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Eugene V. Debs

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Eugene Victor Debs was an American union leader, a founding member of the International Labor Union & the Industrial Workers of the World, as well as a candidate for President as a member of the Social Democratic Party in 1900. In 1855, labor leader, reformer, and socialist Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Ind. His formerly Catholic mother did not baptize him. The family living room contained busts of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

When a teacher gave Debs a bible as an academic award, inscribing it, "Read and obey," Debs later called, "I never did either." (New York Call interviews with David Karsner). He dropped out of high school at age 14 to work. By 1870 he had become a fireman on the railroad, attending evening classes at a business college. His labor activism began in 1875. As President of the Occidental Literary Club of Terre Haute, Debs brought "the Great Agnostic" Col. Robert Ingersoll, whom he always revered despite political differences, Susan B. Anthony, and other famous speakers to town. He was elected state representative to the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat in 1884 while continuing his labor activities. 

As editor of the Locomotive Firemen's journal for many years, Debs routinely attacked the church, promoted women's and racial equality, and promoted justice for the poor. "If I were hungry and friendless today, I would rather take my chances with a saloon-keeper than with the average preacher," Debs once said (cited in Eugene V. Debs: A Man Unafraid, 1930, by McAlister Coleman). He saved his strongest denunciations of the Roman Catholic Church for being an anti-democratic, anti-family, authoritarian "political machine.

In June 1893, Debs organized the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union in Chicago, which held a successful 18-day strike against Great Northern Railway the next year. Debs and union leaders were arrested during the Pullman Boycott and Strike of 1894 and sent to jail for contempt of court for six months in 1895. 

An inspired campaigner, Debs ran for President as a candidate of the Socialist Party in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, employing the "Red Special" train to visit America during his 1908 campaign. The irreligious Debs was beloved by many. He was associate editor from 1907-1912 of the Appeal to Reason, a popular weekly published by freethinker E. Haldeman-Julius in Girard, Kansas. In 1918, Debs delivered his famed anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in protest of WWI and was arrested and convicted in federal court under the wartime espionage law. His appeals to the jury and to the court before sentencing went into legal history. 

Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was disenfranchised for life, losing citizenship. While in prison, he was nominated to run for President and conducted his last campaign, winning nearly a million votes. His opponent, Warren G. Harding, commuted Debs' sentence and released him on Dec. 25, 1921. 1,000 fellow Terre Hauteans welcomed Debs upon his return. His imprisonment broke his health, and he died at a sanitarium. The Terre Haute home he built with his wife in 1890 is today a National Historic Landmark of the National Parks Department and a museum.

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Writings of Eugene V. Debs

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