Former President Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, 34 times over.
Among the many questions that this raises is a very practical one: Will Americans vote for a convicted felon for president?
They have before.
Eugene Debs ran for president five times: in 1900 as a Social Democrat and in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920 as the nominee of the Socialist Party of America. That last time he ran from a prison cell in Atlanta, having been sentenced to 10 years in prison for sedition after criticizing U.S. involvement in World War I. Despite his conviction and incarceration — or perhaps because of it — he received more votes in 1920 than he ever had before, just under one million nationwide. He also made it to the White House later, albeit as a guest of President Warren Harding.
Whether Debs’ precedent more than a century ago applies to Trump today, we’ll see, but that piece of history comes with a curiosity: In Virginia, Debs’ best localities in the 1920 election were often in the western part of the state, just as Trump’s are today. Their politics are quite different, but at some level, both appeared to the same type of voter: people who felt left behind by the economy.
Virginia was hardly a Debs stronghold in 1920 — he received just 0.35% of the vote in the state — but his fate was inextricably tied up with that of a native Virginian, then-President Woodrow Wilson.
The backdrop was the Wilson administration’s attempt to crack down on domestic opposition to American involvement in World War I. In June 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918 which forbade “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” against the government, the flag or the military. Later Supreme Court decisions have made clear that such prohibitions violate the First Amendment’s right to free speech, but for two years the Sedition Act of 1918 was the law of the land.
Exactly one month after Wilson signed the Sedition Act into law, Debs gave a fiery speech in Canton, Ohio, where he urged resistance to the draft. He was arrested and charged with 10 counts of violating the Sedition Act.
Justice moved more swiftly then and by September 1918, Debs had been convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison — and barred for life from voting. Behind the scenes, Wilson’s attorney general urged that the president let Debs go. The unbending Wilson refused: “This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.” Debs appealed his conviction, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it. He blasted the justices as “begowned, bewhiskered, bepowdered old fossils.” The Supreme Court separately upheld the Sedition Act itself.
Come 1920, the Socialist Party nominated Debs again for president and tried to capitalize on his incarceration — by producing buttons with Debs’ picture and the alternating slogans “For President: Convict No. 2253” or “For President: Convict No. 9653.” The former was his number when he first reported to prison in Moundsville, West Virginia; the latter his designation when he was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. (Today, there’s a Eugene V. Debs Foundation whose online gift shop sells reproductions of those buttons.)
That fall, a convicted felon serving a 10-year sentence was on the ballot in 42 of the 48 states. That was the year Republican Warren Harding won the presidency over Democrat James Cox; it was also the first year where women had the right to vote nationwide. Debs polled 3.41% of the vote, hitting 11.5% of the vote in Wisconsin, a state then known for being a hotbed of socialist thought.
The South wasn’t exactly Debs territory (he took just 28 votes in South Carolina), but his Virginia showing does tell us something about our own state’s history. Percentage-wise, Debs did best in Clifton Forge, then an independent city, where he won 3% of the vote. Keep in mind that in those days Virginia’s electorate was quite restricted, so any kind of vote that went against the state’s prevailing conservative Democratic establishment is remarkable. Debs’ vote, while small, came almost entirely from places that were the least amenable to the ruling Democratic organization that would later become known as the Byrd Machine — primarily cities and western counties, especially those industrialized with either railroads or coal production. All those were places where more liberal candidates could find those who dissented from “the organization”; today our cities are Democratic while those rural counties are overwhelmingly Republican.
Of the 808 votes Deb polled in Virginia that year from behind his prison bars, the single biggest number came from Richmond (133), followed by Norfolk (71). However, this third biggest vote total (54) came from Roanoke. We also see some curious spikes in certain rural counties — 25 socialist votes in Wise County, 17 in Dickenson County, 14 in Augusta County and Roanoke County, 13 in Rockingham County. Wise and Dickenson were coal-mining communities were Debs’ pro-labor stance found fertile ground; Roanoke and Roanoke County had large railroad employment. It’s unclear what drove those numbers in more agrarian Augusta and Rockingham.
After Harding was elected, but before he took office, Wilson’s attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, made another push for the outgoing president to pardon Debs. Wilson inked “denied” on the paperwork and sent it back. Wilson granted clemency to 200 others convicted under the Sedition Act, but not Debs.
The next president felt differently. Harding commuted his sentence, and the White House issued this statement: “There is no question of his guilt. … He was by no means, however, as rabid and outspoken in his expressions as many others, and but for his prominence and the resulting far-reaching effect of his words, very probably might not have received the sentence he did. He is an old man, not strong physically. He is a man of much personal charm and impressive personality, which qualifications make him a dangerous man calculated to mislead the unthinking and affording excuse for those with criminal intent.”
When Debs was released, his fellow prisoners at the Atlanta pen cheered him. Harding received him at the White House, saying, “Well, I’ve heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally.” When Debs returned home to Terre Haute, Indiana, a crowd of 50,000 greeted him — in a city whose population was then 66,083 and had voted Republican in the presidential race.
Prison had not been good for Debs’ health, and he never recovered. Five years after his release, he died at age 70. As for the law that Debs violated, its provisions were meant to apply only during wartime. After the war, Palmer — the attorney general who had pushed for leniency for Debs — also pushed for the law to be extended into peacetime. His rationale: He was worried about unrest among Black Americans. There’s also some thought that Palmer, who was seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 1920, would find support for his restrictive tendencies from Southern delegates. He did not, and Congress wound up repealing the law anyway. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in another free speech case — Bradenburg v. Ohio — that had the effect of overturning its previous ruling in favor of the now long-gone Sedition Act.
Is any of this relevant to our current situation? We’ll find out.
In this week’s West of the Capital:
I write a free weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. You can sign up here:
This week I’ll look at:
- The latest news from the Bob Good-John McGuire primary for the 5th District Republican nomination.
- Republican Senate candidate Hung Cao, who previously said it didn’t make sense to drive to Abingdon for a campaign forum, now says it doesn’t make sense to drive to Hampton Roads for one, either.
- What the Roanoke College Poll says about Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
- The latest early voting numbers.