Eugene V. Debs was born in 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana, to prosperous French immigrants who owned a textile mill and a meat market. He quit high school at 14 to scrape grease from freight engines for 50 cents a day and later worked as a night fireman. In the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, which focused on insurance and temperance, he was proud that the union never struck and called capital and labor natural friends, and he served as a Democrat in the Indiana General Assembly in the mid-1880s. The failed Burlington strike of 1888 convinced him craft unions could be played against each other, and in 1893 he founded the American Railway Union. In 1894 its members voted to join the Pullman strike against his advice, and their boycott spread across 27 states.
Railroads attached mail cars to Pullman trains, a federal injunction outlawed the strike and President Grover Cleveland sent the Army; 30 strikers died. Defended by Clarence Darrow, Debs served six months in the Woodstock, Illinois jail, where Victor Berger brought him Marx’s Capital and he left a socialist. He helped found the Socialist Party of America in 1901, ran for president in 1900, 1904 and 1908, and took 6 percent in 1912. He co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 but sided with the electoral wing against Bill Haywood’s sabotage faction. A June 1918 antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio brought a 10-year sentence, and in 1920 he won over 914,000 votes from the Atlanta penitentiary. Warren Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921, and Debs died in 1926.
- Pullman cut wages about 28 percent without lowering rents in its company town.
- His trial defense called no witnesses, and he addressed the court for two hours before sentencing.
- Campaign buttons in 1920 bore his inmate number, 9653.
- Woodrow Wilson refused clemency, while Harding received Debs at the White House after his release.
- He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1924, and his Terre Haute home is a National Historic Landmark.
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