Eugene Victor Debs

American trade unionist, pacifist, and founder of the Socialist Party of America. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on November 5, 1855. Between 1871 and 1883, he was a locomotive fireman on the Terre Haute and Indianapolis Railroad, a wholesale grocery clerk, and a Terre Haute city clerk. In 1885, he was elected to the Indiana legislature for a term.

Very concerned about the rights of workers, he became the secretary and treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen from 1880 to 1893. However, he grew tired of the union's tactics and broke away from them to become founder and president of the American Railway Union in 1893. With Debs in charge, the ARU won many strikes, including a very important one on the Great Northern Railway in 1894. Also in 1894, the ARU pulled a tie-up of the Western roads in protest to the conditions of poorly paid Pullman workers. The Federal government (under Grover Cleveland's orders) broke up the strike and had Debs arrested, charged with conspiracy to committ murder (even though he was a pacifist).

The courts dropped the charges, but Debs wanted his name cleared, so he continued his fight in court. Eventually he was given a sentence of six months in prison for contempt of court. While in Woodstock Jail, he was visited by socialist and fellow pacifist Victor L. Berger, who gave Debs a copy of Karl Marx's work Das Kapital ("Capital"). Having read the book, when released from prison, Debs announced that he had become a socialist.

In 1897, Debs founded the Social Democratic Party (SDP), in order to advance his ideas on socialism. Because of his popularity among the working class, the SDP's membership grew very quickly. In 1900, Debs ran for President for the first time, garnering 87,814 votes. In 1901, the SDP merged with a dissident ("Kangaroo") faction of the older Socialist Labor Party (led by Morris Hilquit) who opposed the policies of SLP leader Daniel DeLeon, forming the Socialist Party of America.

The Socialist Party's first campaign for the Presidency was a ticket of Debs and Benjamin Hanford. This election, the SP captured a total of 402,489 votes, nearly 325,000 more than Debs's previous race. But this would not be Debs's greatest turnout.

In 1905, Debs and other union leaders (including his rival Daniel DeLeon) formed the Industrial Workers of the World, a trade union designed to oppose the more conservative unions of the time. Using the motto "One Big Union", the IWW hoped to unite all the workers of the world in a Marxian revolution of the working class. Unfortunately, many Socialists and unionists opposed the IWW, feeling that it would never gain much support. Debs came to also dislike the IWW because of the anarcho-syndicalist mutation.

During the 1910's, Debs saw the Socialist Party grow all over the US. The party grew to 100,000 members, and thousands of Socialists were elected to local and state offices. The man who had first introduced Debs to socialism, Victor Berger, became the SP's first Congressman. In the 1908 and 1912 Presidential campaigns, Debs continued to see his support increase.

During World War I, Debs was one of the most outspoken opponents of the conflict. Being a pacifist, he felt that the only war he supported was the "world-wide war of social revolution". For this, he was convicted of sedition and put in prison again. From inside his prison cell, he ran his final Presidential campaign. This time, he collected the most votes the Socialist Party would ever get — 900,390. This had a great influence on the left in America.

Though at first Debs supported the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks, he quickly sided with his comrade Victor Berger and opposed the dictatorial style which Lenin ran Russia. This set the stage for the Socialist Party's long-time opposition to Communism.

Debs died in 1926, but was certainly not forgotten. His campaign inspired unionists, socialists, and third parties all the way to the present. With Debs gone, a leadership vacuum was created in the Socialist Party. This space was filled by Norman Thomas, who would be the six-time Presidential candidate of Debs's party.