October 20 - Eugene V. Debs

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On this day, in 1923, Eugene V. Debs, America’s preeminent Socialist, passed away in Elmhurst, Illinois. The son of French immigrants, Eugene was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on November 5, 1855. He dropped out of high school at the age of 14 and began working for the local railroad, earning 50 cents a day degreasing engines. After two years of cleaning duty (as well as occasionally painting freight cars), he had the opportunity to move up to the position of fireman (the guy who kept the engine’s boiler stoked) which more than doubled his pay. He spent most nights for the next three and a half years  travelling between Terre Haute and Indianapolis. In early 1875, Eugene became a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and remained active in the union for almost twenty years. He was elected to represent his local brothers at national conventions and help various offices (including editor of the monthly newsletter, Grand Secretary and Treasurer) until 1893. And that was in spite of the fact that just six months after joining the union, Eugene left the railroad to pursue a degree in business administration.

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If the business interests of Eugene weren’t enough to brand him a capitalist at this point, his writings as editor of the BLM newsletter did. The early days of railroad unions were all about how members could improve their lives through things like honesty and temperance. The founders and leaders of the BLM were strongly against using strikes as a way to get what workers needed. Of course Eugene expected that railroad management would also treat workers with respect and equality. You can probably already see where circumstances are going to break down and change the course of his thinking. Eugene was proud of the fact that the BLM had never authorized a strike from its inception in 1873 up until 1887.

 After the Burlington Railroad Strike of 1888 in Chicago (a complete defeat for the unions), he began to realize that unions needed to organize along industry lines rather than around specific jobs. After stepping down as General Secretary of the BLM in 1893, he organized the American Railway Union, which was open to every railway laborer regardless of skill level or discipline. The ARU was a much more united front and quickly won its first strike against the Great Northern Railroad in 1894. Buoyed by a relatively painless success, the ARU went on strike again in 1895, this time against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Things did not go so well. Pullman was much more powerful than Great Northern and had the ear of President Cleveland. Eugene tried to argue against the strike at an ARU convention. It wasn’t until the number of strikers doubled that he gave in and supported it. In spite of 80,000 ARU members joining in the strike with legitimate grievances against Pullman, the federal government was able to get an injunction against them (because Pullman cars did business with the Postal Service, the official charge was obstruction of the US mail, a felony). Cleveland sent the Army in to enforce the injunction and force it they did. In the end, 30 strikers were killed, $80 million worth of property damage occurred and Eugene found himself sitting in federal prison.

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Prior to the Pullman Strike, Eugene was pro-business and pro-working man. He truly believed that solutions could be found to benefit both sides. He’d even spent a tern in the Indiana State Senate as a Democrat trying to do just that. The six months he spent in prison completely transformed his position. Not only was the ham handed way the government had handled the strike still fresh in his mind, but he was soon inundated with books and pamphlets from virtually every Socialist in the country, all of whom thought he might be sympathetic to their cause. He was. And he had nothing but time to digest all the material coming his way. When Victor L. Berger, a socialist newspaper editor from Milwaukee, paid Eugene a visit, he almost found that he was preaching to the choir. Eugene emerged from captivity a fired up convert to Socialism.

The American Railway Union had been effectively destroyed by the Pullman Strike. In 1896, Eugene met with remnants of the ARU, convincing them to join forces with the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth, a purely Socialist organization that was intent on building a Socialist colony in the state of Washington. The merged group was called the Social Democracy of America. The SDA was a house divided from the very beginning. The majority felt it best to develop colonies to show by example that their ideas worked. A vocal minority, including Eugene, wanted to form a political party and win the country over through the ballot box. By 1898, the minority had split from the SDA to create the Social Democratic Party of the United States with Eugene as the chairman of its board.

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Eugene’s first campaign for President of the United States, as the SDP candidate, happened in 1900. He only garnered 0.6% of the popular vote. In the summer of 1901, the SDP would join forces with a group that split off from the Socialist Labor Party of America (the oldest Socialist party in the country) to establish the Socialist Party of America, again with Eugene at its head. He would run for President as a SPA candidate in each of the next four elections. In 1904, he received 3% of the vote and doubled that to 6% in 1912, the biggest vote a Socialist candidate has ever received in the United States (he actually came second in Florida that year, pushing the incumbent, President Taft, into third in that state). His final run, in the 1920 election, would net him over 913,000 votes, his best total ever, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t actually eligible to run. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

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In between his runs at the Oval Office, Eugene continued trying to unionize every worker in not just America, but the entirety of Earth. In 1905, he was instrumental in creating the Industrial Workers of the World. At its peak in 1917, the IWW would boast over 150,000 members in three countries, but it regularly came into conflict with the other major union, the American Federation of Labor. The IWW considered the AFL to be too conservative, and the AFL considered the IWW to be too willing to embrace both socialism and anarchism. Both organizations still exist today but in radically different forms. The AFL-CIO is one of the world’s largest, most influential unions with over 12,000,000 members. The IWW can barely scrape together a total of 5,000 members spread across five countries. It’s not hard to see which approach is more sustainable, even if it’s highly debatable which is more effective.

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As part of the leadership of the IWW and the SPA, Eugene frequently gave charismatic speeches to rally people to his causes. As President Wilson guided America into World War I, Eugene’s speeches became more and more against Wilson, his policies and the US involvement in Europe. Even after the Espionage Act of 1917 was passed, effectively limiting the free speech of anyone who spoke against the government, he didn’t stop with his rhetoric, he merely chose his words more carefully. The semantic tiptoeing didn’t mitigate the fact that he’d made an enemy of the President. After a speech on June 18, 1918 in which he urged resistance to the military draft, Eugene was arrested and charged with ten counts of sedition. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. He appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court but his conviction was upheld.

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As a result of his incarceration, Eugene was also disenfranchised, meaning he no longer had the right to vote or run for office. That didn't stop him from running a presidential campaign from his prison cell in 1920. He assured everyone that being disenfranchised wouldn't be a problem because he would pardon himself once he'd won. It was, of course, a moot point. Before, during and after the election, Eugene repeatedly petitioned the Oval Office for clemency (or a pardon would be fine, too) but his requests fell on deaf ears. Wilson wasn't interested. Once Warren G Harding was in the White House in 1921, Eugene found more sympathetic ears and his sentence was commuted to time served, ending on December 25, 1921.

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While his prison term may have been shortened, his incarceration had already taken its toll on Eugene's health. He would never recover from his time behind bars even though recovery became his main occupation for the remainder of his life. The one highlight of his final years was probably in 1924 when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, by a Finnish Socialist, for his work opposing the Great War (even though it was admitted he only did what he did because he considered the war a capitalist tool). Spoiler alert: he didn't win, but not necessarily for the reasons you think. A Nobel Peace Prize wasn't awarded to anyone in 1924. Which means it probably is for the reasons you think as the committee decided giving it to no one was preferable to giving it to Eugene. But, as they say, it's nice to be nominated.

Eugene entered Lindlahr Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois in 1926. He would pass away from congestive heart failure there in October. Since then, Eugene's views have crept further and further into mainstream thinking. Popular current Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has long proclaimed himself to be an admirer. Eugene's house, located on the campus of Indiana State University, has become a museum and is listed as a National Historic Landmark. And, love him or hate him, in 1990 he was added to the Department of Labor's Labor Hall of Fame, completing his transformation from fringe seditionist to champion of the people.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Frank Churchill