Debs, Eugene V.

Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926), labor leader, socialist, and presidential candidate.The son of Alsatian immigrants, Eugene Victor Debs became a railroad worker at age fourteen in his native Terre Haute, Indiana. After four years as a railway fireman, he took a job as a clerk but remained active in the Brother‐hood of Locomotive Firemen, becoming its secretary‐treasurer and editor of its journal. In 1893 he broke with the craft‐union tradition by helping found the American Railway Union, which organized both skilled and unskilled workers. The following year, he led a boycott of the Pullman Palace Car Company, which tied up the nation's railroad system but ultimately failed.

After six months in jail for his role in the Pullman boycott, Debs began a career as a lecturer and journalist. Embracing socialism, he ran as the Socialist party's candidate for president five times, beginning in 1900. His best showing came in 1912 when he won nearly 6 percent of the popular vote. In 1905 Debs helped found the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical alternative to the American Federation of Labor. Debs served two years in prison (1919–1921) for a 1918 speech denouncing the federal government's repressive wartime policies. Even behind bars, he polled nearly 920,000 votes in the 1920 presidential election. Afterward, he returned to Terre Haute, still committed to socialism but hampered by ill health.

Debs looms large in American labor history as an eloquent spokesperson for workers' rights and an early advocate of industrial unionism. Later, he became the most influential socialist in the nation's history. A spellbinding orator, he used the language of Christianity and American radicalism to argue for revolutionary change, widening socialism's appeal beyond the immigrant circles where it first won favor. Even after government repression and factionalism crippled the Socialist party, Debs remained a popular symbol of dissent and egalitarianism.
See also Labor Movements; Pullman Strike and Boycott; Socialist Party of America; Thomas, Norman.

Bibliography

Ray Ginger , The Bending Cross, A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs, 1949.
Nick Salvatore , Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, 1982.

Joshua B. Freeman