Eugene V. Debs

American labor leader and social reformer

• Born: November 5, 1855
• Birthplace: Terre Haute, Indiana
• Died: October 20, 1926
• Place of death: Elmhurst, Illinois

Debs’s work in the organization of labor and the adoption of social welfare legislation had a significant impact on the American economy and government. He campaigned several times for the presidency of the United States as a representative of the Socialist Party.

Early Life

Eugene V. Debs was the third child of six who survived to adulthood and the first son of Jean Daniel Debs and Marguerite Marie Bettrich Debs. His parents had emigrated in 1849 from France, lived briefly in were chosen and Cincinnati, and settled in Terre Haute, opening a grocery store that provided the family with a modest but sustaining income.

In his reading of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) he was named by his father after Hugo and Hugo’s compatriot and fellow novelist, Eugène Sue Debs early became aware of the wretchedness of poverty and the dream of its eradication. His formal education was perhaps less influential; in 1871, against his parents’ wishes, he left high school, worked for the Terre Haute and Indianapolis Railroad, and in December, 1871, was promoted to the position of fireman.

Debs was employed as a railroad man for two years. In 1873, as a result of the financial panic and the subsequent economic depression, he lost his job, moved to East St. Louis, and at first hand witnessed the realities of urban beggary and desperation. After his return to Terre Haute the next year, he secured employment in a wholesale grocery company and participated in the cultural and civic institutions of the small midwestern city. He established, along with others, the Occidental Literary Club, served as its president, and provided a platform for such national figures as the atheist propagandist and orator Robert Ingersoll, the former abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who had embraced the cause of labor, and the poet James Whitcomb Riley. The visit to Terre Haute of Susan B. Anthony, and the refusal of the literary club to sponsor her speech, brought him into contact with the cause of women’s rights and the hostility that the intrepid suffragist constantly encountered.

Life’s Work

In February, 1875, although no longer involved in the industry, Debs became a member of the newly established Vigo Lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, rose rapidly to prominence in union circles, and with labor support was elected first as Terre Haute city clerk and then, in 1884, as a representative to the lower house of the Indiana General Assembly. His legislative record reveals a dedication to labor issues, the sponsoring of railroad workers’ safety and employers’ liability bills, and the abortive support of a law extending the ballot to Indiana women.

The year 1885 was a momentous one in Debs’s life and career. A photograph taken sometime later shows him clean-shaven, with a receding hairline, and smart clothes. On June 9, 1885, he married Katherine Metzel, the stepdaughter of a Terre Haute druggist. He was grand secretary of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and editor of its magazine; before the year’s end, he left his positions in the grocery warehouse and as state legislator and devoted himself fully to the cause of labor organization.

In the pages of the union’s official publication, Debs frequently commented on labor strategies and the structure of unionization. He was opposed to strikes except as a last resort. He believed that the use of boycott was a terrible example of economic coercion. He dissociated himself from any project that would effect an “amalgamation” of labor organizations and the dissolution of the independent craft unions.

The 1888 strike against the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, which concluded in defeat for the union, had an important impact on Debs and modified his attitude toward labor organization. If not yet advocating the establishment of an industrial union, he urged that the railway unions develop a federation similar to the American Federation of Labor, and, by numbers and a united front, win concessions on wages and other terms and conditions of employment. His efforts and those of other railroad labor leaders reached a brief fruition in 1889, in the establishment of a Supreme Council of the United Orders of Railroad Employees, combining in a federation firemen, brakemen, and switchmen. The organization was too weak, however, to resolve disputes among its members, caused bitterness and estrangement among the railroad unions, and at its 1892 annual convention, Debs reluctantly sponsored a successful resolution dissolving this experiment in labor federation.

Disillusioned by the impotency of the Supreme Council of the United Orders of Railroad Employees, believing that a federation of craft unions would not prove effective in ameliorating labor conditions, Debs turned to the creation of an industrial railroad union. The American Railway Union (ARU), founded in Chicago in June, 1893, with Debs serving as president, represented a threat not only to railroad corporations but also to the railroad unions of craftsmen and to the American Federation of Labor. It proposed to organize all railroad workers, coal miners, and longshoremen employed in the industry, irrespective of their skills. Reflecting the racism of the 1890’s, it barred black Americans from membership. (Debs, however, opposed such exclusionary language in its constitution.)

The year 1893 was an unpropitious time to form a new labor organization. There was another financial panic and another depression; the ranks of the unemployed swelled, and the breadlines in the cities grew longer. On the other hand, the depression caused railroad men to desert the unions; before a year was over, the ARU had become the largest single labor union in the United States, with a membership of more than 150,000. In April, 1894, it won a brilliant victory and a wage increase after an eighteen-day strike against the Great Northern Railroad. Yet its triumph was transitory: A month later began the strike and lockout at the Pullman Palace Car Company outside Chicago. The employee-inhabitants of Pullman town had long been resentful of the unwillingness of the company to sell them the houses in which they lived, to accord them political rights in the selection of town officials, and to lower rents as wages were reduced in September, 1893. Against the advice of Debs and other ARU officers, in May, 1894, they struck, and, the next month, sent their delegates to the first annual convention of the industrial union that by coincidence was meeting in Chicago. Their accounts of exploitation and deprivation swayed the convention to support a boycott of all railroad companies with Chicago terminals unless they refused to link Pullman cars to their passenger trains.

