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Has Anyone Ever Run for President While in Prison? And More Questions He finished 2nd behind Roosevelt in 5 states, and 2nd behind Taft only in Utah. Union officials called for a national boycott of Pullman cars, asking the other railroad unions to honor the boycott by refusing to work on trains pulling the cars. In 1920, Eugene V. Debs, ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket and received a million votes--even though he was serving a prison term for . Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1855 to a family of French Alsatian immigrants. Many Americans opposed U.S. involvement in the Great War and they did more than protest. Corrections? Fifty years later, the fallout continues. The Battle of Belleau Wood was brutal, deadly and forgotten. The party claimed that it had 435 members elected to office by 1911, and over one thousand by 1912. He also began to believe that organizing unions along trade or craft lines rather than on an industrial basis made it more difficult for workers to join together in common struggle against the growing power of the corporations. Wilson won a majority in the 11 former, * Third party is endorsed by a major party, Attempted assassination of Theodore Roosevelt, Though he had become President upon the William McKinley assassination in 1901, only six months of McKinley's term had elapsed. one party pledged in every fiber of its being to the economic freedom of all the people.. Because the Pullman cars carried U.S. mail, President Grover Cleveland sent the U.S. Army in to quell the conflict. Though he appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. found a clear intention to obstruct the draft. After months of continually increasing support, Roosevelt changed his position, writing to journalist Henry Beach Needham in January 1912 that if the nomination "comes to me as a genuine public movement of course I will accept."[13]. Eugene Debs Got 1 Million Votes For PresidentAs Convict Number 9653 [28], J. Mahlon Barnes, who had managed Debs' campaign in the 1908 election, also managed the campaign in 1912. In the 1920 election, Debs and his running mate Emil Seidel garnered 913,693 votes, but as in his previous campaigns no electoral votes. [24] The number of Socialists in the state legislatures increased from twenty to twenty-one. (Top ten in order: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, and North . [25][26][27], After the presidential ballot Seidel and Russell proposed a motion to make Debs' nomination unanimous and it was accepted. However, each one had registered, and one was even in uniform. 14, The Presidential Vote, 18961932, Edgar E. Robinson, pg. But Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned for his opposition to an earlier draft, has never been pardoned. Delahaye, Claire. The best-known apostle of industrial unionism in the early years of the 20th century, Debs ran for president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket five times between 1900 and 1920, winning millions of votes. There is no record of what either man said. Margin of victory less than 1% (13 electoral votes): Margin of victory less than 5% (142 electoral votes): Margin of victory between 5% and 10% (73 electoral votes): In a plurality of 1,396 counties, no candidate obtained a majority. Beginning with a runaway victory in Illinois on April 9, Roosevelt won nine of the last ten presidential primaries (including Taft's home state of Ohio), losing only Massachusetts.[14]. Laid off during the depression of 1873, Debs eventually found another job as a clerk in the grocery business and never worked for the railroad again the rest of his life. In response to vituperative opposition, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which made it unlawful to incite active opposition to U.S. involvement in the conflict. PO Box 73038 Washington, D.C. 20056 He was suffering from delusion and said the ghost of President McKinley ordered him to kill Roosevelt to prevent a third term. Debs finished 2nd in Florida behind Wilson. By Robbie Updated: June 18, 2023 Eugene Debs was a prominent American labor leader and socialist activist who was undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in the American labor movement of the early 20th century. [6] Roosevelt distinguished "good trusts" from "bad trusts," which he had been lambasted for. 9653.. Taft also fired popular conservationist Gifford Pinchot as head of the Bureau of Forestry in 1910. A much younger Debs, then president of the American Railroad Union, had served time for involvement in a national railroad strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. . Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). But the Socialist Party was once a powerful third party here in the United States. 