Joint Amnesty Committee Formed to Seek Release of Imprisoned WWI Dissidents
The ACLU, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Federal Council of Churches, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and other organizations on this day announced the formation of the Joint Amnesty Committee to coordinate the campaign for amnesty for people who were convicted for their political views during World War I.
The campaign’s activities included the Children’s Crusade on April 29, 1922, which mobilized the children of imprisoned men in demonstrations. There was never any precise figure of the number of people convicted and imprisoned strictly because of their views during World War I. Some held out for complete amnesty (a “forgetting”) and refused pardons (which preserved the record of their convictions).
The most famous prosecution of people opposed to the war involved Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who was convicted under the Espionage Act for a June 16, 1918 speech against war, and sentenced to ten years in prison. President Warren G. Harding pardoned Debs, who was by then in ill-health, on December 25, 1921.
The quest for justice for victims of the World War I suppression of dissent took many years. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on December 23, 1933, finally pardoned all victims of Espionage Act prosecutions who were still in prison. And on May 3, 2006, the Governor of Montana pardoned 79 residents of the state who had been convicted in 1918 under the state Sedition law.
Following the Vietnam War, President Gerald Ford on September 16, 1974 offered a “conditional amnesty” plan for anti-war activists who had been convicted in a civilian or military court. President Jimmy Carter on the day after he was inaugurated, January 21, 1977, issued Executive Order 11967 pardoning anti-Vietnam War protesters facing criminal charges.
Learn more about the repression during World War I: Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (1979)
Read the ACLU report on political prisoners in 1922: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31175035184301;view=1up;seq=1
Learn more about the WW I prosecutions: Stephen Kohn, American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts (1994)