Eugene Debs was the most popular and beloved socialist leader in United States history. Famed for exceptional speechmaking, the Socialist Party of America raised $20,000 to buy a train for Debs’ inaugural run for president in 1906. The “Red Special” carried Debs across the country to hundreds of meetings, from the union halls of mining towns to a mass gathering of more than 10,000 workers at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
A lifetime of struggle, and the lessons born from bitter defeats, transformed Debs from a trade unionist and Democrat to a socialist committed to building a working-class party.
Debs was born in 1855 in the small town of Terre Haute in Indiana. At fourteen, he started working on the railroads. Railways were central to the industrial expansion going on in the United States at the time, connecting major cities and transporting commodities between them. Capitalists employed gangster violence against unions, keeping working conditions dangerous and wages pitiful. Ray Ginger, in his famous 1949 biography of Debs, writes that in his fifth year on the railways, a friend and workmate of Debs fell under a train and died. Worried he’d meet the same all-too-common fate, Debs returned to Terre Haute shortly afterwards.
While working at a grocery store, Debs took an administrative role at a trade union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Initially, his attitudes were relatively conservative. He supported the system of craft unionism that dominated the United States, where workers were organised by trade. Railway engineers, firefighters, drivers and conductors might all be in different unions, working on the same train. Debs also viewed strikes as messy actions of last resort, writing in 1880 that while the Brotherhood sympathised with the “deluded and miserable wretches” who engaged in strikes, they believed in “a different way of settling difficulties between employer and employee. We believe in arbitration”.
Over time, Debs became fed up with craft unionism and turned against it. The various brotherhoods did not support each other. Scabbing during strikes was common, as brotherhoods wanted to advance their own section’s interests, even at the expense of other workers. Debs encountered sectionalism as a barrier to organising the engineers. He began to believe that if unions remained divided, working conditions on the railways would never improve.
Although it caused considerable internal strife, Debs tried to amalgamate the brotherhoods to form a larger union covering the entire industry and all the trades within it. This industrial unionism approach was widespread among socialists at the time. Debs was particularly inspired by the Western Federation of Miners and its leader, “Big” Bill Haywood.
In 1893, Debs helped form the American Railway Union as an industrial union. It was exceedingly popular, with thousands of workers joining in the weeks following its establishment, many of them young and previously unorganised. The overwhelming enthusiasm for the ARU seemed to vindicate the approach of industrial unionism.
But as president of the ARU, Debs’ politics were contradictory. In 1894, he argued that if workers achieved vast industrial organisation, striking “would be remanded to the chamber relic of the past. An era of good will and peace would dawn”. This perspective was simultaneously militant and limited. Debs advocated working-class unity, but believed that class interests could be reconciled.
The 1894 Pullman dispute, later known as the “Debs Rebellion”, changed everything. Workers at the Pullman Factory, outside Chicago, were impoverished. The company owned all the town’s housing. After years of work, many were indebted to their employer because of extortionate rents. A proposed wage cut pushed ARU members to launch a wildcat strike, which expanded into a national boycott of all Pullman goods. The dispute was seminal; at its height, more than 100,000 workers stopped work to respect the boycott, and rail transportation came to a standstill in much of the country.
In response, Chicago’s mayor and President Grover Cleveland, both Democrats, intervened, issuing an injunction against ARU leaders speaking about the dispute and sending in federal troops to break up the strikes. The broader labour movement, including the conservative American Federation of Labor, had refused to support the ARU and scabbed extensively. Without the necessary solidarity, the strike was isolated and ended in terrible defeat. Thousands of ARU members lost their jobs, and Debs was jailed for contempt of court.
The Pullman dispute stayed with Debs for the rest of his life. In a 1902 article, “How I became a Socialist”, Debs said that after the Pullman dispute, he felt naive for believing that industrial organisation alone could alleviate the ills of capitalism. That approach, he concluded, underestimated how vigorously the capitalist state would fight for the ruling class: “In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed”, he wrote.
Debs also became oppositional to the Democratic Party. He had served one term as a local politician in Terre Haute with the Democrats and had backed Cleveland three times. Now, Debs declared: “I have been a Democrat all my life, and I am ashamed to admit it”.
In prison, Debs began contemplating socialism. The socialist Victor Berger visited with a copy of Marx’s Capital, although Debs was more impacted by his practical experience of struggle. Initially, Debs flirted with utopian socialism, floating a plan to find a rich benefactor to establish a socialist colony in the American West. When this proved unviable, Debs returned to Marx, and Marx’s argument that workers—by virtue of their unique position within capitalism—have the ability to overthrow the ruling class and create a new type of economy based on abundance and democracy.