293 pages. How Debs became a socialist | SocialistWorker.org The 1912 United States presidential election was the 32nd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5, 1912. In a January letter to newspaper editor William Allen White, he wrote, "I do not think there is one chance in a thousand that it will ever be wise to have me nominated. Thomas R. Marshall, the Governor of Indiana who had swung Indiana's votes to Wilson, was named Wilson's running mate. The crowd sang "La Marseillaise" and "The Internationale." Acting as the president of the American Railway Union, which he had formed, Debs led workers in a strike against the Pullman Palace Car (Railroad) Company and a boycott of its enterprises when the profitable railroad reduced wages in its company town of Pullman, Illinois, without enacting a corresponding reduction in living costs. He finished 2nd in 24 states, behind Wilson in 23, and behind Taft in Vermont. in, Unger, Nancy C. "The Political Suicide of Robert M. La Follette: Public Disaster, Private Catharsis", Warner, Robert M. "Chase S. Osborn and the Presidential Campaign of 1912.". Statement to the Court upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act, Sept. 1918. Later he helped found the American Railway Union (1894), the Socialist Party of America (1901) and the Industrial Workers of the World (1905). Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. The elector whom received the most votes was an elector for Taft. As Debs tried to galvanize widespread support behind his socialist policies, Debs claimed that Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft were all financed by different factions within the capitalist trusts, and that Roosevelt in particular was a demagogue using socialistic language in order to divert socialist policies up safe channels for the capitalist establishment. Debs acted upon his new convictions with resolve, resigning his $4,000 a year post as grand secretary-treasurer of the BLF in 1893 after organizing the American Railway Union (ARU), an industrial union open to all railroad workers regardless of craft or skill. Debs.[1][2]. He is an old man, not strong physically, said Harding when commuting the sentence to time served. In 4 of those, the top 3 in order were Wilson-Roosevelt-Debs. Historians Ernest Freeberg and Lisa Phillips talked about the political career of Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), who founded several labor unions and represented. Roosevelt accused the Taft faction of having over 200 fraudulently selected delegates. Debs' socialist movement was now dead, the victim of government repression and internal factional fighting between opponents and supporters of the new Bolshevik regime in Russia. This was his fourth of five runs for the presidency, and the one in which he was most successful, gaining 6% of the national popular vote, but carrying no states and securing zero electoral votes. Although Debs lost his battles, his causes won the war. Today is the 104th anniversary of just one of the five times Debs campaigned as a socialist for president. Second, as a labor organizer, he was at the forefront of workers appeals for statutory protection in an area that appeared to be neglected by the Amendment. Porter, Kirk H. and Donald Bruce Johnson, eds. The Courts unanimous holding against Debs In re Debs (1895), as announced by Justice David Brewer, quoting Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, was based on the incontrovertible principle, that the government of the United States may, by means of physical force, exercised through its official agents, execute on every foot of American soil the powers and functions that belong to it. Debs served six months in prison. The voting right for women in 1920 was partly credited to Debs and The Socialist Party, due to their advocacy of women's rights since 1900. A backlash soon followed. Thirty-eight out of the 50 states have voted for the same party since the 2000 presidential election, which has made it relatively easy to predict which states will vote for a Democratic candidate and which will vote for . The act, an amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917, sought to silence those who spoke out about the war. While not on the ballot in California, Taft received 3,914 write-in votes in the state, placing him 5th, behind Roosevelt, Wilson, Debs, and Chafin. Brandon Weber has written for Upworthy, Liberals Unite, and Good.Is magazine, mostly on economics, labor union history, and working people. "The 1912 Election and the Rhetorical Foundations of the Liberal State. In the last Presidential election, Lane county remained overwhelmingly Democratic . A candidate for president for the fifth and final time in 1920, federal prisoner #9653 received once again nearly a million votes. "The New Nationalism." Between them, Roosevelt and Taft secured 7.6 million votes1.3 million more than Wilsonbut Roosevelt won only 88 electoral votes, and Taft won only 8. . I refuse to obey any command to fight from the ruling class, but I will not wait to be commanded to fight for the working class. As an organizer of the strike, Debs received his first prison sentence. [36][37], Afterward, probes and an x-ray showed that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt's chest muscle, but did not penetrate the pleura. "Other(s)", mostly Roosevelt, won a plurality in 772 counties and a majority in 305 counties. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. The electoral college votes were 271 to 176. All images public domain. The Tammany endorsement caused Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and leader of the party's progressives, to turn against Clark, whom he decried as the candidate of Wall Street, and shift his support to reformist Governor of New Jersey Woodrow Wilson. The August, 1912 issue of La Follettes Weekly (the precursor to The Progressive), ran several paragraphs of the acceptance speech Debs gave for the nomination by the Socialist Party.