American labor organizer, socialist, and five-time Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States; the central figure of the American socialist movement at its early-twentieth-century peak and the historical reference point for every subsequent American politics that has called itself socialist, including Michael Harrington's DSA and, in the twenty-first century, the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855 to Alsatian immigrant shopkeepers; he left school at fourteen to work on the railroads, rose through the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, served a term in the Indiana state legislature as a Democrat, and in 1893 organized the American Railway Union, the first industrial union in the United States — an organization of all railroad workers regardless of craft, in contrast to the narrower trade unions of Samuel Gompers's AFL. In 1894 the ARU took on the Pullman Palace Car Company in the Pullman Strike, a national stoppage broken when Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago; Debs was arrested, tried, and sentenced to six months in the Woodstock, Illinois, jail for violating an injunction. There, by his own later account, he read Marx seriously for the first time and emerged a committed socialist.
From 1900 on he was the national face of American socialism. He ran for president in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920; his 1912 campaign took 6 percent of the popular vote, the high-water mark of the American Socialist Party, and in 1920 he ran from a federal prison cell in Atlanta — Convict No. 9653 — and still received 913,000 votes. The imprisonment was the consequence of a speech he gave in Canton, Ohio, on 16 June 1918 opposing American entry into the First World War; he was prosecuted under the Espionage Act, convicted, and sentenced to ten years. His address to the court at sentencing — "while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free" — is the most often quoted passage in the American socialist tradition. He was released in December 1921 by Warren Harding's commutation.
Debs's socialism was Midwestern, Protestant-inflected (though he was not a churchgoer), and rooted in the labor movement rather than in European Marxist parties; his rhetoric ran to Jefferson and Lincoln as often as to Marx. He died in 1926, broken physically by his imprisonment but unrecanting. His home in Terre Haute is now the Eugene V. Debs Museum.