Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926)

The premier representative of native-born American socialism in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries was Eugene V. Debs. Debs was originally a labor union leader who made his reputation as an organizer of unskilled railway workers in the 1890s and as a champion of industrial unionism and workers' control. As the head and three times presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, and an exceptionally effective and inspiring public speaker, he became the public face of the political socialist movement in America in its early decades of heady success and advance. Through his example, a uniquely American amalgam of Marxian, populist, and ethically based social activism came to characterize a significant section of the U.S. left.

Eugene Debs (1855–1926) is considered to be the public face of the political socialist movement in America in its early decades.

Source: Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Born as the son of a prosperous grocery shop owner in Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs worked as a railroad fireman before his father arranged a clerkship for him at a local department store. In the years immediately following, Debs was involved in local politics and, through his secretary-treasurership of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, in labor union activities. He fully embraced the conservative politics of the Firemen's Brotherhood, claiming that all Americans were equal worker-producers capable of rising to affluence through thrift and hard work. A Democrat by party affiliation, Debs tried to practice what he preached through the various local and state offices that he held, including his brief stint as an Indiana state assemblyman in 1884.

His creation of the American Railway Union (ARU) in 1893 started Debs's gradual transformation into a socialist. The ARU was an industrial union;that is, it accepted as members all, whether skilled or unskilled, who worked on the railroads, and it sought not just higher wages and better working conditions, but also a number of broader social and political goals. These included an end to the court injunctions with which employers tried to prevent strikes, unionization, and collective bargaining, and the building of a nationwide organized labor movement so unified in its class solidarity that it could not be divided by employers' attempts at buying off sections of it. In both regards, Debs's union differed dramatically from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) affiliated craft unions that catered only to the “labor aristocracy”of the skilled.

Debs's message proved appealing, and within a year of its founding, the ALU had some 150,000 members. In a series of aggressive sympathy strikes in the 1890s, Debs proceeded to put the union's mass power to the test, and he proved both an effective mobilizer of his constituency and an astute strategist in industrial conflict. Victories in the Pacific Union and Great Northern strikes were, however, followed by defeat in the legendary Pullman Strike (each in 1894), in which Debs fought to improve the conditions of the manufacturers of Pullman train cars. After some of the strikers tampered with federal mail trains, the railroad employers' organization procured a federal injunction and had federal troops suppress the strike and the ALU. For his role, Debs was imprisoned for 6 months.

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