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WHO WAS EUGENE DEBS?  
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Michael K. Smith
November 14, 2025
CounterPunch
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_ "I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I never so clearly
comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and
exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of
industrial freedom and social justice.” _

Debs while in prison in Woodstock, Illinois, in 1895 – Public
Domain,

 

Zohran Mamdani’s quoting of Eugene Debs in his recent victory speech
(for mayor of New York City) should awaken interest in the man who
gained a name for himself as “Mr. Socialism.”

For seventeen years Debs _was_ the Brotherhood of Locomotive
Firemen, starving himself of sleep to bone up on politics, economics,
and history. With painstaking effort he made himself into a
manager’s worst nightmare: an educated union man who could unravel
the knots of capitalist contradiction, making the need for revolution
plain for all to see.

Unable to ignore workers’ constant pleas for help, he went
everywhere he was called, never managing to get his suitcase unpacked.
In bad years he donated up to $900 of his $1500 salary to keeping the
union and its magazine afloat, steering the workers through strikes,
depression, and looming bankruptcy.

Night after night he went tramping through railroad yards, where his
constant agitation got him thrown out of the roundhouse (a circular
building used for servicing and storing trains) and ejected from
trains.

He became a magnificent popular speaker, eventually making socialism
as American as the Liberty Bell.  He praised the fighting spirit of
the workers and heaped scorn on the mining companies and
“cockroach” small shop capitalists who exploited them.  Even
those who had heard it all before couldn’t resist his spell. When he
rehearsed his speeches at home his neighbors came out onto their
porches to eavesdrop.

By the time he ran for president for in 1904 (the second of five
attempts, the last one from a prison cell), socialism had elbowed its
way onto the national political scene. Schoolteachers warned of its
growing _menace_; workers jammed meeting halls to hear of its
glowing _promise_.

Debs was the unanimous choice to represent the Socialist Party that
year. In the wake of a dizzying spate of corporate mergers, three
hundred firms controlled more than forty percent of the industrial
capital of the country and monopoly quickly emerged as the dominant
issue of the campaign. Selling out auditoriums with paid admissions,
Debs ridiculed Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting schemes for their
failure to realign class power, and scoffed at the notion that a state
dominated by gigantic private corporations could ever alleviate the
workers’ distress: “Government ownership of public utilities means
nothing for labor under capitalist ownership of government,” he
thundered.

With muckraking journalists continuing to expose the profit system’s
massive fraud, waste, and abuse, more and more people inclined to the
belief that capitalism was doomed.

The socialist _Appeal to Reason_ boasted a readership of half a
million, educating a huge mass of farmers, factory-workers, and
railwaymen in the Mid-West alone. Its December anti-trust issue that
year piled up three million advance orders, the largest edition of any
newspaper in American history. In New York City, _The Call_ was a
staple of every working-class neighborhood while red-covered pamphlets
of Marx and socialist brochures circulated in the millions throughout
the country. Teddy Roosevelt warned that socialism was “far more
ominous than any populist or similar movement in times
past.” Radicals and reactionaries alike saw the Socialist Party as
the future opposition party of the United States.

An army of Debs volunteers solicited contributions, rang doorbells,
sold newspapers, talked up strangers, and shouted the political heresy
of justice for workers from soapboxes and courthouse stairs,
delivering four hundred twenty thousand votes for Debs, quadrupling
his support of four years before.

Conceding that charity had a claim on private conscience but
strenuously rejecting any worker entitlement to monopoly profits,
Teddy Roosevelt rode a tsunami of corporate cash to victory at the
polls.

Refusing to be stopped by rheumatism, lumbago, or chronic headaches,
Debs ran for president again in 1908.

Touring the country by train in his “Red Special,” he drew huge
crowds yearning to see the burning eyes of a prophet and feel the glow
of solidarity from a real man of the people. For sixty-five
consecutive days he addressed five to twenty rallies a day all across
the country. The _New York Times_ called his sold-out appearance in
New York’s Hippodrome the greatest political meeting ever held in
that city.

As vulgar smears and incendiary slanders failed to stop the rising
socialist tide, a note of desperation crept into the voices of
Democratic and Republican officials scheming to “Stop Debs.”

