ANALYSIS
The possibility that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee might become a convicted felon, as former President Donald Trump is facing dozens of criminal charges in multiple state and federal cases, could be the most embarrassing or plainly ridiculous reality of our debased politics. But nothing in the Constitution bars anyone from seeking the White House, even if imprisoned.
In fact, the most famous socialist in U.S. history proudly ran for president from prison in 1920. Eugene V. Debs received more than 900,000 votes in a contest won in a landslide by Republican Warren G. Harding over Democrat James Cox.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Michael Kazin discusses the political persecution of Debs for speaking out against the draft during World War I. In a lengthy speech in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, Debs condemned the “ruling class” for sending young people across Europe to their deaths in a terrible war.
“His motto was, no war but class war,” said Mr. Kazin, an historian of political and social movements at Georgetown University.
“And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. ’Yours not to reason why; yours but to do and die.’ That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation,” Debs said in his infamous Canton speech.
At a campaign rally in Ohio on Saturday, Mr. Trump made a number of jarring remarks concerning immigrants and the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters. And his warning of a coming “bloodbath” if he’s not elected provoked a debate over whether he was referring to the country or merely the auto industry. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Trump’s words, they were not illegal. One-hundred-six years ago in Ohio, Debs violated the Espionage Act by denouncing U.S. involvement in the European war. He was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. President Harding commuted his sentence in 1921.
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