A century after his death, Eugene Debs remains one of the most famous figures in US history. A union organizer who led the Pullman Strike in 1894 and a politician who ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket five times (including once from his jail cell), he remains today an inspiration for some and a target of scorn for others.
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Eugene Victor Debs was born in Terra Haute, Indiana, in 1855, the son of German-French immigrants. As a young man he worked for the railroads for several years until he lost his job in the economic Panic of 1873. After tramping around the country for a bit, he became an organizer for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and quickly became editor for the union’s magazine.
At this time, Debs had a firm belief that the way to improve the workingman’s lot was through the ballot box. In 1879 he was elected as town clerk of Terre Haute, on the Democratic ticket, and was later elected to a term in the Indiana State Legislature.
But the turning point for Debs came with the Pullman Strike of 1894.
At the time, the railroads were the most important mode of long-distance transportation in the US, for both cargo and passengers. Passengers who took multi-day journeys depended upon the Pullman Sleeping Car, a specially-designed railroad carriage with beds and facilities, to make the trip, and every passenger train in the country had a contingent of Pullman cars. They made the owner of the company, George Pullman, one of the richest men in the country.
Pullman was one of the pioneers of corporate paternalism and helped popularize the “company town”: his workers all were born in company-owned hospitals, lived in company-owned houses, bought all their needs from company-owned stores, and were buried in company-owned cemeteries by company-employed undertakers. The company set the rent on the houses and the prices in the company store, and it formed a perfect circle: virtually all of the wages the company paid out came right back to it. The paternal system also allowed unprecedented control over the company’s workers: if you were fired or laid off by the Company you were not only jobless, but homeless as well.
During the economic Panic of 1893, Pullman protected his profits by slashing the wages of his workers, some by as much as 50%. But the company-set rent and store prices remained the same, and most of the workers were barely able to keep up. In April 1894, the desperate Pullman workers walked out on strike, and asked for help from the American Railway Union. Debs, who headed the Union, was at first unsure if they could win, but the ARU voted to support the strike by refusing to handle any Pullman sleeping cars. For the next few weeks, passenger train travel in the United States all but came to a halt, as union railway workers uncoupled any Pullman cars and left them sitting on the tracks.
The strike/boycott almost brought the Pullman Company to its knees, but in the end the US Government stepped in. President Grover Cleveland ordered the arrest of Debs and other union leaders on Federal charges of “conspiracy in restraint of free trade”. They were convicted, and Debs was sentenced to 6 months in the Woodstock County Jail in Illinois. Debs would later write that it was this experience, along with the loss of reform candidate William Jennings Bryan to William McKinley in the 1896 Presidential election, which led him to convert to socialism and to abandon the Democrat-Republican two-party system. “I am for socialism because I am for humanity,” he declared. “Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization.” In 1897, Debs helped form the Social Democracy of America Party, which would eventually become the Socialist Party of America in 1901.
Debs would be the Socialist Party’s leader and spokesman for the rest of his life, and also helped to organize the radical IWW labor union (“Industrial Workers of the World”) in 1905. A perennial candidate for President, in 1912 Debs received almost a million votes—six percent of the total vote count. The Socialist Party elected mayors, state legislators, and Representatives in the US Congress, making it the most successful third party in American history.
Debs was one of its most popular speakers. He traveled the country constantly in a train that became known as the “Red Express”, attracting crowds wherever he spoke.
When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Debs, like most of the socialists around the world, opposed it. Socialists viewed the war as a conflict between imperialist powers who were arguing over world domination, and they declared that the working class should concentrate on its own economic fight with the employing class instead. As a result, World War One was one of the least popular wars the US ever fought, and there was a large and thriving anti-war movement. The Wilson Administration responded with the Espionage and Sedition Acts. These laws in effect made it illegal to criticize the war or the US Government, making it one of the most draconian anti-dissent and anti-free speech laws ever passed.
In June 1918, Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, which, while circumspect, was deemed by the Federal Government to be “subversive”, and he was arrested for violating the Espionage and Sedition Acts. This was part of the “Red Scare”, in which the Federal Government arrested thousands of socialists, anarchists, labor activists, and anyone else deemed “subversive”. Many people were deported, and others were put on mass show trials. Years later, all of these actions would be declared unconstitutional by the courts.
Debs was sentenced to ten years in Federal prison, and was taken first to West Virginia and then to Georgia. In the 1920 election, he once again ran for President on the Socialist Party ticket, despite the fact that he was sitting in jail for sedition, using the campaign slogan “Vote for Prisoner Number 9653”. He received almost a million votes.
It wasn’t until Woodrow Wilson left office, and the anti-socialist hysteria of the Red Scare ended, that the courts finally ruled that the laws under which the mass arrests and imprisonments had been carried out were unconstitutional. President Warren G Harding ordered Debs released on Christmas Day, 1921.
But Debs was now an old man, and the time in jail had weakened him. His health began to fail, and he died in 1926. The Socialist Party of which he was the leader had also declined in the face of fierce repression, and by 1925 it was virtually dead.
But in the end, Debs and the Socialist Party had their success. The progressive wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties adopted much of the platform that the Socialists had agitated for, and when the Great Depression struck in 1929, Franklin D Roosevelt’s “New Deal” borrowed most of its ideas and programs from the Socialists, pulling the country out of economic disaster and giving us the foundations for the “social safety net” that we still depend upon today.