Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the November elections, has joined a special club: presidential candidates who have also been convicted of a crime.
Before Trump was found guilty of 34 crimes for falsifying corporate records in a historic verdict on Thursday, the best-known convict seeking the Oval Office was Eugene Debs, a socialist who ran his 1920 presidential campaign behind bars.
An ardent labor activist, Debs had established himself as an acclaimed orator before being imprisoned for publicly expressing anti-war sentiments. While Republican Warren Harding won the election that year by a landslide, defeating Democrat James Cox, Debs managed to pull in nearly 1 million votes from his jail cell in Atlanta — which Allison Duerk, director of the Eugene V. Debs Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, called “remarkable.”
“He couldn’t even use his most powerful tool, which is his vote,” she said, adding that he was allowed to issue a short weekly press release during the campaign season but was otherwise dependent on others within the Socialist Party to speak for him. His supporters wore pins with his photo and inmate number on them, which read: “Convict No. 9653 for President.”
Historians say there are important differences between Debs and Trump. For starters, Debs was serving a 10-year prison sentence when he ran for president, and Trump could avoid prison time entirely: When he’s sentenced on July 11, he faces sentences ranging from a fine to four years. in jail.
The crimes the two men were accused of, and their responses to the accusations, also vary considerably. Trump pleaded not guilty to his charges, which related to a hush-money payment his former lawyer made to adult film star Stormy Daniels as the 2016 presidential election approached.
Debs, on the other hand, admitted what he had done – and was proud of it.
A founding member of the Socialist Party who had run for the party’s presidency four times beginning in 1900, Debs’s turning point was a June 1918 speech he gave at a rally in Canton, Ohio. The country was still embroiled in World War I, and Debs knew that criticizing U.S. war policies or then-President Woodrow Wilson would violate the Sedition Act of 1918, an amendment to the 1917 Espionage Act that protected freedom of speech restricted.
So he gave a subtly worded but fiery speech in protest of the war, arguing that American men were “fit for something better” than “cannon fodder.” His wording was not careful enough: Debs was later arrested and tried as a traitor.
Debs appealed the case, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court. He has never expressed regret for his anti-war and pro-free speech stance. At his sentencing, he informed the judge that he would not have withdrawn his address. “I’m not asking for mercy, I’m not asking for immunity,” he said.
After a few months of captivity in West Virginia, Debs was transferred to a federal prison in Atlanta to serve the remainder of his sentence. He was eventually transferred by then-President Harding and left the facility in December 1921 with the inmates cheering him on.
“He was loved and loved by his fellow prisoners,” said Lisa Phillips, a labor historian and professor of history at Indiana State University. “He believed that people were imprisoned because of outside circumstances they had no control over – poverty or whatever. In his case it was to express his opinion.”
There have been lesser-known figures who have attempted to storm the presidency from behind bars: Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter-day Saints, fled while awaiting trial for treason in 1844, and Lyndon LaRouche campaigned from a prison cell in 1992 after a 1988 assault. Conviction for conspiracy and mail fraud, among other charges.
Life after prison was not easy for Debs. He died in 1926 at the age of 70 in a sanitarium, much more physically and mentally exhausted than before he went to prison.
But the efforts he was so passionate about have lived on, said Duerk, director of the Debs Museum.
“There isn’t a person alive, at least in the U.S., who works for a living, who doesn’t directly benefit from the movements that Debs was a part of,” she said. “He campaigned for president and organized workers around the eight-hour day, around child labor laws, around workers’ compensation and minimum wage protections. He campaigned for what would become Social Security.”
“He was able to unite different struggles,” Duerk added. “The legacy is so great.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
