On November 22, 1895, an early winter storm brought eight inches of snow to Woodstock, Illinois. During the morning, Gene Debs and his brother, Theodore, borrowed a horse and sleigh to go around town and say goodbye to the local people Gene had met and befriended during his six-month stay in the county jail.
In June, Debs and seven other American Railway Union officers had resumed their punishment for disobeying the federal injunction. All but Debs had left Woodstock in August when their three-month sentences were completed. When Debs walked free, the final curtain would descend on the Pullman crisis.
The small jail extended from the back of Sheriff George Eckert’s home next to the courthouse. The prisoners had taken their meals with him and his family and played football in the backyard. Organizers all, they kept to a strict schedule of exercise, reading, and discussions of the issues facing the labor movement. Debs received hundreds of visitors and was so overwhelmed by the stacks of incoming mail that he had to hire a secretary.
Debs’s wife, Kate, spent time in Woodstock while he was there. Like her husband, she impressed the town’s residents. A reporter noted her “dignified manner and yet with a charming air which attracts a stranger at once.” His account described her “unbounded faith in her famous husband” and observed that she was well read on the subjects pertaining to Gene’s work and could “hold her own remarkably well in a talk on economics.”
In January, Debs had been interviewed by the intrepid New York World reporter Nellie Bly. He told her of his support for women’s rights and said he did not profess any religion except that of the golden rule. She noted his blue eyes and gold-rimmed glasses. “He smiles frequently,” she reported. He told her he had two pets, Fay, an Irish setter, and a canary named Sweetie.
While in jail, Debs assembled a scrapbook of documents related to the Pullman boycott. He wrote to Richard Olney for a copy of his Supreme Court argument. He held no animus against the man who had put him behind bars.
Victor Berger, an Austrian immigrant who had become a leader of the strong socialist movement in Milwaukee, visited Debs at Woodstock. He “delivered the first impassioned message of socialism I had ever heard,” Debs later remembered, “the very first to set the wires humming in my system.” Berger left him a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
Debs soaked up ideas from other books detailing socialist and utopian visions. He also reread the works of his namesakes, Victor Hugo and Eugène Sue. He kept a copy of Shakespeare’s plays handy—he could recite much of Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet from memory. He studied textbooks on rhetoric. His highest ambition, he told Nellie Bly, was to be a great orator.
* * *
At 5:00 p.m. on that snowy November day, a train from Chicago arrived in Woodstock carrying three hundred Debs supporters and a brass band. The band marched around the large town square playing “Annie Laurie,” while Debs devotees “wept and cheered and laughed and cried.” They waved flags, sipped from flasks of whiskey, shouted themselves hoarse. Soon everyone piled back onto the special train with Debs in tow.
GO WILD OVER DEBS, the Tribune reported.
After a raucous two-hour ride to Chicago, they were greeted by a crowd of at least a hundred thousand people packing Union Station and the streets outside. When Debs appeared on the rear platform of the arriving train, pandemonium erupted. The uproar echoed through the train shed. Men gripped by hysteria screamed and beat on their neighbors. They lifted Debs onto their shoulders. Union men and police pushed against the sea of humanity in an effort to clear a way. Debs declined the carriage that awaited him and said he would walk to the auditorium. Under a heavy rain, the band and an enormous crowd followed Debs down Wells Street through the slush.
They reached Battery D Armory on Michigan Avenue, not far from the site of the federal military encampment in Lake Front Park during the summer of the previous year. Every square inch of the auditorium was filled. Messengers bearing congratulatory telegrams had to be handed over the heads of the crowd so they could deliver them to Debs on the podium. Calls for “Debs! Debs! Debs!” rocked the building.
The muckraking journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd introduced the ARU leader as “the most popular man among the real people today.” The man of the hour stood to address the crowd.
“Manifestly, the spirit of ’76 still survives,” Debs intoned to begin his oration. He complained that convicted of no crime he had been jailed in “flagrant violation of the Constitution.” The decision by the Supreme Court had placed every citizen “at the mercy of any prejudiced or malicious federal judge.”
