Eugene V. Debs
American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States
1855 CE to 1926 CE
Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) is an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States.
Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually becomes one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.
Early in his political career, Debs is a member of the Democratic Party.
He is elected as a Democrat to the Indiana General Assembly in 1884.
After working with several smaller unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs leads his union in a major ten-month strike against the CB&Q Railroad in 1888, and loses.
Debs is instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the nation's first industrial unions.
After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organize a wildcat strike over pay cuts in the summer of 1894, Debs signs many into the ARU.
He leads a boycott by the ARU against handling trains with Pullman cars in what becomes the nationwide Pullman Strike, affecting most lines west of Detroit and more than two hundred and fifty thousand workers in twenty-seven states.
Purportedly to keep the mail running, President Grover Cleveland uses the United States Army to break the strike.
As a leader of the ARU, Debs is convicted of federal charges for defying a court injunction against the strike and serves six months in prison.
In prison, Debs reads various works of socialist theory and emerges six months later as a committed adherent of the international socialist movement.
Debs is a founding member of the Social Democracy of America (1897), the Social Democratic Party of America (1898) and the Socialist Party of America (1901).
Debs runs as a Socialist candidate for President of the United States five times, including 1900 (earning 0.6% of the popular vote), 1904 (3.0%), 1908 (2.8%), 1912 (6.0%) and 1920 (3.4%), the last time from a prison cell.
He is also a candidate for United States Congress from his native state Indiana in 1916.
Debs is noted for his oratory, and his speech denouncing American participation in the Great War lead to his second arrest in 1918.
He is convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918 and sentenced to a term of ten years.
President Warren G. Harding commutes his sentence in December 1921.
Debs dies in 1926, not long after being admitted to a sanatorium due to cardiovascular problems that developed during his time in prison.
He has since been cited as the inspiration for numerous politicians.
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Eugene V. Debs, having risen to the position of national officer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and editor of its magazine, has rebuilt the organization and helped organize other railroad brotherhoods.
An Indiana native, Debs, at twenty, had helped to form a local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875.
After failing to unify these brotherhoods, Debs establishes the industrial American Railway Union in 1893.
It will soon become the nation's largest union.
The Pullman Palace Car Company of Illinois cuts wages in the wake of the Panic but does not lower rents or other charges to employees in the company town of Pullman, near Chicago (later incorporated into Chicago.)
American Railway Union representatives protest on May 11, and are summarily fired by the company.
Eugene V. Debs leads a strike against Pullman in protest of wage reductions, calling for the boycott of all Pullman cars.
The Pullman Strike paralyzes rail traffic across the United States before being halted by a a blanket federal court injunction obtained by Attorney General Richard Olney on July 2.
Federal troops arriving on July 4 under kill several strikers and break the strike in six days.
Debs and other union officials are jailed for six months thereafter for disobeying the injunction.
While in jail, Debs’s readings of Karl Kautsky and visits by Austro-Hungarian born Milwaukee socialist Victor L. Berger lead him to move toward socialism.
The Social Democracy of America (SDA), founded in 1897 by Eugene V. Debs from the remnants of his American Railway Union, is deeply divided between those who favor a tactic of launching a series of colonies to build socialism by practical example and others who favor establishment of a European-style socialist political party with a view to capture of the government apparatus through the ballot box.
Debs had became interested in socialist ideas after being jailed in the aftermath of the 1894 Pullman Strike.
Despite supporting William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential race, Debs announces his conversion to socialism in January 1897.
In June of this year, he holds a convention of his American Railway Union (ARU) in Chicago, where it is decided to merge the ARU with a faction of the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth (BCC) and other elements to create a new organization, the Social Democracy of America.
The newspaper of the ARU, Railway Times, is retitled to become official organ of the new organization, The Social Democrat.
The convention establishing the SDA is opened on June 15, 1897 in Uhlich's Hall in Chicago—the former headquarters of the ATU during the Pullman strike.
The session is attended by one hundred and eighteen delegates, predominately from the Midwest and the Western United States.
The keynote address to the convention is delivered by Gene Debs.
Among the elements that join in forming the new party is a faction of independent Midwestern socialists centered around Victor Berger
This mainly German American group keeps up a loosely organized Social Democratisher Verein and publishes the oldest socialist daily in the country, the Milwaukee Vorwarts.
This tendency emphasizes electoral socialism, especially in local politics, in order to appeal to workers on issues of immediate, day-to-day importance.
Prominent American adherents to this faction include Seymour Stedman and Frederic Heath.
The Socialist Party of America (SPA) is a socialist political party in the United States formed on July 29, 1901, by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party of America which had split from the main organization in 1899; the chief organizers are Victor L. Berger, Job Harriman, and Morris Jillquit of the Socialist Labor party and Eugene V. Debs of the American Railway Union.