Eugene V. Debs: Socialist for President

By H. Wayne Morgan

Eugene V. Debs: Socialist for President, first published in 1962, is a fascinating account of the heady days of American socialism in the early 1900s, the five campaigns of its dogged leader Eugene Debs, and the struggles of the labor movement. Included are 8 pages of illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phocion Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789128680

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EUGENE V. DEBS

Socialist for President

H. WAYNE MORGAN

Eugene V. Debs was originally published in 1962 by Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

Preface 6

Contents 8

I. Eugene V. Debs and the Rise of American Socialism 9

II. The Promise of American Socialism: The Campaign of 1900 22

III. The Rising Tide: The Campaign of 1904 38

IV. Red Special: The Campaign of 1908 50

V. The Harvest Year: The Campaign of 1912 67

VI. American Socialism’s Time of Troubles: 1913-1920 80

VII. Convict Number 9653 for President: The Campaign of 1920 93

VIII. The Final Years: 1921-1926 104

Bibliographical Note 111

Notes to Chapters 113

Illustrations 132

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 141

DEDICATION

• • •

TO

MY MOTHER AND FATHER

• • •

Do you know that all the progress in the whole world’s history has been made by minorities? I have somehow been fortunately all of my life in the minority. I have thought again and again that if I ever find myself in the majority I will know that I have outlived myself. There is something magnificent about having the courage to stand with a few and for a principle and to fight for it without fear or favor, developing all your latent powers, expanding to the proportionate end, rising to your true stature, no matter whose respect you may forfeit as long as you keep your own.

Eugene V. Debs, 1924

Preface

Few Americans today remember a time when the Socialist Party of America was a power of any proportions in politics. They have forgotten or never knew that a scant two generations ago the socialists were the third party of American politics; that they were a considerable force in local and state politics; and that many of the radical policies which they advocated have become standard fixtures in the American system.

In mid-twentieth century, the American socialists have fallen on evil days. The First World War divided the party into quarreling sects which sapped its remaining life and ruined its cohesiveness as an organization. The disillusionment that followed the war, the collapse of progressive sentiment, the frivolity of the 1920’s, the Great Depression and its cure, the New Deal, the Second World War, a permanent cold war—these have served in their separate and collective ways to deaden any popular appeal the once important Socialist Party of America might have had. At the height of its influence in 1912, the party’s presidential candidate polled nearly 6 per cent of the vote in the face of two other powerful liberal vote-getters; forty years later the vote was hardly a courtesy one. In 1912, more than a thousand socialists held elective office; forty years later the number was close to zero.

If the Socialist Party seems to have no future, it at least has a past. No student of American history of the period between 1890 and 1920 can help being struck by the immense quantities of socialist literature printed and distributed. Popular as well as learned magazines before the World War were filled with speculation about the future of socialism. Politicians as well as scholars worried that socialism would invade American society and triumph unless checked. Hundreds if not thousands of leading community men were interested in the theory and often in the practice of socialism, and they sometimes translated that interest into a vote for Eugene Debs between 1900 and 1920.

The history books that extol the campaign exploits of William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson often fail to record that the most famous American socialist, Eugene Victor Debs, waged five presidential campaigns between 1900 and 1920. Historians have failed to exploit the rich body of material left behind in the wake of those campaigns, or to show the extent to which socialist electioneering succeeded or influenced American life.

Whatever success the Socialist Party had in national politics between those years was due in large part to the man who carried the party’s banner. Buoyed up by the waves of protest and reform of those years, Debs shrewdly capitalized on new forces to present his message to hundreds of thousands of Americans during the course of his campaigns. No man gave more to American socialism than he. Despite his romantic sentimentality and lack of profound insight into the forces at work in his time, Debs was a thoroughly practical man, a politician in close touch with the masses.

