On a recent trip to Indiana, I was convinced by my recent readings to visit Terre Haute, the home of Eugene V. Debs.

There are more interesting attractions in the Hoosier State, to be sure, but the life of Debs deserves to be looked at from time to time as a lesson for our democratic state.

Debs remains America's most famous political prisoner -- a true rebel against government policies and perhaps the only candidate for president to campaign from a federal prison cell.

(Curiously, Terra Haute is the site of the U.S. prison where another convict of anti-government views, Timothy McVeigh, was executed.)

Debs' 1918 conviction for violating the War World I Espionage Act for speaking out against the Wilson administration's policies came during the height of the worst federal repression of free speech and politics of all time -- the years 1917-20.

It surpassed any other wave of crackdowns and intimidations in our history. Thousands were jailed, including journalists and filmmakers. Under the mood of paranoia and patriotism advanced by the "progressive" President Wilson, vigilantes, many sanctioned by the U.S. Justice Department, harassed, beat and in a few cases, killed those suspected of disloyalty.

Many others were illegally deported, including radicals Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the man who tried to kill Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead steel turmoil in 1892.

Three books -- a recent study of the Debs case, a revisionist history of the Colorado coal field wars (including the so-called Ludlow Massacre) and an essay on the lingering impact of the 1950s Alger Hiss case that sparked the current political right-left divide -- provide instrumental background to frame a portrait of the United States today.

These days socialism, a word not heard for years, has been dusted off by the right while at the same time, repression and dictatorship are words uttered in other quarters about the Bush administration.

Criticism and aggressive opposition to government is a long American tradition. In these books, readers meet a range of Americans who disagreed with their governments in very public and often illegal ways.

Our study begins in the coal fields of southern Colorado at the turn of the 20th century. Andrews, who teaches at the University of Colorado, brings a 21st-century approach to this once-troubled landscape where the region's voracious need for fuel trumped the rights and independence of the men who dragged it out of the ground.

Colorado Fuel and Iron, owned by the Rockefeller concerns in the East, was the largest industrial company in the state, both in mining coal and making steel. It attracted a polyglot mass of workers from Asia, Mexico and Europe, as well as miners from Pennsylvania, despite the work's unsafe and unhealthy nature.

Andrews begins at the beginning with the geological history of the area to show how nature and man became interconnected. Union organizing was a natural outgrowth of this connection, fought viciously by the companies through a combination of paternalism and violence.

The boiling point was reached in 1913 when the United Mine Workers called a general strike seeking recognition and better conditions.

It boiled over in April 1914 when armed miners and the Colorado militia fought deadly battles, including a particularly violent one at the tent village of 1,200 men, women and children at Ludlow, Colo. Eleven children, two women and three miners died in fighting there April 20.

It became a national scandal as the union cast the dead as victims of corporate brutality, but Andrews shows the incident sparked rebel miners to mount outright rebellion against authority. In what was called the Ten Days War, bands of miners killed more than 30 company workers or soldiers and destroyed six mines.

And during a raid April 29 on the company village of Forbes, they shot down 10 men and leveled the place. President Wilson was forced to send in U.S. Army troops to quell the outbreak.

The Colorado coal wars, like the state's coal industry itself, have been long buried. Andrews' book restores their crucial place in the country's history of citizen opposition.

Debs' career is closely linked with the coal union fights. A charismatic figure, he helped lead the strike against the Pullman train car company in 1893 and was jailed for his efforts. The incident turned him into a fierce disciple of socialism and a leader among the country's left wing and labor movement.

He ran for president four times, reaching the peak of popularity, along with the Socialist Party in 1912. As his now-shabby home in Terre Haute proves, he lived a modest life in his mission to contain capitalism and promote a better life for workers.

Wilson's decision to enter the Great War in Europe was not universally accepted in the United States, so he mounted a campaign of public relations and political suppression to quiet opposition. Debs was not cowed, even after his arrest for a speech criticizing the war in Canton, Ohio.

Freeberg, a University of Tennessee professor, has written an exhaustive account of the three-year campaign to free Debs from federal custody while the nation struggled over civil rights and government power in the last days of the Wilson administration, which included the notorious "Palmer Raids" on suspected dissidents.

Crippled in mind and body by a stroke and rejection of his peace plans, Wilson ignored the Debs campaign, but his successor, Warren Harding, commuted the old socialist's 10-year sentence on Dec. 25, 1921, and Debs returned home to Terre Haute, his health ruined. He died in 1926, but he left a legacy of protest that eventually led the U.S. Supreme Court to strengthen First Amendment rights.

Yale University Press has a book series called Icons of America and gave the task of explaining the curious career of Alger Hiss and his two nemeses, Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon, to Susan Jacoby. She's a former Washington Post reporter turned author, most recently of "The Age of American Unreason," a breezy history of the political scene.

Hiss and Chambers carried on the traditions of radicals like Debs, but went further to embrace communism as it emerged from the Russian revolution and grew in the Depression years.

Jacoby zeroes in on the cultural aspects of Hiss-Chambers, how the question of who was telling the truth cracked open the formerly understated division between liberals and conservatives that yawns like a chasm today.

Breezy and flip as usual -- who but Jacoby could imagine Hiss sneaking a peek at Stalin as he urinated? -- she rapidly sketches the background of the drama that gripped America in 1948 when Chambers fingered Hiss as a fellow Red spy.

Hiss briefly enjoyed a renaissance during the fall from grace of Nixon, his chief congressional tormenter, but then was sullied by revelations from old Soviet records that seemed to name him as an agent.

Convicted as a perjurer, but never as a spy, Hiss was transformed into the victim of right-wing viciousness and revenge by the left while Chambers, who admitted his work for Moscow, was given the Medal of Freedom posthumously by President Reagan.

In her fast-paced overview of the Hiss case viewed through the lens of 2009, Jacoby provides helpful clues to understand the disparate thinking that continues to mark the fault line of American politics.

Her book traces a path back to Debs, whose conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court argument that war changes the nature of free speech. Jacoby argues that a similar justification for pursuing Hiss and other so-called enemy agents was made in the Cold War era, a justification that caught many people guilty only of expressing an opinion, in a damaging net.