Constitutional Voices: Eugene V. Debs

On November 2, 1920, Convict No. 9653 received nearly one million votes from the American electorate for that year’s presidential election. The candidate was then in the midst of serving a ten-year sentence for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, having been convicted two years earlier for criticisms of America’s involvement in World War I. While he would not defeat Republican candidate Warren Harding, Convict No. 9653—or, as he is more commonly known, Eugene V. Debs—made an indelible mark on American politics and the country’s burgeoning labor movement during his decades of work as a politician and activist.

Eugene Victor Debs was born to Alsatian immigrants Marguerite and Jean Daniel Debs on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana. As a teenager, Debs dropped out of school to take up work for the Vandalia Railroad, earning just 50 cents a day for grueling labor. Beginning as a paint scraper, Debs was promoted to locomotive fireman just two years later. In this role, the young Debs took on the dangerous and demanding work of feeding coal into a train’s firebox to power the steam engine.

This experience at a young age exposed Debs to the precarious position of the American worker during the Gilded Age—a time of extreme wealth for some, while few protections were afforded to the working class. Debs would later recall that from this experience he was “made to feel the wrongs of labor, and from the consciousness of these there also sprang the conviction that one day they would all be righted.”

Debs quit the railroad at his mother’s insistence and took a job at a local wholesale grocer in Terre Haute. But even while working at the store, Debs remained involved in the railroad community. He joined Terre Haute’s branch of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, a trade union founded in 1873. He rose to grand secretary in 1880, and in that role, he threw himself into the unglamorous work of organizing: traveling, writing, and agitating on behalf of workers who had no other voice.

Debs first entered politics in 1879, when he served as Terre Haute’s City Clerk. Several years later, voters sent him to the Indiana General Assembly—an experience he found largely disillusioning, as the machinery of electoral politics seemed poorly suited to the sweeping changes he believed working Americans deserved. The experience was not all negative, however. During his term in the statehouse, he met and married Katherine Metzel, to whom he would remain married for the rest of his life.

In 1893, Debs retired from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen to form his own, more inclusive union: the American Railway Union (ARU). The ARU was open to all white railroad workers regardless of craft or specialty. Debs pushed hard for the inclusion of African Americans in the union’s ranks; however, his motion for integration was overruled by just two votes by the membership. The ARU grew rapidly and within a year had attracted tens of thousands of members across the country.

The ARU and Debs’ position as a national leader would be tested shortly thereafter. In 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company, located in a suburb of Chicago, walked off the job to protest a series of wage cuts. When the CEO, George Pullman, refused to negotiate, the ARU voted to support the strike by refusing to handle any trains carrying Pullman cars. The boycott spread across 27 states and effectively paralyzed the entire railroad system of the western United States. The federal government, at the behest of the railroad owners and Attorney General Richard Olney—himself a former railroad attorney—obtained a sweeping injunction ordering the strike to end. President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops and the strike was crushed.

For his leadership of the ARU, Debs was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to six months at the Woodstock jail in Illinois. He emerged from Woodstock convinced that the working class was not being served by the current political apparatus, and that a third party dedicated to working people was necessary. Debs officially became a socialist in 1897, declaring: “I am for socialism, because I am for humanity.”

Debs first ran for president in 1900, launching a political career that would see him become the Socialist Party’s presidential nominee four more times over the next two decades. Each campaign was less a bid for office than a rolling act of public education; Debs sought to make the language of class, exploitation, and worker solidarity part of mainstream American political conversation. Between campaigns, Debs also edited The Appeal to Reason, the nation ’s largest socialist newspaper.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Socialist Party took a formal stand against the conflict and the draft. The federal government responded aggressively. Under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, hundreds of antiwar protesters were arrested.

On June 16, 1918, Debs traveled to Canton, Ohio, to speak at a socialist rally where he delivered a blistering critique of the war and its costs to working people. Within a week, he had been charged with violating the Espionage Act.

At his trial, Debs declined to mount a traditional legal defense. Instead, he spoke directly to the American people—laying out a sharp indictment of the American government. He argued that the Espionage Act was “a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions.” Debs also used the moment to denounce broader socioeconomic inequalities within the country: “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

Debs was convicted on three counts and sentenced to 10 years in the Atlanta federal penitentiary. When the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes affirmed the lower court, holding that any attempts “to obstruct the recruiting service” to the war effort were unlawful.

It was from that Atlanta prison cell that Debs ran his fifth and final presidential campaign in 1920. Following the election, President Warren Harding commuted Debs’s sentence in 1921, and he returned to Terre Haute for the remainder of his life.

In his five presidential runs, Debs never received more than six percent of the vote. Yet, his influence on American politics goes well beyond the vote totals. His unrelenting message of workers’ rights forced leaders in both major parties to adapt their policies. Throughout the Progressive and New Deal eras, Debs’ once-fringe ideas, such as an eight-hour workday and the abolition of child labor, were enshrined into law. Many of the worker protections that we now take for granted were first advocated for by Debs.

Eugene V. Debs died on October 20, 1926. Following his death, roughly 8,000 people made a pilgrimage to his home in Terre Haute to pay their respects. He was in death, as in life, a man of the people.

Trey Sullivan is a Content Fellow at the National Constitution Center and a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Marshall Scholar.