Biography
Oscar O. Wheeler was the Communist Party's candidate for governor of West Virginia, sentenced to six to fifteen years in prison on charges of fraud in the collection of Communist nominating-petition signatures in Raleigh County — part of the 1940 election-year drive to keep the party off the ballot. Arrested on the highway to Charleston, he was jailed on $5,000 bail.
Oscar O. Wheeler was a Pentecostal conscientious objector from West Virginia imprisoned during World War I. Court-martialed for refusing military service, he was held at Fort Leavenworth. Sentenced to 15 years in prison - reduced to 1. (Documented in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection's World War I Conscientious Objectors database.) Archival note: registered for the draft on June 5, 1917 as a CO; on Oct. 18th was dragged into a shack, smothered under a blanket, & robbed ("a strenuous effort was made to remove his trousers, with the avowed intention of perpetrating sodomy upon him. …
