Eugene V. Debs

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Eugene Victor Debs

Debs in 1897
Born November 5, 1855(1855-11-05)
Terre Haute, Indiana
Died October 20, 1926 (aged 70)
Elmhurst, Illinois
Known for Socialism
Spouse Kate Metzel (m. 1855)
Parents Jean Daniel Debs (1820-1906)

Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American union leader, one of the founders of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), as well as five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States. [1]

Contents

Rise to prominence

Eugene Debs was born to parents from Colmar, Alsace, France who immigrated to the US. He was born and lived most of his life in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father Jean Daniel Debs (1820-1906) came from a prosperous family and owned a textile mill and meat market. Eugene Debs was named after the French authors Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo.[2]

Eugene Debs married Kate Metzel on June 9, 1885; they had no children.

At the age of 17, Debs left home to work on the railroads, becoming a fireman (also known as boilerman). He returned home in 1874 to work as a grocery clerk. The next year he 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; in 1884 he was elected to the Indiana state legislature as a Democrat, serving one term.

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 American Railway Union at its convention in Chicago for support.[1] Debs attempted 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, including cars containing U.S. mail.

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. 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

Campaign poster from his 1912 Presidential campaign. Debs was a frequent Socialist candidate for President in the early 1900s.
Campaign poster from his 1912 Presidential campaign. Debs was a frequent Socialist candidate for President in the early 1900s.

At the time of his arrest for mail obstruction, Debs was not a Socialist. However, while jailed in Woodstock, Illinois, he read the works of Karl Marx. After his release in 1895, he started his socialist political career. The experience radicalized[citation needed] 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. His 1912 showing, 6 percent of the vote, remains the all-time high for a Socialist Party candidate.

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.

Debs 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.

Socialists split with the IWW

Debs giving a speech in Chicago in 1918.
Debs giving a speech in Chicago in 1918.

Yet Debs was equally uncomfortable with the apolitical stance of some within the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He had been an early supporter of the IWW, helping to organize it in 1905, along with Daniel De León, leader of the Socialist Labor Party. But the Wobblies (as IWW members were known) had grown tired of bickering between the two socialist parties,[3] and particularly of what they viewed as opportunism by De León.[4] At their convention in 1908, the Wobblies amended the IWW constitution to emphasize industrial action, and to prohibit political action, i.e., alliance with any political party, in the name of the union. De León and Debs both left the IWW in 1908.[5]

Later, the electoral wing of the Socialist Party led by Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit became irritated with speeches by Big Bill Haywood, a member of the National Executive Committee, but also a leader of the IWW.[6] In December of 1911, Haywood told a Lower East Side audience at New York's Cooper Union that parliamentary Socialists were "step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step." It was better, Haywood said, to "elect the superintendent of some branch of industry, than to elect some congressman to the United States Congress."[7] In response, Hillquit attacked the IWW as "purely anarchistic..."[8]

The Cooper Union speech was the beginning of a split between Bill Haywood and the Socialist Party.[9] The final straw came during the Lawrence textile strike when, disgusted with the decision of the elected officials in Lawrence to send police who subsequently used their clubs on children, Haywood publicly declared that "I will not vote again" until such a circumstance was rectified.[10] Haywood was purged from the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party by passage of an amendment that focused on the direct action and sabotage tactics advocated by the IWW.[11] Eugene Debs was probably the one person who might have saved Haywood's seat.[12] In 1906, when Haywood had been on trial for his life in Idaho, Debs had described him as "the Lincoln of Labor," and called for Haywood to run against Theodore Roosevelt for president of the United States.[13] But times had changed and Debs, facing a split in the Party, chose to echo Hillquit's words, accusing the IWW of representing anarchy.[14] Debs thereafter stated that he had opposed the amendment, but once it was adopted, it should be obeyed.[15] Debs remained friendly to Haywood and the IWW after the expulsion, in spite of their perceived differences over IWW tactics.[16]

Eugene V. Debs with Max Eastman and Rose Pastor Stokes in 1918.
Eugene V. Debs with Max Eastman and Rose Pastor Stokes in 1918.

Prior to Haywood's dismissal, the Socialist Party membership had reached an all-time high of 135,000. One year later, four months after Haywood was recalled, the membership dropped to 80,000. The reformists in the Socialist Party attributed the decline to the departure of the "Haywood element," and predicted that the party would recover. However, the Socialist Party's historical high point of membership had already been reached. In the election of 1913, many of the Socialists who had been elected to public office lost their seats.[17]

Leadership style

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 sometimes called" King Debs,"[18] 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. ”

He was sent to the Woodstock, Illinois City Jail to avoid being killed in the city for his radical involvement in the Pullman Strike.[citation needed]

Opposition to World War I

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Clifford Berryman's cartoon depiction of Debs' presidential run
Clifford Berryman's cartoon depiction of Debs' presidential run

On June 16, 1918, Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio in opposition to World War I and was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was convicted, sentenced to serve ten 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 Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the court examined several statements Debs had made regarding World War I. 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, Jr. 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. In the decision Holmes wrote that free speech does not include "the right to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater."

