Eugene V. Debs Sentenced to Ten Years for Antiwar Speech, Runs for President from Prison

Federal Judge David C. Westenhaver sentenced five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs to ten years in federal prison for violating the Espionage Act by delivering an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio on June 16, 1918. Before sentencing, Debs delivered his famous statement: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Debs’s Canton speech had criticized the war as a capitalist conflict and praised three socialists already imprisoned for draft resistance. He carefully avoided explicitly urging draft resistance but argued that the working class had no stake in the war. Federal agents in attendance transcribed his words, and he was arrested two weeks later. At trial, Debs did not contest the facts, instead using the courtroom to articulate socialist principles and attack the prosecution of political speech.

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction in Debs v. United States (1919), with Justice Holmes applying the “clear and present danger” test he had articulated in Schenck just days earlier. From Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1920, Debs received 913,693 votes for president - nearly a million citizens voting for a man their government had imprisoned for speaking. President Wilson refused to pardon Debs, calling him “a traitor to his country.” President Harding commuted his sentence in 1921, but Debs emerged in broken health and died in 1926. The prosecution of Debs remains one of the most egregious examples of the government criminalizing political opposition.