The Time Prison Was an Effective Campaign Strategy

Americans have very little patience for being told to stay quiet. As far as they are concerned, their speech is a God-given right they should be able to exercise at all times despite any minor extenuating circumstances, like war.

That was certainly how Americans felt in the twilight hours of World War One, and it continued to be how they felt during the presidential election of 1920 when nearly a million of them (6 percent) cast their votes for a man sitting in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: Where Are All the Airships?)

Eugene V. Debs was the kind of man who had read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, had decided that it was time to move on from American capitalism, and therefore called himself a socialist.

But it was an American flavor of socialism. Debs thought the American Founding was great and democracy was a swell idea. American socialism was simply the next natural step in the progressive narrative of American development, and he was there to help make it happen.

In 1901 Debs founded the Socialist Party of America and remained its charismatic face and go-to presidential candidate for years — but that wasn’t why he ended up in federal prison. (READ MORE: NY Judge May Get Trump Elected)

The immediate cause was a speech he gave in 1918 in Canton, Ohio. Like many Americans, Debs didn’t like that America was at war and he liked the draft even less. As far as he was concerned, the draft was essentially a way to drag the proletariat onto the battlefield to fight for the petty causes of the bourgeoisie. In American terms, he believed the war to be preeminently undemocratic.

The problem with openly expressing that opinion from a podium on a July day in Ohio was that it was illegal in 1918 under that year’s Sedition Act. It should have been an easy conviction, but it wasn’t really. The stenographer tasked with recording Debs’ speech had done a bad job of it and the witnesses were hardly helpful. Debs, of course, immediately admitted his guilt and proceeded to talk for another two hours. The jury had no problem indicting him. (READ MORE: Are Trump’s Polls Understating His Lead?)

By the time 1920 rolled around, Debs not only received the nomination of the Socialist Party of America on May 13, he then garnered 913,693 votes (although he didn’t manage to obtain any electoral votes). Despite being unable to campaign effectively from his prison cell it was the most successful presidential campaign Debs ever ran. Americans didn’t need to be socialists to vote for him, they just needed to be opposed to the wartime suspension of their constitutional rights.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way on May 13, 2024.

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