Eugene V. Debs

Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American labor and political leader, one of the founders of the international labor union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States.

Rise to prominence

Eugene Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he lived most of his life, to middle-class immigrant parents, from Colmar, Alsace, France. 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 and was 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, one of the first industrial unions in the United States, the American Railway Union (ARU). The Union successfully struck the Great Northern Railway in April 1894, winning most of its demands.

Pullman Strike

Debs was jailed later that year for his part in the Pullman Strike, which grew out of a strike by the workers who made the Pullman Company's cars and who appealed to the ARU at its convention in Chicago, Illinois for support. 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. By the end of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. An estimated $80 million worth of property was damaged, and Debs was found guilty of interfering with the mail and sent to prison.

A Supreme Court case decision, In re Debs, later upheld the right of the federal government to issue the injunction.

Socialist leader

At the time of his arrest for mail obstruction, Debs was not a Socialist. However, while jailed, he read the works of Karl Marx. After his release in 1895 he started his socialist political career. 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.

Debs was, however, largely dismissive of the electoral process: he distrusted the political bargains that Victor Berger and other "sewer socialists" had made in winning local offices and put much more value on the organization of workers, particularly on industrial lines. Debs saw the working class as the one class to organize, educate and emancipate itself by itself.

Yet Debs was equally uncomfortable with the apolitical syndicalism of some within the Industrial Workers of the World. While he was an early supporter of the IWW, he was later appalled by what he considered the IWW's irresponsible advocacy of direct action, especially sabotage.

Although Debs criticized the apolitical "pure and simple unionism" of the railroad brotherhoods and the craft unions within the American Federation of Labor, he practiced a form of pure and simple socialism that underestimated the lasting power of racism, which he viewed as an aspect of capitalist exploitation. As Debs wrote in 1903, the party had "nothing specific to offer the negro, and we cannot make special appeals to all the races. The Socialist party is the party of the working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world". Yet Debs was more advanced on this issue than many others in the Socialist Party: he denounced racism throughout his years as a socialist, refusing to address segregated audiences in the South and condemning D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation".

Debs was a charismatic speaker who sometimes called on the vocabulary of Christianity and much of the oratorical style of evangelism—even though he was generally disdainful of organized religion. As Heywood Broun noted in his eulogy for Debs, quoting a fellow Socialist: "That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as he's around I believe it myself."

Although he was sometimes called "King Debs", Debs himself was not wholly comfortable with his standing as a leader. As he told an audience in Utah in 1910:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; 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 led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.

Return to prison

On June 16, 1918 Debs made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I, and was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was convicted, sentenced to serve twenty years in prison and disenfranchised for life.

Debs made his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs appealed his conviction to the United States Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the Court examined several statements Debs had made regarding WWI. While Debs had carefully guarded his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act, the Court found he still had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and recruitment for the war. Among other things, the Court cited Debs's praise for those imprisoned for obstructing the draft. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated in his opinion that little attention was needed since Debs' case was essentially the same as that of Schenck v. United States, in which the Court had upheld a similar conviction.

He went to prison on April 13, 1919. In protest of his jailing, Charles Ruthenberg led a parade of unionists, Socialists, Anarchists and Communists to march on May 1 (May Day), 1919 in Cleveland, Ohio. The event quickly broke into the violent May Day Riots of 1919.

Debs ran for president in the 1920 election while in prison in Atlanta, Georgia. He received 913,664 votes (3.4%), the most ever for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the U.S. and slightly more than he had won in 1912, when he obtained six percent of the vote. This stint in prison also inspired Debs to write a series of columns deeply critical of the prison system, which appeared in sanitized form in the Bell Syndicate and was collected into his only book, Walls and Bars, with several added chapters (published posthumously).

On December 25, 1921, President Warren G. Harding released Debs from prison, commuting his sentence to time served. Debs, however, never recovered his health from that time in prison and died five years later at the age of 70 in Elmhurst, Illinois.

In 1924, Eugene Debs was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Finnish Socialist Karl Henrik Wiik on the ground that "Debs started to work actively for peace during World War I, mainly because he considered the war to be in the interest of capitalism."

The protagonist in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Hocus Pocus is supposed to be the grandson of Eugene Debs.

References

External links

Eugene V. Debs Foundation
Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive
Eugene Debs Page from the Antiauthoritarian Encyclopedia
Open Directory Project:

Eugene V. Debs

Socialist Party USA

Rise to prominence

Pullman Strike

Socialist leader

Return to prison

References

See also

Recommended reading

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Eugene V. Debs

Rise to prominence

Pullman Strike

Socialist leader

Return to prison

References

See also

Recommended reading

External links