Five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate and pioneer of industrial railroad unionism
At his 1918 sentencing he declared: "While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
The most iconic figure of American socialism and a pioneer of industrial unionism. After leading the American Railway Union through the Pullman Strike of 1894, he embraced Marxism in prison and helped found the Socialist Party of America (1901) and the IWW (1905). He ran for president five times, winning 6.0% in 1912, and from an Atlanta prison cell in 1920 he won over 914,000 votes, the high-water mark of American socialist electoral politics.
Career Timeline
- 1875Joined Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen
- 1880–1893BLF Grand Secretary-Treasurer & magazine editor
- 1885Indiana State Representative (Democrat)
- 1893–1897Founder & president, American Railway Union
- 1901Co-founder, Socialist Party of America
- 1905Founding member, Industrial Workers of the World
- 1900–1920Socialist Party presidential candidate (5 campaigns)
- 1919–1921Imprisoned, Atlanta Federal Penitentiary
Related historical events
Stance on the Russian Revolution and Soviet Russia
Debs enthusiastically welcomed the Russian February and October Revolutions of 1917. In "The Soul of the Russian Revolution," published in The Call in April 1918, he hailed the revolution as "without precedent or parallel in history" and wrote that "the Bolsheviki demanded nothing for themselves they did not demand in the same resolute spirit for the proletariat of all the world." In "The Day of the People" (February 1919), writing in The Class Struggle, which he co-edited with Louis Fraina and Ludwig Lore, Debs made his famous declaration: "From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it," while describing Lenin and Trotsky as "fearless, incorruptible and uncompromising" and denouncing Kerensky and Scheidemann as traitors to the working class.
Lenin reciprocated. At an international socialist meeting in Berne in February 1916, he quoted Debs's anti-war article "Never Be a Soldier" (1915) as evidence of internationalist spirit in the American proletariat. In his "Letter to American Workers" of August 1918, Lenin called Debs "one of the best loved leaders of the American proletariat."
When the Socialist Party split in 1919 and the Communist Party emerged, Debs remained in the Socialist Party but never withdrew his support for Soviet Russia, defending the Bolshevik Revolution even while campaigning from prison in 1920. After his release in December 1921, he actively joined the Friends of Soviet Russia famine-relief campaign, issuing appeals for food and agricultural machinery for the 1921–22 Soviet famine. He also endorsed the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC) in 1922, a venture launched by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to supply tools and machinery for Soviet reconstruction. Debs maintained his admiration for Lenin and his defense of the Soviet Union to the end of his life.