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Eugene Debs, the presidential candidate who ran his campaign from prison
Here’s everything you need to know about Eugene Debs, the man who fought for the people... from prison.
Five-time United States Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, Eugene Debs had a truly wild life in politics.
It was in Indiana in 1855 when Eugene Victor Debs was born to Jean Daniel and Marguerite Mari Bettrich Debs. ‘Gene’, as he was known, had quite a comfortable upbringing, with his father working as a successful textile mill and meat market owner. Young Gene had various jobs after dropping out of school at 14, including being a fireman, railroad vehicle cleaner and grocery store worker.
It was as a locomotive fireman that Debs' passion for the working class began to grow. In 1875, at just 20-years-old and now with a passion for workers' rights, he helped organise the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, effectively a union, of which he was elected national secretary and treasurer five years later.
The Encyclopaedia Brittanica writes that Debs “advocated the organisation of labour by industry rather than by craft” and, seeing the power in numbers, unsuccessfully “tried to unite the various railroad brotherhoods of his day”.
In 1893 the newly established American Railway Union elected a spirited Debs as president, and the promising hopeful, amazingly, managed to unite railway workers from different crafts into the first industrial union in the United States. Now a prominent voice when it came to workers' rights, Debs made the national headlines when the ARU conducted a successful strike for higher wages against the Great Northern Railway in April 1894.
Such success saw another strike come around in 1894. Known as the Pullman Strike after the railroad vehicle company, government troops were deployed by the State and the movement saw Debs sent to jail for 6 months. The brief but fiery light of the ARU was put out.
Debs was sent to Woodstock prison where he began to take a firmer interest in politics in general. Reading saw him take a strong opposition to capitalist ways of life, and Gene grew increasingly critical of traditional political and economic concepts that did not benefit the working classes.
A popular prisoner, he was released from jail after 6 months to cheers from his inmates. Debs, now a known figure in the workers' struggle and prominent public speaker with a talent for rallying large numbers, labelled himself as a socialist. It was here when he started the Socialist Party of America, for which he was their presidential candidate in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920.
The latter year saw Debs receive his highest ever popular vote, around 915,000. What is ironic is that Debs was serving a prison sentence at the time for having made the following speech, protesting against World War 1:
“The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. If war is right, let it be declared by the people – you, who have your lives to lose”
He was released by Presidential order under Warren G. Harding in 1921, but the horrible conditions inside had already hugely affected his health. After being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his protests against The Great War, Debs died of heart failure on October 20, 1926, at the age of 70.