SG: Debs was jailed first in West Virginia, and then in Georgia, and in both places, he won over wardens and prisoners alike. How did Debs think about prison — both his own stint and the larger institution — and how did his ideas about it shape how he comported himself while incarcerated?
EF: A lot of the political prisoners, as they were called, considered traditional prisoners to be essentially parasites on the body of capitalism. Likewise, many of the traditional prisoners were patriotic and considered these anti-war radicals dangerous. And so there was a real distance between them. But Debs thought about prison as an instrument of class warfare and said, “These people are here because this is one of the tools of capitalist domination,” and felt that this is as much a field where he should be promoting and expressing the values of his political life as anywhere else.
So he ended up very much engaged with the prisoners. People from all over the world were sending him books and candy and tobacco and other gifts, and he would disburse them freely among the prisoners. He spent a lot of time counseling them.
The wardens immediately recognized that he was not the dangerous individual that they’d been led to expect. They befriended him and actually began to talk to him about ways to improve prison life. More than one of them invited him home to have a picnic with the family and remained in touch with him for the rest of their lives.
Debs was in no sense a conventional Christian, but many of these people said that Debs was the most Christlike person they’d ever met.
SG: Yeah, he definitely did seem to have that effect on people. One thing Debs did while in prison was run for president. Can you talk about his 1920 campaign?
EF: The war was over, and the Socialists were trying to regroup. Debs had run for president four times already, with a high water mark in 1912 of 6 percent of the vote. The argument that the Socialists wanted to make was that this is a protest vote against what the government had done to the party and the anti-war movement over the course of the war. Nominating Debs was a chance for people to cast their vote on behalf of free speech. Wilson wanted the 1920 election to be a referendum on the League of Nations idea.
The government, I think, took a very confused line on this. On the one hand, Debs was not allowed to speak in any conventional way. He was only allowed to send a press release every other week to the newspapers, though very few of them seemed to run this. At the same time, they let Debs run for president. They let the Socialist Party come to the gates of the Atlanta penitentiary and make a formal nomination.
The party was really divided at this point, smashed by the government, but also increasingly divided over whether the Socialists should join with the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. The party was a diverse coalition of very different sorts of people, and Debs was the unifier, the one person who held it all together. This was his last chance to do that.