If the plutocrats were ever to reach heaven, he said, they would “wreck every avenue leading to the throne of the infinite” and would “debauch heaven’s supreme court to obtain a decision that the command ‘thou shalt not steal’ is unconstitutional.”
Through his secular sermon, he kept coming back to the theme of liberty. He extolled the freedom guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and promised to every man and woman as a divine birthright.
But though guaranteed, liberty had to be fought for. It was, he said, “for those only who dare strike the blow.”
Only through reliance on a pliant federal judiciary had the railroad managers defeated the men of the American Railway Union united in solidarity with each other. He pointed with scorn to this “exhibition of the debauching power of money which the country had never before beheld.”
“What is to be done?” he asked. Every person had to answer the call. “You cannot do your duty by proxy.” By stepping up to play a role, each man would receive the reward that Debs himself had gained. “Not only will you lose nothing but you will find something of infinite value, and that something will be yourself.”
Workingmen must use the ballot to “rescue American liberties from the power of the vandal horde.” The crowd cheered.
“The people are aroused,” Debs declared. “Agitation, organization and unification are to be the future battle cries of men who will not part with their birthright.”
He ended the speech with a quote from abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell: “He’s true to God who’s true to man.”
* * *
As he headed home to Terre Haute the next day, Debs found his wrist swollen to twice its normal size from the orgy of handshaking. He quickly discovered that the American Railway Union was in trouble. Many locals had been destroyed. In the wake of the strike, the blacklist was depriving ARU members of employment wherever they went.
Debs set off on a speaking tour to help rebuild the union. Although not personally liable for the organization’s $22,000 debt, he took on the moral obligation to make it good. It took him nineteen years to pay off every penny.
Everywhere he traveled, he was shadowed by railroad detectives. At a hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, he held a secret midnight meeting with local organizers in his hotel room. The next day, all of them were fired from their jobs. In Alabama, he signed up 111 new members. The company fired eighteen of them and gave the others ten days to turn in their union cards. And so it went.
Yet Debs insisted the signs were encouraging. He had become the personification of the defiant workingman. Now that the threat of anarchy had receded, many remembered that he had been vilified by the rapacious railroad companies, libeled by the press, and persecuted by an overreaching government. He was the man who had been jailed for his sincere beliefs.
Everywhere he went, he was met with adulation. Every speech drew a crowd. Debs’s sparkling, cutting oratory set fire to the imagination of his listeners. Many vividly recalled their souls leaping in response.
During the 1896 presidential election, Debs backed the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, who merged the Populist and Democratic tickets. Bryan railed against the corporations, whom he called “imperious, arrogant, and compassionless.” He represented the ordinary people who “work-worn and dust-begrimed … make their sad appeal.”
Bryan’s radical ideas were ahead of their time. His emphasis on fair treatment for labor, regulation of business monopolies, and the stabilization of markets for farmers set a path toward the progressive reforms of the coming century, but McKinley beat him handily.
After he saw that Bryan was unable to “blunt the fangs of the money power,” Debs gave up on traditional party politics. “I have been a Democrat all my life,” he said, “and I am ashamed to admit it.”
On January 1, 1897, he declared himself a socialist. Bryan’s defeat proved that the ballot in itself would not emancipate the wage slave. The economic system had become too corrupt, too “cannibalistic, with men set one against another.” The stark issue, he proclaimed, was “Socialism vs. Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity.”
Debs would later promote the story that he had experienced a dramatic conversion to socialism during his time in the Woodstock jail. In fact, he had, step by step, grown more radical over the years.
When the government had intervened to cripple the ARU, Debs began to see that deeper change was required. “In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle,” he would later write, “the class struggle was revealed.” Society itself needed to be remade.
“Money constitutes no proper basis for civilization,” he declared. “The time has come to regenerate society—we are on the verge of a universal change.” It was the faith he would espouse for the rest of his life.
