Christmas, 1921: Eugene Debs Is Released From Prison And Meets President Warren Harding

By December of 1921, Eugene Debs, prominent American labor leader, dedicated activist and five time Socialist candidate for President of the United States, had been imprisoned since April of 1919. Now he was to be released on Christmas Day of 1921, thanks to President Warren Harding of Marion, Ohio. Harding asked Debs to visit the White House on his way home from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia where Debs had spent the bulk of his incarceration and from where he had run his final campaign as Socialist candidate for President of the United States in the autumn of 1920.

On December 23, 1921, President Harding officially commuted Debs’s sentence and those of twenty-three other prisoners who had violated the federal government’s Espionage Act during World War One. Debs would soon be able to return to his home in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The origins of Debs’s imprisonment go back to June of 1918, when he gave a speech in Canton, Ohio in the city’s Nimisilla Park. The speech was typical Debs—denouncing the abuses of capitalism and advocating for workers and Socialism.

Debs was arguably the best-known Socialist in America when he gave his Canton speech in 1918. His progressive credentials were impeccable. In addition to his earlier campaigns for President, he had founded the American Railway Union, which successfully struck James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad in April, 1894.

He had served a six-month jail term when the ARU supported a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. He was one of the founders of the legendary radical union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), although Debs and the Socialist Party later broke from that organization. Debs was a relentless voice for the rights of labor. He was the Socialist candidate for President in 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912. 

There were around 1200 or so people in the crowd Debs addressed that day. Nimisilla Park was located across the street from the Stark County Workhouse, where three Ohio Socialists had been jailed for draft opposition. Debs paid a visit to these inmates prior to his speech. While the U.S. had been in the war for some time, it was only during the summer of 1918 that Americans were participating in large scale combat. Much of the previous year was spent mobilizing and training the services, organizing and transporting supplies, and transporting men overseas. But during the time of Debs’s speech, U.S. forces were taking serious casualties on the western front. The month-long battle of Belleau Wood was in full swing, which helped shape the legendary status of the U.S. Marines. Americans were dying in the war and opposition to dissent further hardened during Woodrow Wilson’s administration.

This is part of Debs’ speech on June 16, 1918:

“I have just returned from a visit over yonder, where three of our most loyal comrades are paying the penalty for their devotion to the cause of the working class. They have come to realize, as many of us have, that it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world. I realize that, in speaking to you this afternoon, there are certain limitations placed on the right of free speech. I must be exceedingly careful, prudent, as to what I say, and even more careful and prudent as to how I say it. (Laughter). I may not be able to say all I think; (laughter and applause), but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would a thousand times rather be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets. They may put those boys in jail—but they can not put the Socialist movement in jail.”

Debs continued to lambaste the governmental and industrial order in the United States, even taking the Supreme Court to task:

“Why, the other day, by a vote of five to four—a kind of craps game—come seven, come ‘leven—they declared the child labor law unconstitutional…and this in our so-called Democracy, so that we may continue to grind the flesh and blood and bones of puny little children into profits for the junkers of Wall Street…The history of this country is being written in the blood of the childhood the industrial lords have murdered.”

Debs’ one war statement was this:

“The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”

Debs would soon be in trouble. The government conducted surveillance on gatherings like the one in Canton, and a government stenographer took down Debs’s speech. It would result in a ten-count indictment for violating the Espionage Act. Debs was convicted on two of those charges and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Debs was used to controversy. He was born Eugene Victor Debs in Terre Haute on November 5, 1855, the son of Alsatian immigrants. He left school at age fourteen to work for the Vandalia Railroad scraping paint from rail cars. He later became a fireman, the worker who shoveled coal to keep the train moving. He did this for four years until his mother, concerned about the high mortality rate of railroad workers, persuaded him to take another line of work.

Debs became a grocery clerk, but was still drawn to the railroad and became the secretary for the local Brotherhood of Railroad Firemen, later becoming the union’s Grand Secretary-Treasurer in 1880 and editor of its magazine. Debs was also known as a figure in the cultural and intellectual life of the city. As a member of the city’s Occidental Literary Club he helped bring noted figures such as freethinker and agnostic Robert Ingersoll, feminist Susan B. Anthony, and poet James Whitcomb Riley to speak in Terre Haute.