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 in the Atlanta Penitentiary
Debs in the Atlanta Penitentiary

Debs ran for president in the 1920 election while in prison in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He received 913,664 votes (3.4 percent), the highest number of votes 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 commuted Debs' sentence to time served and Debs was released from prison.

In 1924, Eugene Debs was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Finnish Communist Karl H. 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."[19]

Death

Debs died on October 20, 1926, at the age of 70 in Elmhurst, Illinois.[1][20]

References in popular culture

 Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
  • The protagonist in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Hocus Pocus, is Eugene Debs Hartke, who is named after Eugene V. Debs. There are several other references to Debs throughout the novel, and in other Vonnegut works. Vonnegut received the Eugene V. Debs Award in 1981 from the Debs Foundation.
  • Eugene Debs and his actions figure prominently in the Callen Harty play Debs in Prison. [21]
  • In the story collection Back in the USSA, Debs takes the role of Lenin in the alternate history socialist revolution in the United States.
  • In the John Nichols book The magic journey, Debs is mentioned as inspiring for one of the main characters Virgil Leyba.
  • A general strike occurs in a San Francisco of the near future in the Jack London short story The Dream of Debs (1909).
  • On the January 2, 2008 episode of Late Show with David Letterman, the host introduced a group of picket sign-wielding showgirls as "the Eugene V. Debs" as a play on the common abbreviation for debutants.
  • In Ann Patchett's novel Run, Debs' speeches are memorized by the character Teddy.

References

  1. ^ a b c "Eugene V. Debs", Time (magazine), Monday, November 1, 1926. Retrieved on 2007-08-21. "As it must to all men, Death came last week to Eugene Victor Debs, Socialist." 
  2. ^ Bill Roberts. The Socialist Worker. Retrieved on 2007-07-19.
  3. ^ The I.W.W.: Its First Seventy Years, Fred W. Thompson & Patrick Murfin, 1976, page 20.
  4. ^ The I.W.W.: Its First Seventy Years, Fred W. Thompson & Patrick Murfin, 1976, page 38.
  5. ^ The I.W.W.: Its First Seventy Years, Fred W. Thompson & Patrick Murfin, 1976, page 39.
  6. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 156.
  7. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 157.
  8. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 159.
  9. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 159.
  10. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 183.
  11. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 200.
  12. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 199.
  13. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 109.
  14. ^ Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, William Dudley Haywood, 1929, page 279.
  15. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 199.
  16. ^ Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, William Dudley Haywood, 1929, page 279.
  17. ^ Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, pages 199.
  18. ^ "King" Debs. Harper's Weekly (July 14, 1894). Retrieved on 2006-04-21.
  19. ^ Nobel Foundation. The Nomination Database for the Nobel Prize in Peace, 1901-1955. Retrieved on 2006-04-21.
  20. ^ "Eugene V. Debs Dies After Long Illness.", New York Times, October 21, 1926. Retrieved on 2008-05-17. "Socialist Leader Succumbs to Heart Ailments After Month in Illinois Sanitarium. Once Leader of Rail Union. He Led Pullman Strike In 1895. Served Nearly Three Years In Prison for Opposing War." 
  21. ^ Debs in Prison. Retrieved on 2007-01-13.

See also

Further reading

Archives

  • Debs Collection. Indiana State University Library Special Collections. Searchable pamphlet collection, abstracts of correspondence, photographs, surveillance records, etc. Online collection guide retrieved August 30, 2006.
  • Eugene Victor Debs Papers, 1881-1940. Indiana Historical Society Manuscript Collection. Call Number: SC 0493. Online collection guide retrieved May 16, 2005.
  • Bernard J. Brommel - Eugene V. Debs Papers, 1886-2003. Research material and works of Eugene V. Debs biographer Bernard J. Brommel, including notes, photocopies, photographs, pamphlets, newsclippings, and memorabilia. Also primary sources about and by Debs himself, including correspondence, works, and miscellanea. 4 cubic ft. Call Number: Midwest MS Brommel-Debs. Held at Newberry Library. Online catalog retrieved April 26, 2005.

External links

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Preceded by
—		 Socialist Party of America Presidential candidate
1900 (lost), 1904 (lost), 1908 (lost), 1912 (lost)		 Succeeded by
Allan L. Benson
Preceded by
Allan L. Benson		 Socialist Party of America Presidential candidate
1920 (lost)		 Succeeded by
Robert M. La Follette, Sr. (Progressive Party)
Persondata
NAME Debs, Eugene Victor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES King Debs
SHORT DESCRIPTION U.S. labor and political leader
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH Terre Haute, Indiana, United States
DATE OF DEATH October 20, 1926
PLACE OF DEATH Elmhurst, Illinois, United States