In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while
serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s role
in World War I. Though many called Debs a traitor, others
praised him as a prisoner of conscience, a martyr to the cause
of free speech. Nearly a million Americans agreed, voting for a
man whom the government had branded an enemy to his country. In
a beautifully crafted narrative, Ernest Freeberg shows that the
campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White
House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free
speech in wartime. Debs was one of thousands of Americans
arrested for speaking his mind during the war, while government
censors were silencing dozens of newspapers and magazines. When
peace was restored, however, a nationwide protest was unleashed
against the government’s repression, demanding amnesty for Debs
and his fellow political prisoners. Led by a coalition of the
country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor
leaders, this protes