Eugene Debs

Eugene Debs (1855-1926), American Socialist leader, pacifist, labor organizer, and Socialist candidate for U.S. president five times.

Eugene Victor Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. Between 1871 and 1883 he was a locomotive fireman on the Terre Haute and Indianapolis Railroad, a wholesale grocery salesman, and city clerk of Terre Haute. In 1885 he served as a member of the Indiana legislature. He was grand secretary and treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen from 1880 to 1893, when he resigned to organize and become president (1893-97) of the American Railway Union. Under his leadership the union won an important strike on the Great Northern Railway in 1894. In the same year, having espoused the cause of the poorly paid Pullman workers, the union brought about a shutdown of the western roads. This strike was broken by the interference of the federal courts and by the action of President Grover Cleveland, based on the right of the federal government to maintain the uninterrupted transmission of the mails. Debs was arrested first upon a charge of conspiracy to murder, but the charge was never pressed. In July 1894 Debs and the other officers of the union were arrested on the charge of violating an injunction and sentenced to six months in jail for contempt of court.

Debs's introduction to socialism began during his imprisonment in the Woodstock, Illinois, jail, where he was visited by the American Socialist editor Victor Berger and given Marx's Das Kapital and other Socialist works to read. In 1898 Debs organized the Social Democratic Party of America and, as its candidate for president (1900), he received 96,116 votes. Thereafter he spent most of his time as lecturer and organizer in the Socialist movement. He was the candidate of the Socialist Party for president in 1904, 1908, and 1912. During World War I Debs was sentenced to ten years in jail for his pacifistic beliefs. His sentence was commuted in 1921. While in prison in 1920 he ran again for president on the Socialist ticket and received almost 1 million votes.

As one of the first targets of so-called government by injunction, and because of his personality, Debs commanded the respect of American unionists and radicals, even those who did not accept his economic doctrines. His writings include a widely read speech, “Industrial Unionism” (1911), and Walls and Bars (1927).