialists, oil monopolists and international bankers . . . as contrary to the will of the American people, destructive of domestic development and provocative of war.”