Eugene V. Debs

Debs with his brother Theodore Debs while he was running for president in the 1908 election.

Debs while in prison in Woodstock, Illinois, in 1895.

Eugene Victor "Gene" Debs was born on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Jean Daniel and Marguerite Mari Bettrich Debs, who immigrated to the United States from Colmar, Alsace, France.[2] His father, who came from a prosperous family,[2] owned a textile mill and meat market. Debs was named after the French authors Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo.[3]

Debs attended public school, dropping out of high school at age 14.[4] He took a job with the Vandalia Railroad cleaning grease from the trucks of freight engines for fifty cents a day. He later became a painter and car cleaner in the railroad shops.[4] In December 1871, when a drunken locomotive fireman failed to report for work, Debs was pressed into service as a night fireman. He decided to remain a fireman on the run between Terre Haute and Indianapolis, earning more than a dollar a night for the next three and half years.[4]

In July 1875, Debs left to work at a wholesale grocery house, where he remained for four years[4] while attending a local business school at night.[5]

Debs joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF) in February 1875 and became active in the organization. In 1877 he served as a delegate of the Terre Haute lodge to the organization's national convention.[4] Debs was elected associate editor of the BLF's monthly organ, Firemen's Magazine, in 1878. Two years later, he was appointed Grand Secretary and Treasurer of the BLF and editor of the magazine in July 1880.[4] He worked as a BLF functionary until January 1893 and as the magazine's editor until September 1894.[4]

At the same time, he became a prominent figure in the community. He served two terms as Terre Haute's city clerk from September 1879 to September 1883.[4] In the fall of 1884, he was elected as a Democrat to represent Terre Haute and Vigo County in the Indiana General Assembly. He served for one term in 1885.[5][6]

Debs married Katherine "Kate" Metzel on June 9, 1885 at an Episcopal church.[7][8] Their home still stands in Terre Haute, preserved on the campus of Indiana State University.

Striking American Railway Union (ARU) members confront Illinois National Guard troops in Chicago during Debs's rebellion in 1894

In 1894, Debs became involved in the Pullman Strike, which grew out of a compensation dispute started by the workers who constructed the rail cars made by the Pullman Palace Car Company. The Pullman Company, citing falling revenue after the economic Panic of 1893, had cut the wages of its employees by twenty-eight percent. The workers, many of whom were already members of the ARU, appealed for support to the union at its convention in Chicago, Illinois.[1] Debs tried to persuade union members, who worked on the railways, that the boycott was too risky given the hostility of the railways and the federal government, the weakness of the union, and the possibility that other unions would break the strike.

The membership ignored his warnings and refused to handle Pullman cars or any other railroad cars attached to them, including cars containing US Mail.[12] After ARU Board Director Martin J. Elliott extended the strike to St. Louis, doubling its size to eighty thousand workers, Debs relented and decided to take part in the strike, which was now endorsed by almost all members of the ARU in the immediate area of Chicago.[13] On July 9, 1894, a New York Times editorial called Debs "a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race".[14][15] Strikers fought by establishing boycotts of Pullman train cars and with Debs's eventual leadership the strike came to be known as "Debs' Rebellion".[3]

The federal government intervened, obtaining an injunction against the strike on the grounds that the strikers had obstructed the US Mail, carried on Pullman cars, by refusing to show up for work. President Grover Cleveland, whom Debs had supported in all three of his presidential campaigns, sent the United States Army to enforce the injunction.[16] The presence of the army was enough to break the strike. Overall, thirty strikers were killed in the strike, thirteen of them in Chicago, and thousands were blacklisted.[3][17] An estimated $80 million worth of property was damaged and Debs was found guilty of contempt of court for violating the injunction and sent to federal prison.[3]

Debs was represented by Clarence Darrow, later a leading American lawyer and civil libertarian, who had previously been a corporate lawyer for the railroad company. While it is commonly thought that Darrow "switched sides" to represent Debs, a myth repeated by Irving Stone's biography, Clarence Darrow For the Defense, he had in fact resigned from the railroad earlier, after the death of his mentor William Goudy.[18] A Supreme Court case decision, In re Debs, later upheld the right of the federal government to issue the injunction.