Republican William Howard Taft spoke for free at the Music Hall in his
hometown of Cincinnati and could barely fill the seats; Debs charged a
dime admission at the same hall to poor workers and had to turn many
away.

In a spirit of fair competition the socialists proposed that Taft
address their rally for twenty minutes in exchange for Debs speaking
to the Republican audience for the same length of time. The Taft
campaign quickly rejected the offer.

Known among workers as the “father of injunctions” for his success
in quashing strikes by court order, Taft won the White House on the
strength of vast corporate campaign donations via the National
Association of Manufacturers.

Unable to crack the capitalist monopoly of political power, labor’s
influence continued to grow in subsequent years through popular
organizing and education. Finally, in 1917 it was dealt a decisive
blow by Woodrow Wilson, who drafted workers into the industrial
slaughter of modern warfare and sent them into Europe’s killing
fields (WWI). Rejecting appeals to “patriotism,” Debs refused to
go along, and was jailed for obstructing the draft. His speech at
sentencing was a masterful appeal for socialism.*

Given ten years in an Atlanta penitentiary, he befriended all his
fellow inmates, in the end winning over even his jailers with his
unfailing kindness and sincerity.

Only one heart was too hard for him to reach – Woodrow Wilson’s.
In his waning days in the presidency the Great Idealist refused a
customary Christmas pardon for Debs, whose conduct actually lived up
to Wilson’s high-minded rhetoric, which merely rang hollow in the
president’s mouth.

Finally released by Republican Warren Harding on Christmas Day 2021,
Debs enjoyed the rare privilege of being able to say farewell to his
fellow prisoners when the warden waived regulations for the occasion.

As Debs proceeded down the walkway leading away from the jail, a huge
roar went up behind him from two thousand of society’s forgotten and
despised. Turning to say goodbye, Prisoner 9563, who always refused
special privileges and treated them as the men they were, took in the
ovation, tears streaming down his face.

*”Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living
beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the
meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that 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.

“I listened to all that was said in this court in support and
justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I
look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant
conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free
institutions . . . Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am
opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a
fundamental change – but if possible by peaceable and orderly means.
. .

“I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the
factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking
of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their
barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of
their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the
remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons,
there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being
starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased
and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of
Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the
flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and
rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.

“In this country – the most favored beneath the bending skies –
we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material
resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive
machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their
labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman,
and child – and if there are still vast numbers of our people who
are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle
all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their
rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not
the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is
due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought
to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in
the higher interest of all humanity . . . .

“I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this
nation ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all
Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought
to be jointly owned – that industry, the basis of our social life,
instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their
enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically
administered in the interest of all . . .

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man
who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of
hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who
work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched
existence.

“This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my
protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but,
fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others
who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy
the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a
mutual and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a
great economic and political movement that spreads over the face of
all the earth. . . .

“Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize
that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended
as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation
on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial
freedom and social justice.”

– Eugene Debs, 1918

SOURCES

Philip S. Foner, _History of the Labor Movement in the United States,
Vol. 3 _–_The Policies and Practices of the American Federation of
Labor 1900-1909_, International Publishers, 1964) p. 306, 349, 356-7

Joseph Freeman, _An American Testament_ _– a narrative of rebels
and romantics,_ (Farrar & Rinehart, 1936, p. 36)

Ray Ginger, _The Bending Cross_ – _A Biography of Eugene Victor
Debs_, (Rutgers, 1949) p. pps. 226, 230-3, 281-2

Mathew Josephson, _The President Makers_ – _The Culture of
Politics and Leadership in an Age of Enlightenment
1896-1919_ (Harcourt, 1940)pps. 168-9

Louis Adamic, _Dynamite_ – _The Story of Class Violence in
America_,  (Chelsea House, 1958) pps. 128-33

Howard Zinn, _Eugene Debs and the Idea of Socialism, _August 8,
2022, www.rethinkingschools.org [[link removed]]

Debs speech at sentencing quoted from Chris Hedges, _America: The
Farewell Tour_, pps. 107-9

 

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* Eugene Debs
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* socialism
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* Zohran Mamdani
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