Debs’s socialism was a deeply American creed. He found the principles of community, solidarity, and fairness in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He saw himself as a “revolutionary patriot.” He insisted that the industrial malaise was the result of a counterrevolution fabricated by business interests in the form of corporations. Americans’ independence was in danger of being snuffed out by wage slavery and gross inequality.
The American Railway Union did not regain its feet after the strike. Over the next few years, Debs transformed the organization into the Social Democratic Party, then simply the Socialist Party.
No socialist in American history ever attained the stature of Eugene Debs. During the summer of 1900, he agreed to run for president of the United States under the party’s banner. Socialism, he insisted, was the true patriotism.
People loved to hear him talk. His long orations drew rapt crowds. But on election day, few of his listeners cast their votes for him. He lost resoundingly, even in Terre Haute.
Why was his message applauded, then rejected? For one thing, he underestimated his opponents. The men he called plutocrats were not blind followers of the gospel of capital, but shrewd, adaptable players in the economic arena. Socialists offered a glorious vision; capitalists held out the prospect of a ten-cent raise. Socialists stood on principle; capitalists compromised and curried favor with both major parties. Socialists represented a risky upheaval of the familiar; capitalists enticed the public with luxuries ranging from electric lights to Pullman cars. The nation’s citizens wanted pie, all right, but they didn’t want it in the sky.
Yet many of the ideas promoted by socialists became, over time, quite palatable to American tastes. As the outmoded political shibboleths of the Victorian era faded, programs like unemployment insurance, a government-backed old-age pension, reduced working hours, voting rights for women, and international arbitration to prevent war acquired widespread favor.
Debs’s medicine was too strong for many. “The capitalist politician tells you how intelligent you are to keep you ignorant,” he proclaimed. “I tell you how ignorant you are to make you desire to be intelligent.” Yet he never relinquished hope. He was sure “the whole plutocratic crew” were skating on thin ice. “Socialism is not just a theory,” he insisted, “it is a destiny.”
His voice aroused many. “I heard him speak in San Francisco in 1912,” said the poet Witter Bynner, “and was moved by the kind of appeal he made to his audience; not the appeal of a politician desiring power or corralling votes, but a vivid and humane passion for the betterment of his species.”
For Debs, the Pullman boycott remained the golden moment of solidarity when it seemed that all might be different. He wrote that he was prouder of his participation in the “grandest industrial battle in history … than of any other act of my life.” The vivid experience remained the high point, the peak from which he had glimpsed his own destiny and the future of his country.
“The Debs of fable lighted a fire in the car yards of Chicago,” the essayist Horace Traubel observed. “The Debs of fact lighted an idea in the dangerous shadows of the republic.”
* * *
The 1904 presidential election was a reunion of sorts for veterans of the Pullman upheaval. Debs ran again as a socialist. Both Richard Olney and Nelson Miles made futile attempts to gain the Democratic nod to face Republican incumbent Theodore Roosevelt. The young hero of San Juan Hill easily won the general election. Debs improved his showing from four years earlier, garnering four hundred thousand votes, about 3 percent of the total.
In 1905, working with western miners like Big Bill Haywood, Debs helped found the Industrial Workers of the World, another attempt at a militant, all-inclusive union. The Wobblies welcomed workers of all trades and all races. A delegate at the founding convention said that the Pullman boycott, “in spite of the fact that it apparently ended in Woodstock jail, is not ended yet, but is going on today.”
Debs soon abandoned the IWW. He could not abide the group’s tactic of “direct action,” the type of sabotage and violence that he had always seen as self-defeating for the labor movement. “The American workers are law-abiding,” he said.
He ran for president on the Socialist ticket again in 1908, traveling the country on a train dubbed the Red Special. On one campaign swing he logged nine thousand miles and made 187 speeches in twenty-five days. Children waved red flags in his honor. At a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, fifteen thousand supporters applauded him for more than twenty minutes before they allowed him to speak. He garnered less than 3 percent of the popular tally and no electoral votes. Republican William Howard Taft, who during the strike had hoped that enough men would be killed to make an impression, won the presidency.
