Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926)

EUGENE V. DEBS WAS born in Terre Haute, Indiana. His career made him one of the best known American socialist critics of the capitalist system. Unlike most European and American socialist thinkers, Debs avoided obtuse theory or hair-splitting about the timing of the socialist revolution. He kept his ideas simple and accessible to a wide audience and within the American traditions of utopianism, individualism, political democracy, and radical reform.

Debs left school to support his immigrant parents by scraping and painting railroad cars, so when he got the chance, he took a much better job as a locomotive fireman. The job was dangerous, so when his mother asked him to quit, he took a job with a wholesale grocer. He became active in local politics and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. After reviving the union, he used it as his springboard to local politics, and he won the office of city clerk twice, beginning in 1879. His one term as state legislator began in 1885, but he became disillusioned by the process and by the lack of interest in his ideas. His legislative efforts, all unsuccessful, involved elimination of racial distinctions, women's suffrage, and compensation for railroad workers.

He returned to union work, still a conventional trade unionist who believed that organization and persuasion would bring class harmony. Debs came to reject craft unions because those unions rejected the unskilled, weakening worker solidarity and allowing management to divide and conquer workers. He left the Brotherhood in 1892, forming the American Railroad Union (ARU), an industrial union open to all regardless of craft or skill level. He led the ARU in a sympathy strike when the Pullman Sleeping Car company workers protested wage reductions in 1894. With the ARU refusing to handle trains carrying Pullman cars, the national railroad system stopped. The attorney general brought in federal troops to end the strike. In the resulting violence, dozens died. Debs was prosecuted for obstruction of the mails and contempt of court because he and others defied a court order to end the strike. Debs became a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905.

His conviction in 1894 jailed him for six months and made him a hero to the Left, a national figure, and a reluctant socialist. He supported the Populists and William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential. After that loss, he acknowledged his socialism, and ran for president himself on the American Socialist Party ticket in 1900. He ran in every election but one between 1900 and 1920. His first campaign won him less than 87,000 votes. Four years later his total was over 400,000, and his 1908 effort was only slightly better. In 1912, the party peaked with over 900,000 votes, roughly 6 percent of the vote. In 1916, Debs ran for Congress again as an antiwar candidate. His speeches against the [Page 123]war inevitably meant he ran afoul of the federal anti-sedition laws against such speeches. For violating the Espionage Act, he received a 10-year sentence. He served from 1919 until President Warren Harding commuted his sentence to time served in 1921. In the 1920 election, Debs captured 913,664 votes, his largest count but only 3 percent of the electorate.

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