Debs, Eugene V.

DEBS, EUGENE V. (1855–1926). The closest thing to a folk hero ever produced by the American Left, Eugene Victor Debs was born to French parents in Terre Haute, Indiana, where his father ran a small grocery store. Named for the French novelists Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo, young Debs was a bright and inquisitive student who enrolled in high school briefly in 1870 before deciding to enter the world of work as a locomotive paint-scraper while continuing his studies as a nighttime business student. He joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, not as the youthful firebrand of later legend, but more for the social and civic exposure and benefits that might accrue from membership in a mutual-benefit type of association.

Debs nurtured an idealistic worldview of harmony between employer and employee, with both groups obligated by mutual responsibilities to one another and the community around them. Debs toiled long and hard to fulfill his part of this social contract. He was elected city clerk and state representative in 1879 and 1884, respectively, with majority support in working-class and upper-class wards. The local newspaper christened him “the blue-eyed boy of destiny,” as his oratory and political acumen hinted at fame and fortune to come.

His trade union career similarly proved a double helix of success. Debs was appointed editor of the Brotherhood’s national journal in 1880 and became secretary-treasurer in 1885. He meted out his conservative philosophy to readers and members with a hiring-hall mentality, so that railroad managers could secure the best and brightest for the aristocracy of the rails. Debs pontificated against strikes in general and labeled the portentous 1877 general railroad walkout as signifying “anarchy and revolution” despite the cumulative wage reductions imposed on railroad workers. The Haymarket martyrs also received his scorn a decade later as upsetters of the social order. Debs’s embrace of individual social mobility and liberty within a context of class cooperation became anachronistic in the confines of the Gilded Age’s industrial vagaries. He never quite abandoned these youthful philosophies although he reluctantly began to criticize the growth of monopoly and the demise of individual freedom.

As corporate power increasingly threatened traditional American values by employing federal troops, court injunctions, and blacklists against workers, Debs slowly agonized over the changing situation. He reluctantly envisioned a federation of railroad workers to balance the growing power of industry rather than individual, centripetal craft unions. This was no sudden change on his part, but a poignant, time-consuming transformation in outlook much different from the “born radical” image of his contemporary biographers and followers. Nor was this Debs the Christlike figure of legend. He often attacked his foes unscrupulously, supported Jim Crow, and embraced nascent American imperialism.
By 1892 the contradictions between Debs’s idealistic, old-fashioned belief system clashed irrevocably with the dictates of a changing world. He sadly resigned from the Brotherhood and developed a new type of organization, an undertaking that would propel him onto the national political scene for the next three decades.

As Debs reevaluated his earlier stands against strikes and union militance, he searched for the ingredient that would provide labor with the unity and power enjoyed by the industrial trusts without unleashing the mob atavism that haunted his visions of an enlightened socialist commonwealth. Abandoning his old emphasis on a skilled and elite work force and, blaming the new industrial order for undermining the skills of that work force, Debs created the American Railway Union (ARU) in 1893, an industrial-style federation open to all train workers who received a paycheck from a railroad corporation. The fledgling organization, as its first order of business, engaged the Great Northern Railroad, the bastion of the powerful James Hill, who had cut wages and fired union supporters in a familiar Gilded Age scenario. Debs wisely bridled the de facto and undisciplined militance of the rank and file into a peaceful and solid phalanx of support among competing crafts, Knights of Labor assemblies, and unskilled laborers. More important, he tactfully turned merchants, most notably Charles Pillsbury—the grain merchant dependent on timely transportation for his perishable product—against Hill and his policies, thus breaking capitalist unity in the strike.

The conflict was eventually settled in arbitration, but an arbitration imposed by the unity of the union. When the arbitrator ruled in its favor and restored wage levels, new members stampeded into the ARU not unlike the deluge the Knights of Labor had experienced in the first flush of their success in the mid-1880s. The boom raised the union’s membership to a remarkable 150,000, outstripping the combined forces of all the other brotherhoods, which stood at just below 100,000. Debs still continued to blame individual robber barons like Hill for the ills of industrial society, rather than the system itself. On the heels of this major victory he boldly and prematurely proclaimed a new dawn of cooperation between management and labor through the collective-bargaining and arbitration process. Strikes, he stated, would soon be a thing of the past, a flash of wishful thinking reminiscent of the idealism of Terrence Powderly of the Knights of Labor.

The victory over James Hill, rather than serving as a harbinger of a new day in industrial relations, indirectly led to one of the greatest labor confrontations in US history. The liberal membership policy of the ARU led to affiliation by factory workers at the Pullman car company in Chicago, who went on strike in 1894. The diet of wage cuts in an oppressive company town—“Pullmedown,” as the residents sarcastically called it—provided an emotional backdrop to the ARU convention in June of that year. The delegates voted to initiate a national boycott against all trains with Pullman sleepers, which were still rented individually by the various railroads.

