President Hoover Declines to Pardon WW I Political Prisoners
President Herbert Hoover, in a letter to the famed social worker and activist Jane Addams on this day, declined to pardon any of the hundreds of people still in prison for having opposed World War I, saying it would only open an “acrimonious discussion.”
Eleven years after the end of World War I, several hundred people who had been convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing the war were still in federal prison. The campaign for amnesty for these political prisoners, led in part by the ACLU, was one of the major civil liberties campaigns of the 1920s. Amnesty activists, for example, organized the “Children’s Crusade,” in which the children of imprisoned persons picketed the White House on April 29, 1922. On June 11, 1922, ACLU leader Roger Baldwin helped to organize the Joint Amnesty Committee to coordinate all amnesty-related activities.
On December 25, 1921, President Warren G. Harding pardoned the prominent Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who was probably the most famous victim of Espionage Act prosecutions during World War I.
Four years after President Hoover declined to act, on December 23, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt finally pardoned all victims of the WW I Espionage Act prosecutions.
Learn more about the WW I prosecutions: Stephen Kohn, American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts (1994)
Read about the WWI repression, the founding of the ACLU, and the amnesty activities in the 1920s: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)