Eugene V. Debs
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Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 - October 20, 1926) was an American labor and political leader and five-time Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States.
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Rise to prominence
Debs was born in Terra Haute, Indiana (where he lived most of his life), to middle-class immigrant parents. At the age of fourteen, he left home to work on the railroads, becoming a fireman. He returned home in 1874 to work as a grocery clerk, and the next year was a founding member of a new lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. He rose quickly in the Brotherhood, becoming first an assistant editor for their magazine and then the editor and Grand Secretary (in 1880). At the same time, he became a prominent figure in the community, even being elected to the Indiana state legislature (as a Democrat). The railroad brotherhoods were comparatively conservative unions, more focused on providing fellowship and services than in collective bargaining. Debs gradually became convinced of the need for a more unified (and confrontational) approach. After stepping down as Grand Secretary, he organized, in 1893, the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union (ARU). The Union successfully struck the Great Northern Railway in April 1894.
Trouble with the law
He was jailed later that year as part of the Pullman Strike, which grew out of the strike by the workers who made Pullman's cars. Debs tried to persuade the ARU members who worked on the railways that the boycott was too risky, given the hostility of both the railways and the federal government, the weakness of the ARU, 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.
The federal government did, in fact, intervene, obtaining an injunction against the strike on the theory that the strikers had obstructed the railways by refusing to show up for work, then sending in the United States Army on the grounds that the strike was hindering the delivery of the mail. That intervention only provoked a violent reaction from strikers in what had been a relatively peaceful strike. The strike was broken and the ARU destroyed.
Run for presidency
The experience radicalized Debs still further. He was a candidate for President of the United States in 1900 as a member of the Social Democratic Party. He was later the Socialist Party of America candidate for President in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, the final time from prison.
On June 16, 1918 he made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I, and was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison and disenfranchised for life. While in prison in Atlanta, he ran for President. On December 25, 1921 President Warren G. Harding released Debs from prison, commuting his sentence to time served.
In the 1920 election, while in jail, he received 913,664 votes (3.4%), the most ever for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the U.S. He was also a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World during this period.
Related articles
- Pullman Strike
- U.S. presidential election, 1900
- U.S. presidential election, 1904
- U.S. presidential election, 1908
- U.S. presidential election, 1912
- U.S. presidential election, 1920
Recommended reading
- Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, by Marguerite Young. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: 1999. ISBN 0-679-42757-0
- The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs, by Ray Ginger. Rutgers University Press: 1949. (Reprinted by Thomas Jefferson University Press: 1992. The reprint edition has numerous historic photographs and an introduction by J. Robert Constantine.)
- Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, by Nick Salvatore. Reprinted by University of Illinois Press, 1984. ISBN 0252011481
External links
- Debs Tendency of the Socialist Party USA
- Eugene V. Debs Foundation
- Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive
- Eugene Debs Page from the Antiauthoritarian Encyclopedia
- Google Directory: Eugene V. Debs
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