My purpose in writing this book is to chart the course of the socialists in national politics between 1900 and 1925. I have attempted to write neither a biography of Debs nor a history of American socialism. The socialists employed political methods, and gained successes that are in themselves well worth studying. Aside from the intrinsic interest of socialist politics, the party’s successes proved two things: the mission of minor parties in American history has been to force major parties to accept the least radical portions of their programs; and the socialists succeeded in a free society, a thing which is no small tribute to both the socialists themselves and their opponents. Though suffering much persecution, which ultimately contributed to the party’s demise, the socialists nevertheless worked in a remarkably free atmosphere during their heyday between 1900 and 1912. Their history in American politics is not essentially one of suppression, but of hard work and at least limited success.

I have been assisted in preparing this book by many people and institutions. I wish to thank Mrs. Sylvia Angrist, executrix of the estate of the late Miss Nina Hillquit, for permission to quote from the papers of Morris Hillquit. I wish to thank especially the staffs of the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley; the Tamiment Institute in New York, formerly the Rand School of Social Science; the manuscripts division of the Library of Congress; the newspaper division of the Library of Congress; Miss Mattie Russell and her staff at Duke University; the staff of the Denver Public Library; and Miss Josephine Harper and her staff at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The staffs of the Honnold Library in Claremont, California; the Arizona Pioneer Historical Society in Tucson; and the State Historical Society of Colorado in Denver also gave me their time and cooperation. Portions of this work have appeared in The American Quarterly, Mid-America, and The Indiana Magazine of History, and I am indebted to the editors of those journals for permission to reprint that material here. I wish also to thank Miss Michele Vandersyde of the Syracuse University Press, whose untiring editorial labors have greatly improved the text. For whatever errors may remain, I alone am responsible.

H. WAYNE MORGAN

Austin, Texas

Contents

Preface

I. Eugene V. Debs and the Rise of American Socialism

II. The Promise of American Socialism: The Campaign of 1900

III. The Rising Tide: The Campaign of 1904

IV. Red Special: The Campaign of 1908

V. The Harvest Year: The Campaign of 1912

VI. American Socialism’s Time of Troubles: 1913-1920

VII. Convict Number 9653 for President: The Campaign of 1920

VIII. The Final Years: 1921-1926

Bibliographical Note

Notes to Chapters

Illustrations

I. Eugene V. Debs and the Rise of American Socialism

Liberty, be it known, is for those only who dare strike the blow to secure and retain the priceless boon.—Eugene V. Debs, 1895

The very character and principles of Eugene Victor Debs made a Debs legend inevitable. No man of such warm temperament, colorful personality and unorthodox beliefs could escape becoming a legend in America. Born in the great, frontier Indiana of 1855, he seemed to possess from birth the traces of radicalism that spring so often from that great watershed of discontent. Named after two radical writers favored by his Alsatian father, Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo, the boy seemed destined from the first to follow unorthodox lines.

Terre Haute, Indiana, his birthplace, was then a frontier settlement, a railhead and center for commerce and transport. The veil of memory cast a spell over it for him in later years, when he recalled it as a place of tall sycamores and carefree days. In truth it was muddy and dusty, rutted and ramshackle, populated by as many varieties of men as there were nationalities, a rough western town made rougher by railroad influences.

The railroad’s steel rails symbolized much for the boy, and fascinated him whose future was to be tied so intimately to their expansion and the commerce they carried. Like the railroads, the young Debs grew rapidly in all directions, but chiefly up, until he stood at a lean and gangling six feet, endowed with a winning personality, an amiable charm, and a desire to combat the injustice he saw around him. He made friends easily, was generous to a fault, and even as a young man seemed marked for success in some avenue of public life.

Public life and the glamour of the outside world were far from his youthful thoughts; his first problem was making a living. The boy was drawn to the railroaders like steel filings to a magnet, but his father frowned on such ambitions. The Debs family had followed a long, hard road to respectable middle-class prosperity, and the •elder Debs wanted his sons to make their mark in a profession. He himself had worked at many jobs, and suffered all the tortures and frustrations that beset the immigrant, settling at last to ownership of a small grocery store in Terre Haute. He was a kindly, gentle man, who exercised a great influence on his eldest son. A wide reader and avid social critic, he impressed upon the young Eugene the necessity of understanding the world around him.

