The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act amendments of 1918 converted opposition to the World War into a federal crime, and roughly two thousand Americans were prosecuted for speeches, pamphlets, and private remarks. The emblematic case was Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party's four-time presidential candidate, convicted for a June 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio in which he told his audience they were "fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder." Sentenced to ten years, he told the court: "while there is a lower class, I am in it… while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
From Atlanta Penitentiary, as Convict No. 9653, Debs received nearly a million votes for president in 1920. Around him stood a movement of prisoners: Kate Richards O'Hare, sentenced to five years for an antiwar lecture; Rose Pastor Stokes, ten years for a letter to a newspaper; and hundreds of lesser-known socialists and pacifists. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions unanimously, but the amnesty campaign that followed built the modern American civil-liberties movement, and President Harding commuted Debs's sentence on Christmas Day 1921.