In 1901, Debs helped form the Socialist Party of America. It was a step forward: a party that clearly advocated socialism and sought to represent workers’ interests independently of the Democrats and Republicans, who represented different wings of the capitalist class. But from the outset, the Socialist Party was divided over fundamental goals and objectives.
Debs was committed to abolishing capitalism. He did not believe that socialism could be legislated through parliament, famously saying: “Voting for socialism is not socialism any more than a menu is a meal”. The Pullman dispute left Debs disgusted with politicians (he called them “misrepresentatives of the masses”), conservative trade union organisers, and the whole concept of change from above. He stressed that socialism could only be achieved through workers emancipating themselves, a view he articulated in 1906:
“If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands and get yourselves out of your present condition.”
A right wing in the Socialist Party, represented by figures such as Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit and known as “sewer socialists,” limited its vision to relatively minor reforms and strove to have the government legislate them. They did not advocate for worker militancy, substantially agreeing with the approach of the conservative union bureaucracies of the American Federation of Labor, which had repeatedly sold out workers in alliances with capitalists. Berger also held openly racist attitudes, whereas Debs had opposed the practice of organising trade unions on a segregated basis, and refused to speak in front of segregated crowds.
The moderate reformists knew Debs had a more expansive vision of socialism than they did, and they opposed it. But they allowed Debs relatively free rein to say what he wanted in public, as his enormous talent as a writer and orator was essential to building the party, and no figure could match the reputation Debs held as a leader.
While freely advocating his views in lectures and articles, Debs did not fight to win the Socialist Party over to his left-wing perspectives. In fact, Debs largely stayed out of shaping the party’s internal politics, viewing himself primarily as a mass leader. Debs attended the first convention of the Socialist Party but never returned for the rest of his life. As a result, the party apparatus largely fell into the hands of moderate reformists.
Debs became the most prominent and indispensable spokesperson for a party whose leadership he frequently conflicted with. Having edited a variety of union magazines, Debs took over as editor of the Socialist Party’s Appeal to Reason, building it to a readership of 600,000 at its height. Although he had no desire to be a politician, Debs was so popular among party members that they repeatedly conscripted him to run for president. Believing that elections were an opportunity to educate workers in socialism, Debs campaigned relentlessly and effectively. The Socialist Party received between 400,000 and nearly 1 million votes on the occasions Debs stood for president. In 1912, he received 6 percent of the total votes cast across the country.
The stance for which Debs is most remembered came towards the end of his life: opposing World War One. Millions of US workers were conscripted to fight in the conflict, and hundreds of thousands died. Debs, with the rights of the working class as his political compass, argued that patriotism and nationalism disguised the profit-mongering interests of capitalists that drove the war, declaring in 1918 that “the master class has always declared the wars” while the working class “fight all the battles ... make all the supreme sacrifices ... freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses”.
The limited civil rights workers had enjoyed in peacetime were rolled back, with all criticism of the war effort criminalised and strikes labelled “unpatriotic”. Several socialists had been imprisoned for opposing the war. Debs realised that he too needed to go to jail for this cause, conceiving that this act would animate workers to stand against imperialism.
In Canton, Ohio, in 1918, at age 63, Debs addressed thousands of workers for two hours about the crimes of the war. He knew full well that this would lead to his imprisonment, saying: “I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than a sycophant and coward in the streets”. He celebrated the 1917 Russian Revolution and viewed it as the beginning of a worldwide revolution that he hoped would spread to the United States: “Socialism is a growing idea; an expanding philosophy ... It is as vain to resist it as it would be to arrest the sunrise on the morrow”.
With that, Debs went to jail for three years. While imprisoned, the Socialist Party stood him for president again, and Debs won nearly 1 million votes from his cell, demonstrating widespread sympathy for socialism and opposition to the war. At the war’s end, President Woodrow Wilson refused to grant Debs amnesty.
Imprisonment took a toll on Debs’ health and optimism. He lived only five years after his release. Although he maintained his opposition to the war, and desired to speak and tour, he spent much of his time in hospitals or at home.
The post-war years were trying. The Socialist Party was collapsing. Moderate reformism dominated the party. But Debs stayed a member. Despite supporting the Russian Revolution, Debs refused to throw his weight behind the new Communist Party. Given his prestige and authority, had Debs chosen to support the new party, it may have helped unify a new socialist layer among US workers.
Whatever his shortcomings, Eugene Debs was a committed and radical socialist, and his life was dedicated to the struggle of workers. Passionate, self-sacrificing, and brave, Debs embraced socialist principles after his experience of workers’ struggle and became someone who embodied them.