During these years Debs became one of the most loved and vilified men in America. There were many, despite disagreement with his views, who liked Debs personally. This was especially the case in Terre Haute. Debs was easygoing and friendly, with a warm, engaging manner that conveyed respect for others, even those who might have found his beliefs repellent. His oratorical style, aside from his content, was familiar to his listeners. He was much like an evangelical preacher when he spoke.

Debs had been giving essentially the same speech for the past several weeks and the government had taken no action against him. Print outlets for dissenting opinion had dried up: the government had suppressed the publication of periodicals such as The Masses and the International Socialist Review. The Socialist movement worldwide had been torn in competing directions, with some Socialists advocating participation in the conflict and others in opposition to the war. Debs had been sick for much of 1918 and felt called to action for a variety of reasons. He had a hard time lying down when old comrades were standing up for their beliefs and being jailed and vilified. Debs biographer Nick Salvatore said Debs knew that other people in the movement still looked to him as a leader and wanted to see him act. According to another Debs biographer, Ray Ginger, the Socialist leader had wanted to arouse opposition to the war and test the government’s willingness to enforce these repressive laws. This time the government decided to bite—after some consideration.

Debs’s comments had first been relayed to the Justice Department. Officials there mulled over Debs’ speech for three days, including Attorney General Thomas Gregory. They argued against prosecution, stating “Parts of the speech, taken in connection with the context, brings the speech close to, if not over, the line, although the case is by means a clear one. All in all, the Department does not feel strongly convinced that a prosecution is advisable.”

E.S. Wertz, U.S. attorney for northern Ohio, still felt he had a case and brought it to a grand jury, which indicted Debs on June 29, 1918 on ten counts of violating the Espionage Law. He was arrested the following day, with his trial following in September. After his conviction on two counts, Debs was sent to the state prison in Moundsville, West Virginia as federal prisons were crowded. Debs was well treated in Moundsville. Warden Joseph Z. Terrell, a former railroad man, treated Debs kindly. According to Debs biographer Ray Ginger, “The prison rules allowed only one visitor and two letters per month, but Debs was permitted an unlimited number of visitors, and he could write as many letters as he wished.” He was also allowed to continue receiving his Socialist newspapers as long as he didn’t distribute them among the prison population. Debs was also assigned a light duty hospital job, but he felt guilty about the privileges he had received and asked Terrell to let him do heavier manual labor. Terrell turned him down.

Debs was able to spend a lot of time reading. He was also popular with the prison population. He served in an almost priestly kind of role to the men, who would come to him for advice and conversation. Debs’s stay at Moundsville was short. On June 13, 1919, Debs learned that he was to be transferred to the federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia. Some of Debs’s associates thought there was maliciousness behind the act, but the real reason was that a state facility needed a certain ratio of guards to prisoners if it was to house federal convicts, and the West Virginia government lacked the additional security. Terrell did what he could to ease Debs’s transition to Atlanta. In a letter to the Atlanta warden he wrote, “I never in my life met a kinder man. He is forever thinking of others, trying to serve them, and never thinking of himself.”

Debs continued to be a positive influence in Atlanta, where he became known as “Little Jesus.” He encountered a stricter world than that of Moundsville. He could write only one single sheet of correspondence per week to an approved family member. Debs insisted on wearing prison stripes, worked in the clothing warehouse, and gave away a large amount of tobacco to other convicts as he often received it as a gift from his visitors. Debs continued to be a sort of father-confessor to the men. Debs did have one act of overt rebellion. He did not like the practice of compulsory chapel attendance. During his first time in the chapel, he was put off by the sight of armed guards walking around the rows of seats swinging their nightsticks. He refused to go again, and the prison authorities, wary of his prominence and the influence he had, no longer made chapel attendance compulsory.

While imprisoned, Debs’ health began to decline. His health had deteriorated even before his imprisonment, and the poor prison fare and the southern heat took its toll on him. The warden moved Debs to lighter duty in the prison hospital. As Ginger notes in his biography, this treatment wasn’t only out of concern for Debs. The potential death of a high profile prisoner like Debs would have been a public relations debacle, and prisoners also understood that having Debs around also made the authorities more circumspect in how they treated everyone incarcerated.

His deep connections with the other prisoners and their concern for him could not keep Debs from experiencing his own dark night of the soul while jailed. Although not a Christian, Debs drew inspiration from the life and suffering of Christ and had a picture of Jesus on his cell wall. Debs spent a total of fourteen hours each day behind bars. During this time he reflected on his life and the causes for which he had worked. He was appalled at how fractured the Socialist movement and other wings of the American Left had become because of infighting. He was disturbed by how ruthlessly the Wilson administration had cracked down on any kind of dissent during the war. He worried about the future of working men and women in the coming years of the twentieth century.