The Social Democracy of America (SDA), founded in June 1897 by Eugene V. Debs from the remnants of his American Railway Union, was deeply divided between those who favored a tactic of launching a series of colonies to build socialism by practical example and others who favored establishment of a European-style socialist political party with a view to capture of the government apparatus through the ballot box.

The June 1898 convention would be the group's last, with the minority political action wing quitting the organization to establish a new organization, the Social Democratic Party of America (SDP), also called the Social Democratic Party of the United States.[23] Debs was elected to the National Executive Board, the five-member committee which governed the party,[24] and his brother, Theodore Debs, was selected as its paid executive secretary, handling day-to-day affairs of the organization.[25] Although by no means the sole decision-maker in the organization, Debs's status as prominent public figure in the aftermath of the Pullman strike provided cachet and made him the recognized spokesman for the party in the newspapers.

Campaign poster from his 1912 presidential campaign featuring Debs and vice presidential candidate Emil Seidel

Along with Elliott, who ran for Congress in 1900, Debs was the first federal office candidate for the fledgling socialist party, running unsuccessfully for president the same year.[26] Debs and his running mate Job Harriman received 87,945 votes (0.6 percent of the popular vote) and no electoral votes.[27]

Following the 1900 Election, the Social Democratic Party and dissidents who had split from the Socialist Labor Party in 1899 unified forces at a Socialist Unity Convention held in Indianapolis in mid-1901 – a meeting which established the Socialist Party of America (SPA).[23]

Debs was the Socialist Party of America candidate for president in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 (the final time from prison). Though he received increasing numbers of popular votes in each subsequent election, he never won any votes in the Electoral College.[28][29][30][31] In both 1904 and 1908, Debs ran with running-mate Ben Hanford. They received 402,810 votes in 1904, for 3.0 percent of the popular vote and an overall third-place finish.[28] In the 1908 election, they received a slightly higher number of votes (420,852) than in their previous run, but at 2.8 percent, a smaller percentage of the total votes cast.[29] In 1912, Debs ran with Emil Seidel as a running mate and received 901,551 votes, which was 6.0 percent of the popular vote, which remains the all-time highest percentage of the vote for a Socialist Party candidate in a US presidential election. Though Debs won no state's electoral votes, in Florida, he came in second behind Wilson and ahead of President William Howard Taft and former President Teddy Roosevelt.[30] Finally, in 1920, running with Seymour Stedman, Debs won 913,693 votes, which remains the all-time high number of votes for a Socialist Party candidate in a US presidential election. Notably, the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920, granting women the federal right to vote across the country, and with the expanded voting pool, his vote total accounted for only 3.4 percent of the total number of votes cast.[31][32] The size of the vote is nevertheless remarkable since Debs was at the time a federal prisoner in jail for sedition, though he promised to pardon himself if elected.

Although he received some success as a third-party candidate, Debs was largely dismissive of the electoral process as he distrusted the political bargains that Victor Berger and other "sewer socialists" had made in winning local offices. He put much more value on organizing workers into unions, favoring unions that brought together all workers in a given industry over those organized by the craft skills workers practiced.