The Pullman Strike of 1894 pitted the ARU against the General Managers Association, a trade organization of twenty-four railroad companies with terminals in Chicago. Allied with management were the judges of the federal courts, the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland, and particularly Attorney GeneralRichard Olney. Olney was determined to crush the railroad workers and to destroy their union. He attained both objectives. Borrowed from the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, appointed as special district attorney, Edwin Walker successfully petitioned the federal court in Chicago to grant an injunction that prohibited the ARU, its president, and other officials from any further supervision of the strike. They could not speak, write instructions, or use telegraph or telephone lines to support ARU members who had paralyzed railroad traffic, not only in and out of Chicago but also in twenty-seven Western states and territories. Unemployed railroad workers were transported from the East to replace striking employees, and on July 4, 1894, federal troops appeared in Chicago by Cleveland’s order. Labor had suffered one of the most devastating defeats in its history. The ARU was wrecked, its members blacklisted, and the Pullman workers were forced to return to their jobs under the old conditions. Debs was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in Woodstock Jail for violating the federal court’s injunction.

The failure of the ARU and the subsequent incarceration converted Debs to socialism as a preferable economic system. Within two years after his release, he joined the Social Democratic Party (in 1901, it became the Socialist Party of America), served on its executive board, and, in 1900, ran for president of the United States. It was the first of five campaigns. Debs used his candidacies as forums for education, attracting large crowds, arguing that socialism and democracy were compatible, standing on party platforms that advocated, among other things, woman suffrage, industrial safety legislation, shorter workdays, and the abolition of child labor. He received 96,978 votes in 1900, 402,406 in 1904, and eight years later, a climactic vote of 897,011, representing 6 percent of the electorate.

World War I and the entry of the United States in April, 1917, marked the end of the socialist electoral momentum. In June, 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act (amended the next year to include nine new federal criminal offenses) to enforce the Selective Service Act and to suppress verbal opposition to the war. Debs was angered by the imprisonment of many of his socialist colleagues under the congressional legislation. On June 15, 1918, in Canton, Ohio, he addressed the Ohio Socialist Party Convention. In a long and sometimes eloquent speech, he expressed sympathy for his incarcerated socialist comrades, excoriated the United States Supreme Court, and criticized conscription and the United States’ participation in the European conflagration. He did not directly counsel draft resistance or illegal action in the military forces or say anything to promote the success of the German army. Nevertheless, he was arrested, indicted, and, in September, 1918, tried in a Cleveland courtroom, convicted, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. His appeal to the United States Supreme Court his attorneys arguing that the Espionage Act violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech was concluded in March, 1919, with a Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., opinion affirming the conviction.

Debs, sixty-three years old, confronted a decade of imprisonment. Depressed at times by his confinement in Atlanta Penitentiary, elated at others by the steady flow of sympathetic letters and visitors, in 1920 he ran once more for president, the only candidate ever to have done so while in prison.

Ironically it was Republican president Warren G. Harding who ordered Debs’s release on Christmas Day, 1921. The socialist leader was not able to unite his party, which had been torn by dissension over the war and by the emergence of two communist political organizations. His personal popularity, however, had not waned. He spoke out against violent revolution, criticized the Soviet government, and worked to revise Socialist Party fortunes. Hampered by failing health, he continued his speaking tours throughout the country, edited the American Appeal, and, in a last pamphlet, pleaded the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. He died on October 20, 1926, in Lindlahr Sanatorium in a Chicago suburb and was buried in his hometown of Terre Haute.

Significance

Although the ARU failed and the Socialist Party declined in influence during his lifetime, Debs left behind him important legacies in the currents of twentieth century American history. The ARU served as a model of the industrial organization of labor, emulated by the establishment of the more enduring Congress of Industrial Organizations. The Socialist Party of America, under his leadership, impelled the major political parties of Democrats and Republicans to coopt reformist elements in their rival’s platform. The abolition of child labor, maximum hour and minimum wage legislation, the protection of employees in the workplace, woman suffrage, and the graduated income tax became part of state and federal legal codes or amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Debs’s conviction and incarceration under the Espionage Act educated the American public and the Supreme Court about the dangers of suppressing dissent and the crucial relationship between the free speech guarantee and the preservation of democratic institutions. Perhaps most important, his dedication to the alleviation of poverty, to social justice, and to peace has inspired other Americans in later generations and has contributed to the richness of American political life.

Bibliography

Chace, James. 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs: The Election That Changed the Country. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Relates the events of the 1912 presidential election, including Debs’s campaign on the Socialist Party ticket.

Debs, Eugene Victor. Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs. New York: Hermitage Press, 1948. A collection of Debs’s works, with an introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., including an abridged version of the Canton speech for which the socialist leader was convicted and imprisoned for violation of the Espionage Act. The book further exhibits the quality of Debs’s rhetorical skills.

Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949. The most colorful and readable study of Debs’s life, narrative in form, but perpetuating a mythic portrait of the socialist leader.

Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. The only systematic account of the conflict between the Pullman workers and the ARU on one side and the railroad corporations and the Cleveland administration on the other. The author emphasizes employee grievances relative to conditions in Pullman, Illinois, and, along with a careful analysis of the course of the strike, presents the reactions and recommendations of the United States Strike Commission in its aftermath.

Morgan, H. Wayne. Eugene V. Debs: Socialist for President. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1952. Focuses on the five presidential campaigns as well as on the history of the party between 1900 and 1925.

Peterson, J. C., and Gilbert C. Fite. Opponents of War: 1917-1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957. One of many such studies, a wide panorama of the suppression of dissent during World War I, the closing of German-language and socialist newspapers, the prosecutions under the Espionage Act, and the antilibertarian record of the Woodrow Wilson administration.

Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. The best and most analytic biography to date. The author argues that Debs’s career can be viewed in an American tradition of radical reformism rather than as an attempt to implant into American politics an alien European ideology.

Shannon, David A. The Socialist Party of America: A History. New York: Macmillan, 1955. An overview of the fortunes of the Socialist Party from its origins in 1901 to the early 1950’s, placing Debs in a context of intraparty factionalism.