Eugene V. Debs

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was the founder of the Socialist Party of America, a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World and a noted public speaker, labour organizer and journalist in the interest of progressive causes. He stood for president on five different occasions, receiving as many as 915,000 votes for the 1920 election when he was at the time, uniquely, incarcerated in Atlanta Prison after receiving a ten year sentence for speaking against the First World War and the USA’s involvement with it. One of his slogans was, in part: “When bosses rule the world no more, we’ll need no wars to save it.” He and his supporters consoled themselves with the fact that, although there was never much prospect of electoral success, other candidates from the big two parties were willing to adopt policies promoted by the Socialist Party for their own. This was especially true of Teddy Roosevelt.

As a young man, Debs dropped out of school at 14 and then started work as a locomotive engineer. In common with many radical thinkers, much of his education came late in life through personal study and attending community college. His politics were formed as a result of his time with organizing labour, particularly in connection with the Strike against the Great Northern Railroad of April, 1894. The railroad companies had been awarded enormous power, land and political power by successive administrations and had grown accustomed to running roughshod over the interests of their workers, happily turning to violence to suppress any opposition to their exploitative management styles. To stand up to these bosses was an extraordinarily brave thing to do and, despite the success of the strike, which achieved all of its goals, Debs was personally persecuted with a prison sentence for his rail in the subsequent Chicago Pullman Palace Company Strike of 1895. These events brought about a change in Debs’s thinking, in which Marxist thought became a stronger strand, leading him to believe that only a radical change from the existing political structure could result in conditions of greater equality and justice for working people and that there was a need for the working people’s of every country in the world to unite in their struggle against their class enemies. These features were present in the foundation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which was a labour union devoted to internationalism, anti-racism and anti-sexism and which turned any confrontation with the representative of the bosses into an opportunity to bring down the existing political structure – Debs soon withdrew from the IWW because of disagreements with some of these very radical positions.

In general, Eugene Debs worked most effectively on a personal or one-to-one basis and was apparently a man of great persuasive powers and character. Many of the achievements achieved in such difficult circumstances for the American working classes (and rolled back by the repressive Reagan and Bush administrations, among others) are evidence of his hard work and success.

More information on Eugene Debs is provided at the very informative website here.