Re: Treason?
 

From wikipedia entry on Eugene Debs [ QUOTE ]
On June 16, 1918, Debs made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I, and was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was convicted, sentenced to serve ten years in prison and disenfranchised for life.

Debs made his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs appealed his conviction to the United States Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the Court examined several statements Debs had made regarding World War I. While Debs had carefully guarded his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act, the Court found he still had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and recruitment for the war. Among other things, the Court cited Debs's praise for those imprisoned for obstructing the draft. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated in his opinion that little attention was needed since Debs' case was essentially the same as that of Schenck v. United States, in which the Court had upheld a similar conviction.


Debs in the Atlanta PenitentiaryHe went to prison on April 13, 1919. In protest of his jailing, Charles Ruthenberg led a parade of unionists, Socialists, Anarchists and Communists to march on May 1 (May Day), 1919 in Cleveland, Ohio. The event quickly broke into the violent May Day Riots of 1919.

Debs ran for president in the 1920 election while in prison in Atlanta, Georgia at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He received 913,664 votes (3.4%), the most ever for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the U.S. and slightly more than he had won in 1912, when he obtained six percent of the vote. This stint in prison also inspired Debs to write a series of columns deeply critical of the prison system, which appeared in sanitized form in the Bell Syndicate and was collected into his only book, Walls and Bars, with several added chapters (published posthumously).

On December 25, 1921, President Warren G. Harding released Debs from prison, commuting his sentence to time served. Debs, however, never recovered his health from that time in prison and died five years later at the age of 70 in Elmhurst, Illinois.


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