Debs was a man who had spent much of his life on the go, traveling the country and working on behalf of the Socialist cause and the workingman. Now in the long prison hours, confined to his cell, Debs looked back over the years of his life and reflected more deeply and powerfully than he ever had before. Despite the depression and melancholy he felt, Debs continued to believe in the causes for which he had dedicated his life. He had the inner strength to keep going. As Nick Salvatore wrote in his biography of Debs, the imprisoned labor leader was able to “take solace in this, the starkest crisis of his life, in the cycle of death and rebirth that had for so long drawn the circumference of his vision. He found that inner strength to persevere in reflections on his own manliness and in the examples of others who had preceded him in that lonely path.”

It wasn’t long before Debs would be called for one last hurrah in the American electoral cycle. In 1920, Debs would stand for the last time as the Socialist candidate for President of the United States. Debs made a different kind of history by being the first federal prisoner to run for President. When asked by a Socialist committee as to how he would run his campaign, Debs joked that would be “a candidate at home in seclusion.” Debs was nominated as the Socialist Party’s candidate during their convention in May, 1920. Prison officials allowed him to release a weekly bulletin. In the end, Debs still earned nearly a million votes during the 1920 campaign, which is pretty impressive for a man campaigning from behind bars, but the halcyon days of the Socialist party in America were past. The winner in 1920 was a man Debs would meet a little over the year after the election: Warren Gamaliel Harding of Marion, Ohio. Harding was an easygoing small town newspaper editor who had gone into politics and become an Ohio state senator, lieutenant governor of Ohio and later a U.S. Senator. Harding was temperamentally different from Wilson. Harding had a genial nature and a roving eye. He enjoyed a good poker game and a glass of whiskey on Saturday night with the boys.

During his campaign, Harding expressed interest in amnesty for political prisoners jailed by the U.S. government during the First World War.

The first move towards clemency actually came from A. Mitchell Palmer, who was Wilson’s Attorney General. In January of 1921, Palmer recommended that Debs be released on February 12, 1921, which was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Wilson read the recommendation, which noted Debs’ poor health and concerns that Debs would die behind bars. Wilson simply wrote a single word across the recommendation: “Denied.” Joseph Tumulty, who served as private secretary to Wilson, later wrote that Wilson said Debs was “a traitor to his country and will never be pardoned during my administration.”

When Wilson’s denial was made known, Debs responded quickly. He wanted it understood that he had never applied for a pardon as such as request would seem to be an admission of guilt. But in regard to Wilson and his character, he was especially blunt. He released this public statement that appeared in the New York Times:

“I understand perfectly the feelings of Wilson. When he reviews what he has done, when he realizes the suffering he has brought about, then he is being punished. It is he, not I, who needs a pardon. If I had it in my power I would give him the pardon which would set him free.”

“Woodrow Wilson is an exile from the hearts of his people. The betrayal of his ideals makes him the most pathetic figure in the world. No man in public life in American history ever retired so thoroughly discredited, so scathingly rebuked, so overwhelmingly impeached and repudiated as Woodrow Wilson…”

Wilson’s Department of Justice responded in punitive fashion, ordering Debs to be held incommunicado and suspending all visitors and written communication. But this in turn spurred public protest and Wilson’s administration appeared petty and vindictive. The decision was partially revoked shortly before Wilson left office.

Not long after Harding was inaugurated, Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty reviewed Debs’ status. He actually had Debs travel unescorted by train to Washington on March 24, 1921. Debs spent the day visiting with Daugherty and other officials. Daugherty recalled years later that Debs “spent a large part of the day in my office, and I never met a man I liked better.”

The clemency movement picked up speed. The Socialist party and other left wing and labor organizations collected thousands of petitions. Opposition also came from some quarters, including  the American Legion, a veterans organization formed shortly after World War I. Prominent figures such as Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens continued to press for Debs’s release. Norman Thomas, a Socialist Presbyterian minister who would later run for President himself on the Socialist ticket, visited Harding twice. Thomas had a been a paperboy for Warren Harding’s Marion Star in their hometown of Marion, Ohio. Harding wanted to wait until the Senate had ratified the peace treaty with Germany, which finally happened on August 25, 1921.