The General Managers Association, the governing body of railroad capital in the United States, saw an opportunity to destroy the upstart labor Lilliputian. As the boycott spread, the railroad chieftains had the government cynically invoke the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against the union, the first time that particular legislation was employed. Thousands of federal troops were sent into Chicago despite the lack of violence there. The presence of soldiers ironically engendered rioting, and Debs, like the Haymarket martyrs before him, was indicted for influencing the course of events.

Debs was sentenced to six months in jail in 1895 despite the courtroom heroics of defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. He spent his fortieth birthday there and read The Communist Manifesto. He left as a hero, with 100,000 citizens hailing his release in an impressive rally in Chicago on 22 November 1895. Debs became such a popular symbol that he was offered the Populist Party nomination for president the following year but turned it down. The McKinley victory finally turned him leftward.

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Eugene Debs was a soul in search of an institutional anchor and a meaningful ideology after the defeat of the ARU, which never resurrected itself from the debilitating Pullman showdown. He briefly instituted a quasi-political party, the Social Democracy of America, and flirted with a colonization scheme in the western United States. However, he soon gravitated to Victor Berger’s new Social Democratic Party, the precursor to the Socialist Party. Debs had finally found the political antidote to the dislocations of the new industrial order.

Debs’s own philosophical confusion in these years reflected the uncertainty in his audiences and seemed to create a sympathetic bonding with working-class America, which collectively shared his own anomie. In 1900 Debs was the standard-bearer for the Social Democratic Party, the first of five runs for the nation’s top office. He barely polled 100,000 votes but managed to double that four years later. By 1912, Debs had garnered almost a million votes, 6 percent of the votes cast that year and the electoral high-water for the American Left. His lingering belief in the American Dream, an unsettled ingredient in his own socialist psyche, found sympathetic listeners outside the narrow circle of the already convinced.

Although he remained uneasy with union hierarchies, Debs tried to find a home with the infant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), attending the founding convention in 1905. He remained close to the rank and file of that organization but was unable to handle the fractious personalities that made up the IWW leadership. By the eve of World War I, the Socialist Party had a flourishing media, a coterie of successful local candidates, and more than 100,000 dues-paying members. Debs, while the titular head of the party, suffered greatly from insecurity and uncertainty. His marriage to Kate Metzel in 1885 had quickly turned to one of convenience. Debs often retreated from depression by visiting bordellos or bars. He also detested the internecine battles that rumbled through the Socialist Party and the American Left like thunderstorms on the western prairie. He often sacrificed himself as a peacemaker who never really brought peace but only an expedient, temporary truce.

As the capitalist parties appropriated the demands of the socialists, populists, and trade unions into their own platforms, considerable venom was taken from the socialist sting. When the Progressive era stumbled into World War I, Debs and the American Socialist Party held firm against imperialist war. Debs was determined to take a stand, even as the hard-won socialist gains unraveled in the growing wartime hysteria. Debs, who had always possessed a martyr complex, foresaw his own crucifixion—indeed toiled for it—as the once-powerful European socialist parties succumbed to individual nationalisms. In one of his most quoted passages he wrote: “I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world wide war of the social revolution. In that way, I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.” That rhetoric was designed to rally the socialists and taunt the authorities, who responded soon after American troops had been dispatched to Europe. Debs was arrested for sedition after a militant anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918.

At the age of sixty-three, with his beloved party hounded and repressed, Debs was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. He believed his incarceration might at least rally his followers and provide the cure to the political impotence he felt. He had proved his citizenship once again and earned the approbation of Lenin in revolutionary Russia. He began his sentence on the eve of the Red Scare, in April 1919, when it seemed that rebellion might shake America, too. But he rode to prison in a union train with not so much as a whisper of protest from his former coworkers.

Once ensconced at Atlanta Penitentiary, Debs became a protest candidate for the US presidency for the fifth and last time in 1920. He railed at the system from within and taunted the prosecutors: “There are no bars and no walls for the man who in his heart is free, and there is no freedom for the man who in his heart is a slave.” His followers wore buttons, much prized by collectors today, that proclaimed VOTE FOR PRISONER 9653. Debs polled more than 900,000 votes, about the same as his 1912 total. He was pardoned on Christmas Day, 1921, in an unusual gesture by President-elect Harding. The convict sent his five dollars release money to the Sacco Vanzetti Defense Committee. The Debs that left Atlanta Penitentiary in 1921 was a different person from the one who had left the Chicago jail in 1895, and it was a different country as well. A large throng greeted him upon his return to Terre Haute, as others had earlier in Chicago, but Debs was in his twilight years now and the promise of social victory so alive a generation earlier had given way to despondency and defeat. He and his party had lost despite the intense loyalty of remaining members. The Russian Revolution had become the standard-bearer of the world Left and eclipsed the native socialism of Debs. He died on 20 October 1926.

Buhle, Paul and Steve Max. Eugene V. Debs; a Graphic Biography. New York: Verso, 2019.

Constantine, R. Robert, ed. Letters of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. I-III. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990.

Davenport, Tim and David Waters, eds., The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019-2021.

Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949.

Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive. Marxists Internet Archives. https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/