After his work with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and the American Railway Union, Debs's next major work in organizing a labor union came during the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). On June 27, 1905, in Chicago, Illinois, Debs and other influential union leaders including Bill Haywood, leader of the Western Federation of Miners; and Daniel De Leon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party, held what Haywood called the "Continental Congress of the working class". Haywood stated: "We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class".[33] Debs stated: "We are here to perform a task so great that it appeals to our best thought, our united energies, and will enlist our most loyal support; a task in the presence of which weak men might falter and despair, but from which it is impossible to shrink without betraying the working class".[34]

Debs during one of his presidential campaigns

Although the IWW was built on the basis of uniting workers of industry, a rift began between the union and the Socialist Party. It started when the electoral wing of the Socialist Party, led by Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit, became irritated with speeches by Haywood.[35] In December 1911, Haywood told a Lower East Side audience at New York's Cooper Union that parliamentary Socialists were "step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step". It was better, Haywood said, to "elect the superintendent of some branch of industry, than to elect some congressman to the United States Congress".[36] In response, Hillquit attacked the IWW as "purely anarchistic".[37]

The Cooper Union speech was the beginning of a split between Haywood and the Socialist Party, leading to the split between the factions of the IWW, one faction loyal to the Socialist Party and the other to Haywood.[37] The rift presented a problem for Debs, who was influential in both the IWW and the Socialist Party. The final straw between Haywood and the Socialist Party came during the Lawrence Textile Strike, when disgusted with the decision of the elected officials in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to send police, who subsequently used their clubs on children, Haywood publicly declared that "I will not vote again" until such a circumstance was rectified.[38] Haywood was purged from the National Executive Committee by passage of an amendment that focused on the direct action and sabotage tactics advocated by the IWW.[39] Debs was probably the only person who could have saved Haywood's seat.[40]

In 1906, when Haywood had been on trial for his life in Idaho, Debs had described him as "the Lincoln of Labor" and called for Haywood to run against Theodore Roosevelt for president,[41] but times had changed and Debs, facing a split in the party, chose to echo Hillquit's words, accusing the IWW of representing anarchy.[42] Debs thereafter stated that he had opposed the amendment, but that once it was adopted it should be obeyed.[40] Debs remained friendly to Haywood and the IWW after the expulsion despite their perceived differences over IWW tactics.[42]

Debs speaking in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, being arrested for sedition shortly thereafter

Prior to Haywood's dismissal, the Socialist Party membership had reached an all-time high of 135,000. One year later, four months after Haywood was recalled, the membership dropped to 80,000. The reformists in the Socialist Party attributed the decline to the departure of the "Haywood element" and predicted that the party would recover, but it did not. In the election of 1912, many of the Socialists who had been elected to public office lost their seats.[40]

Debs was noted by many to be a charismatic speaker who sometimes called on the vocabulary of Christianity and much of the oratorical style of evangelism, even though he was generally disdainful of organized religion.[43] Howard Zinn opined that "Debs was what every socialist or anarchist or radical should be: fierce in his convictions, kind and compassionate in his personal relations."[44] Heywood Broun noted in his eulogy for Debs, quoting a fellow Socialist: "That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as he's around I believe it myself".[45]

Although sometimes called "King Debs",[46] Debs himself was not wholly comfortable with his standing as a leader. As he told an audience in Detroit in 1906:[47]

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.[48]

Debs with Max Eastman and Rose Pastor Stokes in 1918

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Debs' Speech of Sedition

Debs's speeches against the Wilson administration and the war earned the enmity of President Woodrow Wilson, who later called Debs a "traitor to his country".[49] On June 16, 1918, Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the military draft of World War I. He was arrested on June 30 and charged with ten counts of sedition.[44]

His trial defense called no witnesses, asking that Debs be allowed to address the court in his defense. That unusual request was granted, and Debs spoke for two hours. He was found guilty on September 12. At his sentencing hearing on September 14, he again addressed the court and his speech has become a classic. Heywood Broun, a liberal journalist and not a Debs partisan, said it was "one of the most beautiful and moving passages in the English language. He was for that one afternoon touched with inspiration. If anyone told me that tongues of fire danced upon his shoulders as he spoke, I would believe it".[50] Debs said in part:

Your honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government; that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means. ...

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul. ...

