The Other Felon
A century ago, the Eugene Debs got millions of votes for president—some while in prison
It almost seems like a contradiction in terms now, but the labor leader Eugene Debs belonged to what was once a hardy species in American life: the patriotic socialist. Born in 1855, the child of French immigrants who grew up in Indiana and founded a grocery store, Debs and his brother Theodore had an idyllic Midwestern childhood of the kind Abraham Lincoln would approve. When he completed his schooling, Debs went to work in the exciting new railroad industry—as a paint scraper. When he lost his job in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, Debs returned home and went into the grocery business. But his attachment to the fraternal world of railroad workers led him to join the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, a labor union, in 1875. Even as he took on more responsibility at work and for the Brotherhood, Debs also found time to dabble in politics, winning an election to a city clerk position and later becoming a member of the Indiana legislature as a Democrat. He married Katherine Metzel 1885. The two, who were often separated by Debs’ incessant travels, had no children.
Gradually—just how gradually is a little hard to gauge—Debs began moving to the left. Restless with the political process, he gave up his city clerkship and legislative seat and focused most of his energy on the Brotherhood. Like many of his fellow Americans, Debs was troubled by what he saw as the increasingly rapacious American business community, ever more removed from local ties and ever more concerned with shareholders than workers. But his response was somewhat different than many of his peers in the labor movement—and even his own union. While organizations such as the American Federation of Labor placed great emphasis on the effectiveness of tightly organized unions centered on skilled workers in particular crafts (like, say, train engineers or metal workers), Debs cast his lot with unions that united workers across craft lines in entire industries—an organization of all railroad workers rather than loosely affiliated ones of, say, firemen or engineers, whose cooperation was uncertain at best. In June 1893 he helped found the American Railway Union, of which he was elected president.
The following year, Debs found himself at the center of one of the largest labor conflagrations in American history: the Pullman Strike of 1894. George Pullman was the Elon Musk of his time, a man who became immensely rich by building luxury railway cars for those wealthy enough to own one. He founded the company town in his name (it’s now a neighborhood in Chicago) where he owned everything from the homes his employees rented to the stores where they shopped. This was fine until the Panic of 1893, when he raised prices and cut wages, leading to a walkout that exploded nationally under Debs’s leadership. Pullman and his allies pulled strings and got Debs arrested on the basis that the strike was interfering with the delivery of the U.S. mail. He was convicted and served six months in prison.
For Debs, the Pullman affair was a watershed event. “There was delivered, from wholly unexpected quarters, a swift succession of blows that blinded me for an instant and then opened wide my eyes—and in that gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rife the class struggle was revealed,” he would later explain in characteristically theatrical language. (One affinity Debs did not have with Lincoln was a gift for hard, lean prose.) But Debs always cast his militancy in terms of patriotism: he was upholding the honor of American workers against greedy capitalists with no loyalty to the people.
Over the course of the next two decades, Debs threw himself headlong into political work, navigating his way through an often-confusing maze of internecine battles between competing socialist factions, unions, and their relations with each other. In 1905, he became a Founding Father of the International Workers of the World, also known as “the Wobblies,” perhaps the most militant union this country has ever seen. After backing the prairie populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896, Debs himself became the Socialist Party candidate in 1904 and the ensuing two elections. His political clout crested in 1912, when he received almost a million votes in a four-man field that included Woodrow Wilson (who won), Theodore Roosevelt (the former president now a renegade Republican running in the “Bull Moose” Party), and the incumbent, Republican William Howard Taft.
Significantly, the three candidates who ran ahead of Debs in 1912 all called themselves Progressives. Defining what Progressivism actually means is something that has bedeviled generations of historians. It nevertheless seems safe to say the movement was more about reform than revolution, more about expertise than equality, and more top-down in its approach than bottom-up. (Sound familiar?) Progressives agreed with Debs that there was something seriously wrong in American life that needed to be changed. But Debs wanted to go a good deal further than they did, and suspected that people like Roosevelt, a child of hereditary privilege, were more interested in preserving their own prerogatives than really understanding, and helping, ordinary working people.
Though never a principal player, Debs was nevertheless an important and popular one in these debates, a reference point even for those who disagreed with him. A man labeled a radical subversive in much of the mass media during the Pullman strike, he was nevertheless greeted in Chicago by one of the most remarkable demonstrations in the history of the city upon his release from prison in 1895. His train tour in 1908 on the “Red Special” attracted sustained national attention, something he would continue to draw for the next decade.
The final act of Debs’s career was his vocal opposition to U.S. involvement in the First World War, something his critics regarded as kooky at best and traitorous at worst. (His position looks a lot more reasonable in retrospect.) Debs was once again arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. He ran for president again in 1920, and as in 1912, got almost a million votes.
Through it all, he remained a deeply beloved figure who seemed to embody what was best in his country. “Is that Debs?” a working-class Irish woman reputedly once asked of a speaker during a Socialist Party rally during the presidential campaign of 1908. “Oh no, that ain’t Debs,” another Irishwoman replied. “When Debs comes out you’ll think it’s Jesus Christ.”
This is true even of those who rejected his ideas. “While the overwhelming majority of the people here are opposed to the social and economic theories of Mr. Debs, there isn’t perhaps a single man in this city who enjoys to a greater degree than Mr. Debs the affection, love and profound respect of the entire community,” James Lyons, the mayor of Debs’ hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana wrote in 1907. Out-of-towners were similarly impressed. “I’m told that even those speeches of his which seem to any reader indifferent stuff, took on a vitality from his presence,” journalist Heywood Broun reported in the 1920s. As one observer told Broun, “That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that’s not the funniest part of it. As long as he’s around I believe it myself.”
One person who was decidedly not a Debs fan: Woodrow Wilson, whose increasingly repressive administration—led by tyrannical figures such as Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, a the dawn of his career at what became the FBI—got him jailed. Despite a good deal of lobbying, Wilson resolutely refused to free Debs. “I’ll never consent to the pardon of this man,” he said at the end of his presidential term in 1921, when Wilson, himself a sick and broken man, was at the nadir of his popularity. “This man was a traitor to his country, and he will never be pardoned during my administration.”
His successor felt differently. Most historians agree Warren Harding was one of the most corrupt presidents in American history—and one of its most good-natured men. A Republican at the behest of arch-capitalists, he nevertheless lacked the vindictiveness of Wilson. Harding arranged for Debs to come to Washington for an interview in March 1921, the month he came into office. The president planned to pardon Debs on July 4; when informed this would cause an uproar among his supporters, Harding waited until Christmas. Debs had served about two-and-a-half years of his ten-year sentence (he permanently lost his citizenship). Twenty-three hundred inmates gathered at the gates of the prison to cheer him as he left in tears. On the way to the train for another meeting with Harding, Debs took the $5 bill given to every freed prisoner out of his wallet and sent it off to the committee of activists working for the release of Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who were tried, convicted, and ultimately executed for murder under highly dubious legal proceedings. Debs died in 1926.
Of course, it matters what you go to jail for. Martin Luther King Jr.’s many arrests were badges of honor. Many of those who voted for Debs regarded him as a great American because he was a convicted felon who had a lifetime dedication to something larger than himself. Those inclined to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 would do well to consider what, and, in the end, who he finally represents.