The man who ran for president from his cell

Opinion

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This article was published 26/04/2024 (529 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Should Donald Trump be found guilty of all 34 felony charges he is currently on trial for in a New York City courtroom, he could be sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence the state allows for the type of offences he has allegedly committed.

The odds are that his prison term would be much less, if he is incarcerated at all.

Even if he is locked up, and assuming that he becomes the Republican party presidential nominee, a conviction would not disqualify him. True, millions of voters might (finally) turn against him, yet there is no U.S. constitutional law that individuals with a criminal record cannot run for a federal office.

Moreover, it has happened before. More than a century ago, Eugene Debs, the head of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), ran as a third-party candidate in the 1920 presidential election from his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. In September 1918, he had been convicted on charges for violating the Espionage and Sedition Acts and was given a 10-year prison sentence.

According to U.S. historian J. Robert Constantine, Debs was allowed to make one official pronouncement a week and campaigned with the slogan: “From the Jail House to the White House.” The election was won easily by the Republican party’s nominee, Warren Harding, with 16.1 million votes (60.3 per cent of the total popular vote). But Debs, who came in third behind the Democratic party’s James Cox, received close to a million votes (3.4 per cent of the total). Unlike Trump, however, Debs truly was a victim of political persecution and government paranoia.

Born in 1855 in a small Indiana city to French immigrant parents, Debs, despite his middle-class upbringing, identified as a member of the working-class. When he was 14 years old, he dropped out of school and took a job in a local railroad company shop. In a short time, he became an ardent unionist and played a key role in organizing the American Railway Union, an industrial union more radical than the more moderate trade unions. As a leader of the Pullman Rail Strike of 1894, the first national strike in U.S. history, Debs was charged with disobeying a court injunction and was sentenced to six months in jail.

Convinced of the injustice faced by labour in its conflict with unscrupulous capitalists, who were supported by the government, Debs helped found the SPA as an alternative political party. He first ran for president as the SPA’s candidate in 1900 and again in 1904, 1908, 1912, and then in 1920 as a convicted felon. He understood that he would never win these elections — and received on average only three per cent of the popular vote — but he did so to give publicity to the numerous causes he advocated such as the abolition of child labour, women’s suffrage and a graduated income tax. In this he was successful and many of the issues he championed were eventually adopted and implemented by the two main political parties.

Once the U.S. declared war on Germany in early April 1917, the federal government passed the Espionage Act, making it a crime, “to interfere with the operations or success” of the U.S. war effort.” Congress soon added the Sedition Act, which made it illegal to utter, print, write or publish anything about the U.S. government or Constitution that might be considered disloyal or profane. Both laws carried with them harsh penalties: a US$10,000 fine and a 20-year jail sentence.

More than 2,100 individuals were indicted under the espionage and sedition laws and more than 1,000 were convicted — often for merely declaring in public (and private) their negative view about the war.

Debs was arrested in June 1918 after delivering a controversial speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he denounced the government and urged those in the audience not to support the war effort. “Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters,” he declared. “This year we are going to sweep into power and in this nation we are going to destroy capitalistic institutions.”

He appealed his 10-year prison sentence, based on his belief that his freedom of expression rights were protected by the First Amendment. Yet, the Supreme Court upheld his conviction, ruling that his actions created “a clear and present danger” to the country. Most newspapers editors applauded the decision that established defined limits on freedom of speech in the United States.

Debs’s supporters held rallies and demanded that then-President Woodrow Wilson pardon him, but Wilson refused. His successor, Warren Harding, who Debs had run against in 1920, was more amenable. In late December 1921, he ordered that Debs be released after serving 32 months in prison. Debs died five years later.

In Trump’s New York criminal case, if he is convicted the only person who could pardon him is the governor of the state, Kathy Hochul of the Democratic party. And, that likely would not happen any time soon.

Needless to say, serving as president from a jail cell would be impossible. Should it come to this, Trump would almost certainly be released for the duration of his presidency so that he could carry out his official duties.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.