Your honor, I ask no mercy, I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more fully comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come into their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the Southern Cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches the Southern Cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of Time upon the dial of the universe; and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the look-out knows that the midnight is passing – that relief and rest are close at hand.

Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.[51]

Debs was sentenced on September 18, 1918, to ten years in prison and was also disenfranchised for life.[1] Debs presented what has been called his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:[52]

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the court examined several statements Debs had made regarding World War I and socialism. While Debs had carefully worded his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act, the Court found he had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and military recruitment. Among other things, the Court cited Debs's praise for those imprisoned for obstructing the draft. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated in his opinion that little attention was needed since Debs's case was essentially the same as that of Schenck v. United States, in which the court had upheld a similar conviction.

Clifford Berryman's cartoon depiction of Debs's 1920 presidential run from prison

A cartoon of Debs drawn by Ryan Walker. Walker was one of Debs' friends and Debs considered this his favorite cartoon.[53]

Debs went to prison on April 13, 1919.[5] In protest of his jailing, Charles Ruthenberg led a parade of unionists, socialists, anarchists, and communists to march on May 1 (May Day) in Cleveland, Ohio. The event quickly broke into the violent May Day riots of 1919.

Debs ran for president in the 1920 election while in prison in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He received 919,799[54] votes (3.4 percent),[55] slightly less than he had won in 1912, when he received 6 percent, the highest number of votes for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the United States.[5][56] During his time in prison, Debs wrote a series of columns deeply critical of the prison system. They appeared in sanitized form in the Bell Syndicate and were published in his only book, Walls and Bars, with several added chapters. It was published posthumously.[1]

In March 1919, President Wilson asked Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer for his opinion on clemency, offering his own: "I doubt the wisdom and public effect of such an action."[57] Palmer generally favored releasing people convicted under the wartime security acts, but when he consulted with Debs's prosecutors – even those with records as defenders of civil liberties – they assured him that Debs's conviction was correct and his sentence appropriate.[58] The President and his Attorney General both believed that public opinion opposed clemency and that releasing Debs could strengthen Wilson's opponents in the debate over the ratification of the peace treaty. Palmer proposed clemency in August and October 1920 without success.[59] At one point, Wilson wrote: "While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines sniping, attacking, and denouncing them. ... This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration."[49] In January 1921, Palmer, citing Debs's deteriorating health, proposed to Wilson that Debs receive a presidential pardon freeing him on February 12, Lincoln's birthday. Wilson returned the paperwork after writing "Denied" across it.[60]

Debs leaving the federal penitentiary in Atlanta on Christmas Day 1921 following commutation of his sentence

On December 23, 1921, President Warren G. Harding commuted Debs's sentence to time served, effective Christmas Day. He did not issue a pardon. A White House statement summarized the administration's view of Debs's case:

There is no question of his guilt. ... He was by no means, however, as rabid and outspoken in his expressions as many others, and but for his prominence and the resulting far-reaching effect of his words, very probably might not have received the sentence he did. He is an old man, not strong physically. He is a man of much personal charm and impressive personality, which qualifications make him a dangerous man calculated to mislead the unthinking and affording excuse for those with criminal intent.[61]

Debs leaving the White House the day after being released from prison in 1921

When Debs was released from the Atlanta Penitentiary, the other prisoners sent him off with "a roar of cheers" and a crowd of fifty thousand greeted his return to Terre Haute to the accompaniment of band music.[62] En route home, Debs was warmly received at the White House by Harding, who greeted him by saying: "Well, I've heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally."[63]

In 1924, Debs was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Finnish Socialist Karl H. Wiik on the grounds that "Debs started to work actively for peace during World War I, mainly because he considered the war to be in the interest of capitalism."[64]

He spent his remaining years trying to recover his health, which was severely undermined by prison confinement. In late 1926, he was admitted to Lindlahr Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois.[1] He died there of heart failure on October 20, 1926, at the age of 70.[62] His body was cremated and buried in Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute, Indiana.[5]