David M. Shribman
A commutation of a socialist convicted of sedition. A pardon of a president criticized for traducing the Constitution. A former president indicted on 34 counts and facing multiple additional court battles.
Can any of these elements be connected, and would the country be better off if they were? The mere suggestion is enough to unleash furies that defy containment.
The three men in that paragraph of peril — Eugene V. Debs, Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump — account for 11 campaigns for the White House, 45 counts spread over three formal indictments, two prison sentences, and more anger and alienation, more passion and polarization than can be attributed to perhaps any three other Americans ever.
Hundreds of thousands marched against them and, even today, spit their names in rage — but crowds thronged to their rallies and many consider them heroes. They spoke for the dispossessed and the silent — but the mere mention of them sparks wrath. In their time, they were regarded as prophets — but also as menacing threats to American values.
For the greater part of the American public, Debs and Nixon are fuzzy figures from a distant past. Fewer than a dozen Americans have any living memory of Debs. Only 17 percent of Americans are old enough to have much memory of Nixon.
But there breathes not a soul over the age of 10, or even younger, in this country who doesn’t have knowledge of, and almost certainly a strong opinion about, Trump.
So, first, a refresher course.
Born in Indiana six years before the outbreak of the Civil War and a former city clerk of Terre Haute, Debs was drawn into rail-union activism that led him to his first prison sentence for his role in the 1894 Pullman Strike.
There he read Karl Marx and began, in his words, “to dissect the anatomy of the system in which working men, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke.”
In 1918, as World War I was underway, Debs — by then a committed socialist — was convicted on three counts of sedition after urging men to avoid the draft. Before being sentenced to 10 years in prison, he delivered one of the most famous orations in American history, saying:
“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.”
He added: “I am opposed to the form of our present government.”
Debs was nominated in 1920 for his fifth presidential campaign by the Socialist Party, which hailed him as the Lincoln of the Wabash. President Woodrow Wilson described him as “a traitor to his country,” vowing “he will never be pardoned during my administration.”
Wilson was succeeded by Warren G. Harding. The socialist Norman Thomas, a onetime paperboy of the Marion Star newspaper that Harding owned, counseled his former boss that “in prison [he] speaks far louder than he could were he free.”
Harding came to agree, deciding to commute the Debs sentence on Dec. 23, 1921. “I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife,” he said.
Christmas dinner would have to wait, but on Dec. 26, Debs and Harding met in the White House. Afterward, the freed prisoner said of the president, “Harding appears to be a kind gentleman, one whom I believe possesses humane impulses.”
Gerald R. Ford, too, was a kind gentleman, one who possessed humane impulses, and a new biography by Richard Norton Smith provides fresh details about Ford’s 1974 pardon of Nixon, who resigned the presidency as impeachment loomed for his involvement in the Watergate scandal.
In “An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford,” published only days ago, he relates how, three weeks into his term, Ford was “strongly inclined to pardon his predecessor.” He describes a meeting in which Ford said he didn’t want to saddle prosecutors with “this terrible burden of prosecuting” Nixon.
His decision — which, he predicted correctly, would wreck his reelection chances — affected the myriad legal actions Nixon faced, trials that would arouse great controversy in a bitterly divided nation.
Hoping to clear away the stench of scandal, allowing the country to move beyond Watergate, he instead cleared away the goodwill his young presidency had sown. His popularity dropped 22 points overnight — a record.
“During this long period of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused,” he said. “And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.” My reaction at the time: sheer outrage.
During the coming months, with Trump possibly facing multiple criminal indictments, ugly passions will be aroused, and Americans will be further polarized, with the credibility of the country’s free institutions of government again challenged.
Joe Biden has vowed not to pardon Trump, an action that would inflame the president’s supporters, united in their bitter contempt for the 45th president and in their devout concerns about the future of American democratic values.
Its effect on the Trump base is uncertain. While some legal experts argue that a presidential pardon cannot be offered for a New York crime, others believe that the connection District Attorney Alvin Bragg intends to make with federal election law would obviate that objection. Besides, Trump may face federal charges in the Florida government documents case.
In the wake of the Debs commutation, The New York Times editorialized, “The majority of the American people will not approve this commutation.” President Harding answered that he believed “the spirit of clemency was quite in harmony with the things we were trying to do in Washington.”
Would a commutation or pardon for a man who once wrote a book titled “The Art of the Deal” calm this anxious country down — or would it send it into new frontiers of fury? Is the unforgivable — from treachery to treason — also unpardonable?
Mark my words: These may be tomorrow’s great American questions.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
