Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855-October 20, 1926) labor leader, socialist agitator and five time candidate for President of the United States.
Born in the small town of Terre Haute, IN, Eugene Victor Debs (named by his father for Victor Hugo and Eugene Sue) followed the course of American industry and American unionism from the low capital enterprises, with personal relations between owners and skilled workers, to bitter confrontations between thousands of organized workers and national robber barons, supported by the military forces of the federal government.
Debs began working at age 15 in the railroad yards of Terre Haute and in 1871 became a fireman on the Terre Haute and Indianapolis Railroad. After five years of sporadic employment, Debs took a position in February, 1875, as organizer and recording secretary for a lodge of The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF). Craft unionists of the time believed that offering high skills, with responsible and sober attitudes, to employers would bring recognition of unionism as a partner in the emerging industrial landscape. Sobriety and “manliness” would make the workers successful and their organizations, more mutual aid societies than unions, would become legitimate and respectable, eliminating struggles with their employers and fulfilling “the promise of America” that should allow workers and bosses to meet as equals.
Debs was so convinced that the railroad corporation was “the architect of progress” that he distanced himself from workers in the 1877 railroad strike, even though his lodge of the BLF was technically on strike and federal troops were sent into Terre Haute to secure the depot.
Debs served as secretary-treasurer of the BLF and editor of the BLF Magazine until 1892, but became increasingly critical of craft unionism and its conciliatory attitude toward railroad owners, who were growing more powerful and more hostile to their workers. He was also becoming increasingly involved in politics: in1879, he was elected City Clerk in Terre Haute as a Democrat and served one term, 1884-1886, in the Indiana General Assembly.
In June 1893, Debs and about fifty other railroad workers met in Chicago to found one of the country’s first industrial unions, The American Railroad Union (ARU). In immediate conflict with the “aristocracy”—the engineers and conductors—in existing craft unions on the railroads, the ARU grew rapidly, especially on the western rail lines of the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe. After winning a dramatic strike against the Great Northern Railroad, owned by James J. Hill, in April, 1894, the ARU became a participant—almost accidentally—in one of labor history’s most famous episodes: the Pullman Strike of 1894.
Rising again the oppressive paternalism of the Pullman Corporation, whose president was the son of Abraham Lincoln, workers from the Pullman Palace Car shops walked out in May, 1894, and came to the ARU’s first convention in Chicago for support. Over Debs’ objections, the ARU agreed to support the strike but a combination of a determined management and the intervention of federal troops authorized by President Grover Cleveland, broke the strike and devastated the ARU. At one point in the strike, an ARU delegation asked AFL president Samuel Gompers for support, but Gompers refused, dealing what Debs called “the death stab to the strike.”
As part of its intervention, the federal government obtained an injunction against all of the leaders of the ARU. While Debs continued his strike activities, he was arrested and sent in June, 1895, to the Woodstock, IL, jail for six months. While in jail for the first time, Debs experienced an almost apocalyptic conversion to socialism. He read widely, claiming that “I was to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of conflict . . . in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle, the class struggle was revealed.” In January, 1897, after campaigning in 1896 for William Jennings Bryant, Debs announced his belief in socialism as the ultimate protection for workers.
Debs ran for president five times—in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920—as a Socialist Party candidate against the “too old parties.” The 1908 campaign featured The Red Special, a train which toured the country in true whistle-stop fashion and, in 1912, Debs ran in the famous four-way campaign,amassing almost one million votes, nearly 6% of the total.
In addition to socialist politics, Debs continued to support industrial unionism. In June, 1905, Debs appeared on the platform of the founding convention of The IndustrialWorkers of the World(IWW), a new organization founded on the principle of revolutionary industrial unionism. As the IWW struggled against bitter opposition from the bosses, the majority of its members—many of them transient workers—rejected the political action that Debs so forcefully advocated, so Debs left the organization and spent the rest of his life speaking across the country in support of socialism.
One of Debs’—and even labor history’s-- most famous speeches emphasized the importance of class in what we would now call”a global context.” On June 16, 1918, Debs spoke in Canton, OH, against World War I. After urging the workers “to keep foursquare with the principles of the international Socialist movement,”Debs denounced the war in the strongest class terms, insisting “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”
Among the thousands in the audience was a stenographer for the U. S. Attorney’s office, who recorded—fortunately for worker historians—Debs’ attack on “our plutocracy, our Junkers.”Although Debs placed his opposition to the war within the protection of the U.S, Constitution, the text of the speech was the basis for a 10-count indictment for violation of the Espionage Law of 1917. In his defense, he claimed to be part of a tradition that began with “Washington, Paine, Adams” but was convicted and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. In court, Debs delivered one of his most memorable statements:”While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
While serving his sentence in the Atlanta federal prison, Deb was once again a candidate of the Socialist Party for President in the 1920 election. The slogan “From the jail house to the White House,” and references to the candidate as “#9653,” his prison identification, made the campaign—in which Debs drew almost one million votes, or about 3% of the total—unique. Even as Debs ran, his socialist supporters were breaking up into competing parties in the wake of the Russian Revolution.
On December 23, 1921, President Warren Harding announced that Debs and 23 other political prisoners would have their sentences commuted to time served, and would be released on Christmas Day. He returned to Terre Haute in frail health to confront the various factions of the left and to resume friendships with his middle-west friends, Sinclair Lewis and Carl Sandburg. In 1923, he became the National Chairman of the Socialist Party, but conceded that a working-class party had no chance in the 1924 elections. Instead Debs supported Robert M. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette’s new Progressive Party so that “socialists could keep the red flag flying,” a decision denounced by the new Communist Party, whose paper once accused Debs of sinking “into the swamp of social-democratic reform.”
Debs never really recovered his health after the release from the Atlanta penitentiary. He spent time in a sanitarium near Chicago, and surveyed the virtual collapse by 1925 of the Socialist Party amidst the reactionary politics of “the roaring 20’s.” Debs died on October 20, 1926, the same day that a letter to him, urging “courage” and expressing a desire “to see you, kiss you” was written by Nicola Sacco, himself standing in the shadow of the gallows.
SUGGESTED READINGS: J. Robert Constantine (ed.), Gentle Rebel: Letters of EugeneV. Debs, 1995; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, 1982; Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs, 1949.
Bill Barry