Biography
Charles Baker was an Ohio Socialist Party organizer. Charles Baker was convicted in 1917 with Charles E. Ruthenberg and Alfred Wagenknecht for anti-war and anti-conscription agitation in Cleveland, and served a year in the Canton, Ohio workhouse. It was outside that workhouse, at a rally for the three imprisoned socialists, that Eugene Debs gave the June 1918 Canton speech for which Debs was himself imprisoned under the Espionage Act.
The reprinted June 16, 1918 Canton speech by Eugene Debs identifies three Cleveland antiwar socialists in the workhouse: Charles E. Ruthenberg, Alfred Wagenknecht and Charles Baker. The editorial footnote individually establishes Baker among the imprisoned men whom Debs had just visited. This supplements the existing antiwar custody record without inferring admission or release dates. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n052-NY-sect-one-feb-28-1931-DW-LOC.pdf#page=11
Ruthenberg’s report says Ohio Socialist organizer Baker was arrested at a Cleveland street meeting for allegedly disrespecting the flag and charged with disorderly conduct. The issue supplies neither his exact meeting/arrest day nor the municipal case’s final disposition, so no date is borrowed from Wagenknecht’s May27arrest or the later federal sentence.
International Socialist Review, July1917, vol.XVIII no.1, PDF page 13.
A Cleveland dispatch dated June 28, 1917 reports that Charles Baker and Alfred Wagenknecht had been arrested the previous night on secret federal indictments concerning draft registration. Both pleaded not guilty, and Federal Judge Westenhaver released each on $3,000 bond on June 28. This was a pretrial bail release, distinct from the later Canton workhouse sentence and from the earlier street-meeting disorderly-conduct arrests. Weekly Optic and Live Stock Grower, June 30, 1917, front page.