Debs was a prophetic socialist. He was never a theorist. He read and studied, but he always found the truth of his beliefs written in the faces of working people. No other radical voice ever rang out so clearly in America. His mission was to convince and inspire. He drove his message home with what to some was fanaticism and to others faith.
For a generation and more, Debs remained what his biographer Nick Salvatore called “the most visible and dynamic opponent of the new corporate order.” He warned audiences that “the world only respects as it is compelled to respect.” Workers had to have regard for themselves first, had to desert the politicians of the major parties, who took them for granted. They had to reject the cozy collaboration with bosses that satisfied the leaders of trade unions.
In 1912, Debs made his fourth run for the White House. There were indications that socialism was finally gaining traction. Backed by Debs’s relentless cheerleading and strategizing, party membership had doubled since 1909 and socialists had become a force in some state and local elections. “Comrades, this is our year,” Debs proclaimed. He received more than nine hundred thousand votes, 6 percent of the total.
It was the high-water mark for socialism in America. Afterward, Debs became a voice crying in the wilderness. In 1916 he ran to represent Terre Haute in Congress. Now nearly sixty-one, he joined the contest with his usual energy, touring the district by automobile. He lost.
* * *
During World War I, political repression swept the country. Socialists began to disappear into American prisons. It became a crime to “willfully utter … any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States.” Debs protested. During a speech in Canton, Ohio, he told listeners that “the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”
It was a principled stand, but an unpopular one. A U.S. attorney had this heresy transcribed by a stenographer and charged Debs with denigrating the war effort. “American institutions are on trial here,” Debs declared in court. A jury convicted him of treason for speaking out.
At his sentencing in September 1918, he summed up his life’s view and shaped an enduring motto. “Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings,” he said. “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” The judge gave him ten years.
Some thought it shameful that members of the same railroad brotherhoods that Debs had helped build forty years earlier now transported him to prison. Debs said he was glad to be carried “by union men, not by scabs, what more could I ask.”
Ten years in a maximum-security prison was hard time for a sixty-three-year-old. “An awful loneliness has gripped me,” he wrote. He later told a biographer that he had yearned for his “beloved little community of Terre Haute, where all were neighbors and friends.” At least the “profit pirates” could not destroy “our sweet and priceless memories.”
During his time in prison, Debs wrote to a friend: “I had a strange dream last night. I was walking by the house where I was born—the house was gone and nothing left but ashes … only ashes—ashes!” He had done so much, inspired so many, yet what had he accomplished that would last? It was, for the indomitable Debs, an uncharacteristic flash of heartbreak.
He was not done. In 1920, he agreed to run one more time for president of the United States. He would campaign as “Convict Number 9653.” He again received more than nine hundred thousand votes from across the country, this time without ever leaving his prison cell. After the election, supporters signed petitions and demonstrated at the White House, urging his release.
In December 1921, the new president, Warren G. Harding, commuted the sentences of Debs and twenty-three other political prisoners. Debs had served two years and eight months. As he walked out of the federal prison in Atlanta on Christmas Day, he heard a familiar, heartening roar. It was the cheering from the twenty-three hundred inmates who had been won over by the friendship, the principled stance, the boundless heart of this man who never lost sight of the tragedy of working people and their longing for dignity.
During the heyday of Debs’s politicking, a Yiddish speaker remembered crowds of Jewish immigrants chanting for “Deps! Deps!” “His words made men cry,” the man noted, “even when they were not fully understood.” Immigrants mounted his picture in their homes. A reporter who watched Debs address a crowd in New Orleans wrote that his listeners did not care so much what he said. “They cared that he cared for them.”
Even a sophisticate like New York journalist Heywood Broun, who dismissed rhetorical excess as bunk, admitted that “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.”
He would not be around much longer. In the spring of 1926, he and Kate took a trip to Bermuda, their first long vacation since their honeymoon forty years earlier. Gene caught a cold on the way home. In September he entered a sanitarium. While he was there, he suffered a heart attack. He died on October 20, 1926, at the age of seventy-one.