Biography
Egbert Aswell Trumble was a Rains County, Texas farmer, an official of the Farmers and Laborers Protective Association, a Socialist Party election official and the Socialist candidate for Rains County sheriff in 1904. He spoke at the first of the anti-draft meetings held in the county in the summer of 1917, called after local farmers complained that their draft quota was unfairly high; at a meeting on July 29 participants allegedly voted that draft-age men should resist induction and that older residents should help them. Rumours that the farmers meant to burn the town of Emory, form armed camps and attack officials proved baseless — no town was attacked, no encampment or arms cache was found, and the defendants did not resist arrest — but about fifty people were seized in raids beginning on the night of August 8, 1917. He was among the forty-six released on individual $2,000 bonds. Tried at Tyler from September 9, 1918 in a trial lasting some ten days, he was one of twenty-three convicted, of federal seditious conspiracy connected to resistance to the Selective Service Act, and sentenced to two years alongside his son John and John O’Rear. The Fifth Circuit affirmed on November 25, 1919, holding that abandoning the planned resistance did not erase criminal responsibility once the conspiracy had formed. He entered USP Atlanta on January 31, 1920 and was paroled on December 4, 1920. His brother Joe and his son John were imprisoned with him.
