Eugene Victor Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 5 November 1855, the son of an Alsatian immigrant grocer. He went to work for the Vandalia Railroad at age 14, became a locomotive fireman at 16, and progressively built the largest trade-union career in late-19th-century American railway labour. By 1893 he had founded the American Railway Union (ARU), the first major American industrial-rather-than-craft union, which by spring 1894 had organised approximately 150,000 American railway workers across the major lines. He was 38 years old. He was, at the time, a mainstream Democratic Party labour leader of substantially conventional views.
A year later he was in jail. Six years later he was a socialist running for president. Twenty-five years later he was in federal prison again, this time serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. He died in 1926. The 71-year arc from Terre Haute railway clerk to socialist political martyr is one of the most consequential individual political-biographical trajectories in American labour history.
The Pullman strike
The trigger was the Pullman strike of 1894. The Pullman Palace Car Company’s wage cuts had produced a strike at the company-town factory in May 1894. The strikers appealed to Debs’s ARU, which responded with a sympathetic boycott — ARU members across the American railway network refused to work trains carrying Pullman sleeping cars. The boycott shut down approximately half of the American railroad system over the following six weeks.
The federal response — under President Grover Cleveland — was a substantially novel use of the federal injunction power. The U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney obtained a federal court injunction against the ARU on the grounds that the boycott interfered with the federal mail. When the ARU did not comply with the injunction, Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to break the strike. There were several days of street fighting in early July 1894; approximately 30 strikers were killed; the strike was defeated by the end of July.
Debs was arrested on 17 July 1894 for contempt of the federal injunction. He was sentenced to six months in the small county jail at Woodstock, McHenry County, Illinois — about 50 miles northwest of Chicago. He served the full six months. He read substantially during the imprisonment.
Woodstock
The Woodstock jail provided unusually comfortable conditions for a political prisoner. Debs was the only major prisoner at the facility during his sentence; he was assigned a private cell that he furnished himself; he was allowed visitor access and unlimited reading material. His reading during the sentence is documented in detail in his subsequent memoir Walls and Bars and in the surviving correspondence with his Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow.
The substantive intellectual transformation during the Woodstock sentence was Debs’s first sustained engagement with Marxist political-economic theory. He had been provided copies of Marx’s Das Kapital, Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, the Kautsky-Bebel programme of the German Social Democratic Party, and a body of late-19th-century American socialist pamphlet literature. He read systematically through approximately five months of his six-month sentence.
He emerged from Woodstock in November 1894 changed. He had concluded that the trade-union framework within which he had previously operated was institutionally incapable of producing the substantive changes in American working-class conditions that he had spent twenty years pursuing. The American federal political-administrative system would, in any sustained labour-management conflict, be aligned with capital against labour — as the Pullman strike’s federal-injunction response had demonstrated. The substantive alternative was direct political mobilisation of the working class through an independent socialist political party.
The Socialist Party
The Socialist Party of America was founded in 1901, through Debs’s organisational leadership. The party’s electoral peak ran from approximately 1908 through 1916. Debs ran as the party’s presidential candidate in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 — five separate campaigns. His votes:
1900: 87,945 (0.6% of the national popular vote) 1904: 402,810 (3.0%) 1908: 420,852 (2.8%) 1912: 901,551 (6.0%) — his peak, against Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt. 1920: 919,799 (3.4%) — his second-largest absolute total, conducted from a federal penitentiary cell.
The Socialist Party’s substantive political peak coincided with the 1912 election. The party had approximately 118,000 dues-paying members by the end of that year, several hundred elected municipal officials across the United States, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the editorial control of the socialist press (the Appeal to Reason, with a paid weekly circulation of approximately 500,000, was the largest-circulation socialist newspaper in the world).
The decline was the consequence of two specific events: the American repression of the socialist press during the First World War (the post office revoked the second-class mailing permits of most of the socialist publications between 1917 and 1919), and the Russian Revolution’s polarising effect on the American left (the portion of the Socialist Party leadership that endorsed the Bolshevik revolution split off in 1919 to form the Communist Party USA, destroying the older organisation).
Atlanta
Debs’s last campaign was conducted from a federal prison cell. He had been convicted in 1918 of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for a speech delivered in Canton, Ohio, on 16 June 1918, in which he had publicly opposed the U.S. participation in the First World War and had encouraged young Americans to resist conscription. The conviction carried a ten-year federal sentence. He was 63 at the time of conviction.
He served the sentence at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary from April 1919 until December 1921. The 1920 election was conducted entirely from his Atlanta cell — he could not give campaign speeches, could not write campaign correspondence beyond a single weekly letter, and could not even receive most of his campaign-management staff. The Socialist Party ran the campaign from outside; Debs’s name appeared on the ballot in all the states that had standard ballot access; he received 919,799 votes (the -portion-fewer total than his 1912 peak reflects the post-WWI political collapse of the Socialist Party rather than diminished support for Debs personally).
President Warren G. Harding commuted Debs’s sentence to time served on 23 December 1921, on Christmas Eve. Debs travelled to the White House on the way home to Indiana; he and Harding spoke for approximately 25 minutes; Debs reportedly said as he left: “Mr. Harding appears to me to be a kind gentleman, one whom I believe possesses humane impulses. We understand each other perfectly.”
After
Debs’s last five years (1921-1926) were spent in declining health at his home in Terre Haute. He continued to write the standard socialist column for the American Appeal and gave occasional small-scale public speeches. He died of cardiac failure at the Lindlahr Sanitarium near Chicago on 20 October 1926, aged 70.
His political-institutional legacy was absorbed by the New Deal coalition of the 1930s. Several substantive Socialist Party policy positions of the 1908-1916 period — old-age pensions, the eight-hour day, workplace-injury compensation, child-labour restrictions, public ownership of utilities, women’s suffrage — were progressively adopted as mainstream American Democratic Party policy in the 1930s and 1940s. The Socialist Party itself continued in reduced form into the 1950s under Norman Thomas’s leadership but never recovered its 1912 electoral position.
The Pullman strike of 1894 — the specific episode that had sent Debs to Woodstock and inaugurated the substantive transformation of his political-economic views — produced the founding event of the American socialist tradition. The strike was lost. The strike’s intellectual legacy was approximately a million American socialist votes for Eugene Debs in the 1912 and 1920 presidential elections and a restructured American labour-political tradition that has continued, in various adapted forms, to the present.