On April 4, 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
announced the indictment of former president and current presidential candidate
Donald Trump on 34 felony charges related to alleged
crimes involving bookkeeping on a 7-year-old hush money payment to an adult
film actress.
Trump is unlikely to wind up in an orange jumpsuit, at least not
on this indictment, and probably not before November 2024, in any case. Yet if
he does, he would not be the first candidate to run for the White House from
the Big House.
In the election of 1920, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, polled nearly a million votes without ever hitting the campaign trail. Debs was behind bars in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, serving a 10-year sentence for sedition. It was a not a bum rap. Debs had defiantly disobeyed a law he deemed unjust, the Sedition Act of 1918.
The act was an anti-free speech measure passed at the behest of President Woodrow Wilson. The
law made it illegal for a U.S. citizen to “willfully
utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive
language about the United States government” or to discourage compliance with
the draft or voluntary enlistment into the military.
By the time he was imprisoned for sedition, Eugene Victor Debs
had enjoyed a lifetime of running afoul of government authority. Born in 1855 into
bourgeois comfort in Terre Haute, Indiana, he worked as a clerk and a grocer
before joining the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875 and finding his
vocation as an advocate for labor.
Eugene Debs ran for president five
times, including in 1904, when he wrote this column for The Spokane
Press. Library of
Congress
Representing American Socialism
For the next 30 years, Debs was the face of socialism in America. He ran for president four times, in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912, garnering around a million votes in the last cycle. “The Republican, Democratic, and Progressive Parties are but branches of the same capitalistic tree,” he told a cheering mass of people in Madison Square Garden during the 1912 campaign. “They all stand for wage slavery.”
In 1916, he opted to seek a seat in
Congress and deferred to socialist journalist Allan
L. Benson to head the party’s ticket. Both lost.
In April 1917, when America joined World War I’s bloodbath in
Europe, Debs became a fierce opponent of American involvement in what he saw as
a death cult orchestrated by rapacious munitions manufacturers. On May 21,
1918, wary of a small but energized and eloquent anti-war movement, Wilson signed
the Sedition Act into law.
Debs would not be muzzled. One June 18, 1918, in an address in
Canton, Ohio, he declared that American boys were “fit
for something better than for cannon fodder.”
In short order, he was arrested and convicted of violating the
Sedition Act. At his sentencing, he told the judge he would not retract a word
of his speech even if it meant he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
“I ask for no mercy, plead for no immunity,” he declared. After a
brief stint in the West Virginia Federal Penitentiary, he was sent to serve out
his sentence at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
Last-minute pre-election campaigning on Debs’ behalf by the
Socialist Party is described in the New York Tribune of October 27, 1920. Library of
Congress
Imprisonment only enhanced Debs’ status with his followers. On
May 13, 1920, at its national convention in New York, the Socialist Party
unanimously nominated “Convict 2253” as its standard bearer for the presidency.
Debs was later given new digits, so the campaign buttons read “For President,
Convict No. 9653.”
As Debs’ name was entered into nomination, a wave of emotion
swept over the delegates, who cheered for 30 minutes before bursting into a
rousing chorus of the “Internationale,” the communist anthem.
A ‘front cell’ campaign
Debs’ opponents both were better funded and enjoyed freedom of
movement: They were Warren G. Harding,
the GOP junior senator from Ohio, and James M. Cox, governor of
Ohio, for the Democrats.
Yet Debs did not let incarceration keep his message from the
voters. In a wry response to Harding’s “front
porch” campaign style, in which the Republican candidate
received visits from the front porch of his home in Marion, Ohio, the Socialist
Party announced that its candidate would conduct a “front cell”
campaign from Atlanta.
In 1920, broadcast radio was not a factor in electioneering, but
another electronic medium was just beginning to be exploited for political
messaging. On May 29, 1920, in a carefully choreographed event, newsreel
cameras filmed a delegation from the Socialist Party arriving at the Atlanta
penitentiary to inform Debs officially of his nomination. The intertitles of
the silent screen described “the most unusual scene in the political history of
America – Debs, serving a ten-year term for ‘seditious activities,’ accepts
Socialist nomination for Presidency.”
After accepting “a floral tribute from Socialist women voters,”
the “Moving Picture Weekly” reported, the denim-clad Debs was shown
giving “a final affectionate farewell” before heading “back to
the prison cell for nine years longer.”
At motion picture theaters across the nation, audiences watched
the staged ritual and, depending on their party registration, reacted with
cheers or hisses.
The New York Times was aghast that a felon might canvass for votes from the motion picture screen. “Under the influence of this unreasoning mob psychology, the acknowledged criminal is nightly applauded as loudly as many of the candidates for the Presidency who have won their honorable eminence by great and unflagging service to the American people,” read an editorial from June 12, 1920.
One year after the election of 1920, President Harding commuted
Debs’ sentence and he was released from prison on Christmas Day, 1921. Library of Congress
Public opinion turns
On Nov. 2, 1920, when the election results came in, Harding had
trounced his Democratic opponent by a record electoral majority, 404 electoral
votes to Cox’s 127, with 60.4% of the popular vote to Cox’s 34.1%. Debs was a
distant third, but he had won 3.4% of the electorate – 913,693 votes. Debs’
personal best showing was in the presidential election of 1912, with 6% of the
vote. To be fair, that was when he was more mobile.
Even with the Great War over and the Sedition Act repealed by a
repentant U.S. Congress on Dec. 13, 1920, President Wilson, during his final months in office, steadfastly
refused to grant Debs a pardon. But public opinion had turned
emphatically in favor of the convict-candidate. President Harding, who took
office in March 1921, finally commuted his sentence, effective on Christmas
Day, 1921, along with that of 23 other Great War prisoners of conscience
convicted under the Sedition Act.
As Debs exited the prison gates, his fellow inmates cheered. He raised his hat in
one hand, his cane in the other, and waved back at them. Outside, the newsreel
cameras were waiting to greet him. It was the kind of photo op that Donald Trump might relish.
Thomas Doherty, Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University
This article is republished from The Conversation under
a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