Eugene worked for a time in his father’s store, but tired of the routine. The restlessness of adventure was in his blood; the railroad was too close, its whistle too intriguing to allow him to count cookies and measure cloth for housewives. He devoted much of his excess energy to reading, and read widely if not deeply, drinking at the same fountains as his father, filled early with the rhetoric and reasoning of social protest and the romantic view of life. He favored Hugo among the novelists, Robert Ingersoll among the popular philosophers, and action in everything.

Without family approval, he started work on the railroad in 1870, beginning at the bottom of the ladder, working his way up as floor boy, oiler, and finally into the locomotive cab with the firemen and engineers. It was not an easy life even for the lean, hardened young man. Bad weather, poor equipment, erratic schedules and the unforeseen combined with low wages and long hours to make the railroaders a tough group. Drinking, gambling, and the roughest horseplay were their pastimes. The young Debs entered into all of this gladly. He found in the men around him a hard core of principle, a feeling of camaraderie inspired by common hardships, and he greatly admired their courage, sense of honor, and general outlook. He made many lasting friendships, each of which strengthened his belief that men were basically good and that evil was the product of the social system, rather than human nature.

Despite his long hours and grueling schedule, Debs continued to read widely, attended many lectures in Terre Haute and other cities along the railroad, and absorbed much of the radical thought of his day. His mother’s protests, however, finally triumphed over his love for the railroad and he left his job because she feared that he would be killed or maimed, the common lot of many railroaders.

Yet his neighbors marked him for progress. In 1879 he was elected city clerk of Terre Haute with the support of the local political boss, and won a second term in 1881, though the rest of the ticket went down to defeat. If he thought of politics in those days, he thought of himself as a Democrat. The routine of office did not exhaust his energies and he continued his studies and his interests in radical politics and labor affairs. In 1880 he reluctantly became secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and editor of the Firemen’s Magazine. It was no sinecure, for the union was weak, bankrupt, and disorganized. But Debs applied his energies to the task and within a year the debts were paid, membership was growing, and the future seemed bright.

Debs allowed the Democrats to run him for the state legislature in 1884. Thinking that he could help his union followers, and utterly unaware of the political process, he plunged into public life again. In 1885, he maneuvered a bill through the lower house providing that railroads compensate their employees when injured through no fault of their own. The bill died a lingering death in the upper house and the experience was such a shock to Debs that he refused to run for re-election, feeling that he had failed his followers. He turned from party politics and never afterwards had any faith in parliamentary process under the old parties.

His heart was not in politics, however; the union brotherhood claimed it. Throughout the 1880’s he worked steadily to build up the union, devoting time, health, money to the cause. He worked eighteen hours a day, full of idealism as well as the practical belief that he could help his men. At that time he knew little if anything of socialism and was committed to the craft unionism which he vehemently condemned in a few years.

He devoted much of his time to the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, and he learned there a facility of pen and ease of expression which helped him much later. The Debs of 1890 was not the Debs of 1900. His general tenor was that of a Christian moralist, exhorting his readers to improve themselves through sobriety, thrift, self-help, and hard work. He even listed appropriate examples of self-made men for his readers to emulate. When Jay Gould died Debs thought it appropriate to say a few kind words, and pointed out that although Gould had done many bad things, he had treated his men with consideration.

If Debs thought of socialism it was with a negative edge on his mind, dismissing it as a utopian scheme, generally irrelevant to the workers’ present needs. He who would later preach the class struggle as the source of social conflict saw little of it in these years. On the eve of the great depression of 1893, which drastically altered his outlook, he wrote:

We indulge in none of the current vagaries about a conflict between capital and labor. There are capitalists who fight labor; we do not anticipate any diminution of their numbers, but, we do expect to see them checkmated in their schemes of piracy.