Finally, on December 23, 1921, Harding announced he was commuting the sentences of Debs and twenty-three other prisoners. It should be noted that these were not pardons, and the civil rights of the prisoners were not restored.

Debs gaining his freedom was a loss for his fellow prisoners. As Nick Salvaotore noted in his book on Debs, “During the most severe personal crisis of his life, the convicts at Atlanta had stood by him, encouraged him, and reminded him in his most desolate days of the potential that each individual possessed. In turn, Debs had befriended many of them. As one prison-mate, Sam Moore, remembered some years later while still in the penitentiary: ‘God what I would not give for those old days those happy days, those miserable days back again. As miserable as I was I would defy fate with all its cruelty as long as Debs held my hand, and I was the most miserably happiest man on earth when I knew he was going home Christmas.’ ” 

That love was on full display when Debs exited the prison. Warden Fred Zerbst defied prison regulations and allowed all 2,500 prisoners to gather in front of the main prison building. The men roared as Debs walked out towards the prison gates. It was a massive sound, the pent call of love and appreciation for a man who had endured and suffered alongside them. Debs turned and faced them, tears streaming down his face and reached out his arms towards the men. He turned away and walked towards a waiting car, but the prisoners cheered again, and Debs turned and acknowledged them once again. One last time the prisoners called to him, and Debs, his face wet with tears, turned and honored them one last time before entering the car and leaving prison. 

Debs arrived in Washington on the morning of December 26, 1921. Debs walked into Harding’s office and simply said, “Good morning, Mr. President.” Harding arose from his chair and said heartily, “Well, I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally.” Debs and Harding chatted for some time with the understanding that Debs was not to divulge any of the contents of their conversation. Harding, perhaps inspired by his conversations with his famous paperboy Norman Thomas, mainly seems to have wanted to meet the man who had been America’s most famous prisoner and who had campaigned against him from the federal pen in Atlanta. Debs told reporters that “Mr. Harding appears to me to be a kind gentleman, one whom I believe possesses humane impulses. We understand each other perfectly.”

Debs met with a number of callers on that day and the next in Washington, including fellow labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers. He informed his wife that he would depart Washington on the evening of December 27 and arrive in Terre Haute the following day. Debs returned to Terre Haute and a massive reception, hoisted off the train and onto the shoulders of waiting men who took him to a wagon that brought him back to his home.

But it was a far cry from the 1890s when Debs was released from jail and had years of activity ahead of him. Debs was in bad health, and progressive movements were in retreat. The decade of the Roaring Twenties was underway. The American left wasn’t completely dormant, but aside from its role in the Sacco and Vanzetti protests, the public profiles of the Socialist party in the United States and other left wing movements were overshadowed during the nation’s wave of prosperity. Americans in the age of Harding and Coolidge retreated from the concerns of the larger world and were weary of reform and activism. It would change when the stock market crashed in October of 1929.

 

Debs had less than five years to live. His health continued to decline, and he died on October 20, 1926 at the Lindlahr Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois. Harding had less time left than Debs. Harding died on August 2, 1923 in San Francisco while on a cross country trip. He was succeeded in office by Calvin Coolidge of Vermont.

I find the meeting of Debs and Harding interesting in itself, but I also feel like it represents the end of an era in American politics: the time when Midwesterners exerted such extraordinary influence in the national arena. Debs was a man of the Midwest whose radicalism was of a deeply American homegrown variety.

It was born out of his experience on the railroads and the suffering and poverty he witnessed in the nation’s heartland and across the country. It was the workingmen and farmers who shaped his thought, not Marx and Engels. Of all the Presidents between 1869 and 1923, seven were from Ohio, all of them Republicans, all of them strongly shaped by the Midwestern world in which they were raised. Five of them were also deeply influenced by the great convulsion of the nineteenth century–the Civil War. The last of the Ohio men was Warren Harding, the son of a Union veteran.

 

In the Christmas season of 1921, these two men of the nineteenth century heartland met for one time. It’s hard to imagine a President today welcoming a homegrown radical to see him at the White House after commuting his sentence. Indeed, the past is a different country.

Patrick Kerin 

 

 

Resources:

 

Eugene V. Debs: A Biography by Ray Ginger (originally published as The Bending Cross, A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs). Collier Books, New York, New York. 1949, 1962.

Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist by Nick Salvatore (Second Edition). University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1982, 2007.