Debs grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana, the son of lower-middle-class immigrants. At 14, he went to work on the railroads. In 1875, he helped found the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, launching his long career as a labor organizer. His views were far from radical in these early years; for example, he opposed the 1877 railroad strikes. As a Democrat, he was Terre Haute city clerk from 1880 to 1884 and briefly served in the Indiana state legislature. During the 1880s, he came to believe that unions organized by craft left the labor movement unnecessarily fragmented and weakened. In response, he helped found the American Railway Union to unite workers from across the entire industry. After early growth, the ARU waged a disastrously unsuccessful strike against the Pullman Co. in 1894. Federal intervention helped defeat the strike and crush the union, and Debs was sentenced to six months in jail.
In the following years, Debs embraced socialism and set about organizing both an alternative political party and a broad-based union movement. Never an ideologue or theorist, his radicalism grew from an idealistic belief in economic justice and a pragmatic response to the labor movement's setbacks. In 1897, he helped found the Social Democratic Party, which soon merged with another group to form the Socialist Party of America. In 1905, he helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka "the Wobblies"), though he played little role in its later history. He ran for president on the Socialist ticket five times, receiving 900,000 votes in both the 1912 and 1920 elections. In 1920 he campaigned from prison while serving a 10-year sentence for publically opposing U.S. involvement in World War I.
SOURCE: Encyclopedia of American Biography; Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography. |