Partly because of exhaustion and overwork, Debs repeatedly begged to be released from his work with the union. More significant, however, was his growing conviction that craft unionism was outmoded and that a new and broader system of organization was necessary if labor was to move forward. The cruel Panic of 1893 brought hardship and suffering to thousands and impressed upon Debs the inherent weaknesses and cruelties of the economic system. Before that, however, he had thought of a railroad union based on industrial, not craft, lines; a union to which all railroaders, regardless of their jobs, would be united for a common cause. He saw that unity was the key to success, for if all the railroad workers struck, not just the firemen or switchmen, management would be brought to terms much faster.

From these first thoughts the American Railway Union was born. Joined by many craft unionists and sympathizers who felt the same way, Debs began organizing his one big union. He was astonished by his success, for applications for membership and local charters came in faster than he and his limited staff could handle them. He worked prodigally and successfully through the autumn and winter of 1893, facing opposition from craft unionists and capitalists alike. As the depression deepened, the membership lists grew. In the spring of 1894, the ARU won a sensational strike against James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad without violence and with unity despite blandishments from all sides. The ARU, it seemed, had come to stay, and so had its leader, Eugene V. Debs.

But that was not to be, for 1894 was a cruel year in American history and none felt that cruelty more than the employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company in the model town of Pullman, Illinois. Every aspect of the paternalism sponsored by George Pullman was evident in the town, yet its workers were not happy. Cuts in orders compelled cuts in wages, Mr. Pullman said, and cuts were made. Chicago tensed; labor trouble was in the air. The workers who made the Palace Cars were technically not railroaders, but occupational bonds overrode technical differences and strong ties of sympathy held the two groups together. Finding their conditions intolerable, the Pullman workers finally struck in desperation and called for the support of fellow workers. Debs was invited to investigate the situation, and though he was not inclined to lead his fledgling union into a massive strike, he visited Pullman, Illinois, talked with the workers, and came away convinced that their cause was just. The paternalism of Pullman is the same as the interest of a slave holder in his human chattels. You are striking to avert slavery and degradation, he told the workers.

Strong as his sympathies were, Debs hesitated to join the strike. He knew that a full scale labor war was in the making, that his union was not as strong as it seemed, and that times were hard, which meant that the company could count on strike breakers and government influence. But if he hesitated, his men did not. They took the issue from his hands by voting to join the strike. Reluctantly, Debs agreed, and issued a call for a general strike to the railroad brotherhoods, who declined to join the ARU. In late June, 1894, Chicago prepared for the worst.

From Debs’ point of view, the strike was an immediate success. Trains carrying Pullman cars were sidetracked; little rail traffic moved except mail trains, and the ARU lines held firmly. In a matter of days the greatest strike of the century was firmly entrenched, with remarkably little violence, but with neither side inclined to surrender. The union asked for arbitration, but Pullman gave a classic answer: There is nothing to arbitrate. Debs directed the strike from his Chicago headquarters, enjoining his men to avoid violence, which could only boomerang against them. He was busy, and his tall, balding figure, his rapid stride, and ready handshake were familiar sights to his men as he made his rounds of the strike headquarters.

The company was not idle. Strikebreakers were easy to find because of hard times; special company approved deputy marshals were sworn in to protect railroad property; private detectives watched Debs and other union officials. Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois, already stigmatized by his pardon of the Haymarket anarchists, was notified that state militia might be needed; the governor, for all his sympathies toward labor, was ready to prevent violence and enforce the law.

As the strike wore on into July, tempers flared and tension mounted. A city already filled with the kindling of discontented workers now bore the added danger of a national strike. Pressures were applied from elsewhere as delays in rail shipments affected all parts of the country. Railroad property was destroyed, cars fired, tracks