[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.]
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THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF CONVICT 9653  
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Thomas Doherty
April 18, 2023
The Conversation
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_ 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. _

Eugene Debs, center, imprisoned at the Atlanta Federal Prison, was
notified of his nomination for the presidency on the socialist ticket
by a delegation of leading socialists who came from New York to
Atlanta., George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

 

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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] without ever
hitting the campaign trail.

Debs was behind bars in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia,
serving a 10-year sentence for sedition
[[link removed]].
It was a not a bum rap. Debs had defiantly disobeyed a law he deemed
unjust, the Sedition Act of 1918
[[link removed]].

The act was an anti-free speech measure passed at the behest of
President Woodrow Wilson
[[link removed]].
The law made it illegal for a U.S. citizen
[[link removed]]
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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]].

[A balding man's profile illustrating an old newspaper article
headlined 'There will be work for all and wealth for all willing to
work for it.']
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Eugene Debs ran for president five times, including in 1904, when he
wrote this column for The Spokane Press. Library of Congress
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Representing American socialism

For the next 30 years, Debs was the face of socialism in America
[[link removed]].
He ran for president four times
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]] in
Madison Square Garden during the 1912 campaign. “They all stand for
wage slavery.”

In 1916, he opted to seek a seat in Congress
[[link removed]] and deferred to
socialist journalist Allan L. Benson
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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
[[link removed]].

Debs would not be muzzled. One June 18, 1918, in an address in Canton,
Ohio, he declared that
[[link removed]------]
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
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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.

[A vintage newspaper clipping with the headline 'Socialists Declare
Old Parties Are Crumbling.']
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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
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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
[[link removed]].

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
[[link removed]],
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
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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
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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
[[link removed]]
“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
[[link removed]].

[A vintage telegram regarding President Harding's commutation of
Eugene Debs' sentence.]
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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 [[link removed]]

Public opinion turns

On Nov. 2, 1920, when the election results came in
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]].
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.[The
Conversation]

Thomas Doherty
[[link removed]],
Professor of American Studies, _Brandeis University
[[link removed]]_

This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

* elections
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* socialists
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* Eugene Debs
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* Free Speech Movement
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* electoral campaigns
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* World War I
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* Labor
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* socialism
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