• Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run
    221·
    20 days ago

    “Eugene V. Debs ran, but didn’t win.”, Captain Obvious. May the next person to run from jail have similar results.

    Eugene V. Debs was in an Atlanta penitentiary, serving a ten-year sentence, when he lost the 1920 presidential election. Two years earlier, Debs, a labor leader, had spoken out against America’s involvement in World War I. He was convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, after the prosecution argued that his antiwar speech obstructed military enrollment. The 1920 loss didn’t come as a surprise to Debs, who had run four times before. His fifth and final run, promoted with a campaign button that read “For President Convict No. 9653,” brought him nearly one million votes, says Claire Jerry, curator of political history at the National Museum of American History. President Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/run-president-prison-ask-smithsonian-180974594/

    • PhlubbaDubba
      12·
      20 days ago

      Yeah we don’t really talk enough about just how balls to the walls America went in on WWI once it did.

      We went from half the country speaking German daily to several German languages dying out in America with a flip of a switch starting with American entry into WWI, and that’s not really something that just happens because the neighbors are looking at you funny.

  • Signtist
    182·
    20 days ago

    I’ve always felt that republicans were the ones to push pronouns mattering, to the point of obstinance; they frequently get worked up about people’s genders, and refuse to use pronouns that differ from what they believe to be the “correct” ones for a person. The lefter people understand that pronouns really only matter to the person who identifies with them, so we’re fine calling people whatever they want, since it’s their choice and we don’t really care what they choose in the end.