Insight: Drawing lessons from a convict vying for the White House
The presidential campaign of the Socialist Party candidate while being in prison shares a striking similarity with the case of Trump in 2024 (Trump has vowed to appeal and his sentencing is set for July 11). The story of Debs shows that being incarcerated doesn't hinder running for office or maintaining a campaign.
Debs had a history of clashing with the law, but it was a speech delivered in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918, that led to his arrest and imprisonment. Before an audience of 1,200 working-class people, Debs criticized the government's decision to join what later became known as World War I. Addressing the crowd, he said, "Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense!"
Present in the crowd were agents from the Justice Department, who took note of the inflammatory speech. They hired a stenographer to record incendiary lines from the speech, which proved enough to arrest Debs under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the subsequent Sedition Act of 1918, which forbade "use in speech or written form any language that was disloyal to the government, the Constitution, the military, or the flag."
After receiving his verdict, Debs delivered a furious speech at his trial, condemning the Espionage Act as "a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions." Unapologetic, he concluded, "The people are awakening."
A jury of his peers found him guilty on three counts of violating the Espionage and Sedition acts and sentenced Debs to 10 years in a federal penitentiary. An appeal to the US Supreme Court upheld the lower court's decision.
Despite his imprisonment, the Socialist Party remained unwaveringly loyal to its standard-bearer. At their national convention on May 13, 1920, delegates unanimously supported Debs' nomination. When his prison number changed, a new campaign button emerged: "For President, Convict No. 9653."
In an attempt to keep his candidacy alive, Debs took advantage of the emerging medium of film during his time in prison. A delegation from the Socialist Party presented him with their party's nomination at his prison in Atlanta on May 29, and the footage was shown in theatres across the country.
Unable to speak in public, Debs issued a weekly press release to maintain his presence in the public eye. In one message, he remarked, "I would rather have a man think and vote against me than vote like a sheep."
Upon Harding's election in 1920, pressure was applied to outgoing President Woodrow Wilson to pardon Debs. However, Wilson refused. When Harding took office, he commuted Debs’ sentence, stating, "We cannot punish men in America for the exercise of their freedom in political and religious belief."
Broken by the harsh prison experience, Debs spent his final years largely out of the public eye and passed away in 1926 at the age of 70. Over time, history has more often viewed Debs' imprisonment as an infringement on traditional democratic liberties than a justifiable protection of the national interest.
As we enter unchartered territory, this history of campaigning from prison could offer valuable insights. In our system of two major parties—Democrats and Republicans—Debs, who ran as a Socialist, had a steep hill to climb to win the presidency under any circumstances. While Trump isn't a Socialist and is a former president, pressure for a pardon will surface. We won't determine Trump’s fate in prison until his scheduled sentencing in July.
One major similarity lies in the use of media. Debs employed the available media of the day to communicate with voters and maintain the seriousness of his campaign. Trump will undoubtedly follow suit, as evident in his campaign's statement calling him a "political prisoner" following the trial. Even with a guilty verdict, a post-trial Reuters/Ipsos poll indicated that 35% of Republican registered voters were more inclined to vote for him, while 25% of independent voters showed less interest.
The most intriguing similarity may be their shared strategy of putting the judicial system itself on trial. Debs contended that the 1918 Sedition Law, passed just a month before his speech, was unjust, and Trump has denounced the New York hush money trial as "rigged," claiming that the "real verdict" would come on November 5.
The Democrats and Republicans are ready to shift their focus to different lines of attack. They may refer to Trump as a "convicted felon" and argue that the trial was entirely political. The American people, however, will ultimately decide the outcome of the election, just as they did with Debs. It will be up to them to determine whether the results of Trump's trial eroded their trust in the legal system or if it was a matter of delivering justice.
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Debate surrounding the fairness of charging and sentencing political figures, such as Debs and potentially Trump, often elicits strong opinions from the public.
Specifically, many people argue that the use of legal charges and sentencing to silence political opponents constitutes an infringement on democratic freedoms.
