Photo via Socialist Party of America Papers: A Resource Guide
***
During my Congressional internship in my home state of Oregon this past summer, I noticed my coworker wore a button fastened to their shirt featuring a rather thin-faced bald man that read along its border: For President: Convict No. 9653.
Source: Progressive.org
Intrigued, I inquired into its meaning, to which my colleague proudly responded that it was merchandise from Eugene V. Debs’s 1920 presidential campaign. They explained that Debs ran for the executive office from prison and received millions of votes over multiple campaigns, not as a Democrat or Republican, but as a member of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). I had not hitherto heard of this Eugene Debs character, nor the SPA. My curiosity was piqued!
I soon discovered that the 1920 election was not a flash in the pan—far from it. Though my high school textbooks failed to alert me to the fact, Eugene Debs was a major force behind the 20th century reforms that granted workers many of their present rights, galvanizing and organizing laborers to contend with the entrenched systems of disempowerment. The minimum wage was codified by several state legislatures in his lifetime, while the federal reforms of the New Deal are attributable, in no small part, to his efforts. This poses the question: why is he not more widely remembered?
Before we answer this question, we must understand just who Eugene Debs was, and the social context that inspired his activism. Born in 1855, 39 years before the inaugural Labor Day, ‘Gene’ Debs was reared in Terre Haute, Indiana, amidst the American Industrial Revolution, which brought unprecedented prosperity to the country at the expense of the working class. Innovations such as the steam locomotive created new large-scale infrastructure markets, while the incipient assembly line proved more efficient than artisanry and small shop hand production in the manufacturing of consumer goods. These advances generated demand for cheap unskilled labor, while smiths, journeymen, and sole proprietors were undercut by factories that could produce at a lower cost. Mechanized industry drove large numbers of wage-earners into low-skill, low-paying jobs while executives and shareholders profited tremendously. Class disparities widened in a period that gave rise to a wave of industry captains known as the “Robber Barons,” like Andrew Carnegie of Carnegie Steel and John D. Rockefeller Jr. of Standard Oil. Vertical integration of production and distribution was made possible by the exploitative labor structure that spread across the country in those years.
Debs found employment in the booming railway industry as a fireman, where he worked in harsh conditions for little pay or recognition. In 1875, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF) organized a lodge in Terre Haute, and Debs signed up as a charter member. The BLF was a fraternal, quasi-secret society that predated modern trade unions. The Brotherhood would organize locally to provide mutual support for laborers through insurance and labor-management relations, i.e. the beginnings of collective bargaining. The BLF’s altruistic telos resonated with Debs. “A new purpose entered my life, a fresh force impelled me as I repeated the obligation to serve the ‘brotherhood,’” he later wrote, continuing that he developed “a totally different and far loftier ambition than [he] had ever known before.” The ambition in question was, of course, protecting the dignity and civil liberties of other working people. By 1890, he was the Grand Secretary and Treasurer. In 1893 Debs merged the BLF with other labor organizations to co-found the American Railway Union (ARU). One year later came perhaps the watershed moment in Gene’s career as an organizer: the Pullman Strike of 1894.
The story goes like this: George Pullman founded a ‘company town’ outside Chicago called Pullman, Illinois. “He owned the land, homes, stores,” and in a way, the inhabitants. You see, everyone living in the town worked for the Pullman Company, and their wages were so meager that they were forced into taking out loans from their employer to afford their living expenses, and thus became increasingly indebted to the very company that was supposed to provide them with a living. This disregard for employee wellbeing was characteristic of the industrial era in which businesses, unchecked by regulation, were able to push the limits of employee exploitation. Upon learning of the situation, Debs and the ARU vowed to support the aggrieved workers.
A wildcat strike began on May 11, 1894. A subsequent failed arbitration between Pullman and the ARU exacerbated tension between the parties, and the former sought legal recourse to quell the walkout soon thereafter. In early July, George Pullman filed an injunction against the ARU citing the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which ruled it illegal for any business combination to restrain trade or commerce. On July 3, President S. Grover Cleveland ordered over 10,000 federal troops to move into Chicago and crush the strike. What ensued was brutal state suppression. Soldiers fired into crowds of outgunned workers. Estimates for fatalities range from 25-70, even more were badly injured and hundreds were jailed. Days after the bloody affair, Cleveland established Labor Day as a federal holiday, in part as a symbolic gesture to those who were killed while fighting for workers’ rights. By July 7, Debs and ten other ARU leaders were arrested and later tried and convicted for ‘conspiracy to halt the free flow of mail.’
