eugene v. debs
socialist party founder
biography
The only candidate to run for the presidency of the United States from a prison cell, the labor organizer Eugene V. Debs had been sentenced to prison for criticizing the government's prosecution of persons charged with violating the 1917 Espionage Act. It was the fifth time he had run for the presidency on the Socialist ticket. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence; although he was released, he did not regain his citizenship. In his last years, Debs wrote a series of newspaper articles on prison conditions and was editor of the Socialist weekly American Appeal. He also wrote a book, Walls and Bars (1927).
Debs was born in Terre Haute, Ind., on Nov. 5, 1855, the oldest son of immigrant parents from Alsace. He began work at the age of 14 in the railroad shops of Terre Haute and soon became a locomotive fireman. . He left home at 14 to work on the railroad and soon became interested in union activity. In 1875 he helped organize the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. As president of the American Railway Union, he led a successful strike against the Great Northern Railroad in 1894. Two months later he was jailed for his role in a strike against the Chicago Pullman Palace Car Company.
Although he quit railroading in 1874, he became an officer in the local lodge of the struggling Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875. Laboring tirelessly to build the organization, Debs in 1880 became secretary- treasurer of the national Brotherhood and editor of the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine. He also had a promising career in Democratic politics, serving as Terre Haute city clerk (1880–1884) and in the Indiana state legislature (1885–1887). Then the increasingly militant Brotherhood claimed all his efforts.
Within a few years he had become a socialist and a founder of the Socialist Party of America. He was a presidential candidate in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, when he received his highest popular vote about 915,000. He was released from prison in 1921. In 1905 Debs helped found the Industrial Workers of the World, but he soon quit the organization because of its radicalism He died in Elmhurst, Ill., on Oct. 20, 1926.