An in-depth recount of the trial can be found here.
While incarcerated, Debs spent much of his time reading the literary works of Karl Marx and other socialist texts. Upon his release, he merged the ARU with another labor organization, the Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth, to form the Social Democracy of America, a political party, which became the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1901. The stated goal of the SPA was “collective ownership and democratic management” of key economic sectors. If the applied socialist philosophy can be crudely summarised, it is this: A society stratified into upper and lower classes inherently violates the lower-class peoples’ right to self-actualization and consequently precipitates a perpetual class struggle. The call for “collective ownership” of the means of production is rooted in the theory that if an economy is centralized, then goods and profit can be disseminated equitably. The SPA wanted to abolish the class system, which meant rethinking the entire economic framework of American life.
This message appealed, in whole or in part, to a large constituency. The SPA was one of the most successful third-party platforms in modern U.S. history, with two party members elected to the House of Representatives, and many into city and state governments nationwide. Debs himself ran for president five times: in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920. In 1912, he won 901,551 votes, six percent of the popular vote. He was the de-facto face of the labor movement, whose many wins include the establishment of the Department of Labor in 1913, the Wagner Act of 1935, which affirmed workers’ right to organize unions, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a federal minimum wage and eventually a 40-hour week. Though the latter two bills were passed after Debs’s passing, his role in creating and advancing labor advocacy platforms was a fundamental boon to all subsequent efforts.
So why isn’t Debs’s story told every Labor Day? His marginalization within the cultural imaginary can be traced to two causes. The first was the forceful expulsion of the SPA and its offshoot, the American Communist Party (ACP) from the political sphere through a series of Red Scares: panics staged by right-wingers in a concerted effort to halt domestic and international socialist momentum.
In the first half of the 20th century, the United States viewed the rising diplomatic and military threat posed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with concern. The proliferation of Bolshevist socialist ideals via worldwide proletariat uprisings threatened to increase the USSR’s diplomatic and military influence, and the U.S. adopted a zero-tolerance foreign policy of containment to prevent that outcome. Domestically, socialism jeopardized business interests, a subset of the population who had increased their influence in Washington since the Industrial Revolution.
The first Red Scare of the immediate post-WWI period fanned efforts to dismantle the institutions of working-class solidarity, beginning with the Palmer Raids in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1919. A related reaction followed the Second World War. Anti-communist investigations began during the 1930s through the Congressional Dies Committee, but red-baiting came to a head with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade in the 1950’s, perhaps best remembered by the Hollywood Blacklist. The government cracked down on “radical” organized labor groups under the pretense of their members being potential foreign operatives or communist sympathizers. Through force, and subtler methods like propaganda, Debs’s Socialist Party was scapegoated and forced out of the political mainstream.
But despite efforts to snuff out radical-left movements throughout the 20th century, there exists a pantheon of influential modern American activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cesar E. Chavez, and Rosa Parks, suggesting the potential for these stories to live on. This leads to the second potential reason for Debs’s absence in the gallery of leaders: the white-male ethos of the SPA. Unlike with the American Communist Party, which operated largely after Debs’s passing, the Socialist Party was ambivalent regarding the unique plight of African Americans in the class-struggle. Their vision of sweeping reform failed to address pre-existing systematic inequities between white and Black workers. Likewise, while the SPA dedicated resources to aiding feminist movements like the Suffragists, the intersectional oppression experienced by working-class women was also a secondary issue in the party’s hierarchy of values. In short, the SPA was organized by and for the primary benefit of white men, which very well might play a part in its lack of modern-day appreciation.
This advertisement typifies the SPA’s demographic:
Source: Eugene V. Debs | Biography & Facts | Britannica
Notwithstanding the SPA’s narrow political scope, Debs played an indispensable role in the fight for all workers, and his efforts remain visible today. Other progressive movements more aptly addressed the intersectionality between class, race, and gender. Debs, however, was one of the most consequential and effective grassroots political leaders. The vast organizations he shaped, like the ALF, SPA, and unmentioned IWW, didn’t just influence policy-makers, but fundamentally changed the American legal and social landscapes of the wage labor system and employer relations. It is with Debs’s zeal and aptitude that we must rally together in order to effectively address the American system’s present failures.
