Debs was sentenced to six months in prison after encouraging the union to go on strike against the Pullman Company. President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to end the strike. It was at this time that Debs became a socialist. When the Social Democrat Party formed in Indianapolis in , its members nominated Debs as their presidential candidate.
Debs ran for president on the Socialist ticket in , , , , and In , Debs obtained approximately six percent of the total popular vote. In , he received approximately , popular votes, about 3.
Debs was outspoken in his opposition to U. He made numerous speeches on the topic, including in Ohio. A speech that Debs made in Canton, Ohio, resulted in his imprisonment. In this speech, Debs criticized the war by discussing how workers were the ones who always made the greatest sacrifices in times of war. Politically, the IWW was also unattractive to Debs because it opposed political action, including electoral campaigns, something Debs thought necessary to achieve socialism.
Debs soon grew discouraged at the direction taken by the IWW. Hundreds of militants were jailed and foreign-born activists, whether members of the IWW or not, were subject to deportation. After the IWW was effectively gone. Many of its best militants went on to help found the U. Communist Party, but not Debs. Debs was no pacifist though. Long before the First World War, Debs showed his willingness to take up arms in defense of the labor movement.
Nearly twenty years ago the capitalist tyrants put some innocent men to death for standing up for labor. They are now going to try it again. Let them dare! There have been twenty years of revolutionary education, agitation, and organization since the Haymarket tragedy, and if an attempt is made to repeat it, there will be a revolution and I will do all in my power to precipitate it….
If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone and their brothers, a million revolutionists will meet them with guns. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and this the world-wide war of the social revolution. In spite of international splits as well as divisions in the American left, the antiwar movement was vigorous. In , Cleveland saw its biggest-ever May Day parade with banners that denounced the war and the capitalist class.
But the event that agitated the prowar forces the most was the Russian Revolution in October Debs hailed the revolution and urged workers everywhere to follow the example of the best antiwar movement ever. The Canton speech Of the thousands of speeches Debs made in his life, the one in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, , is perhaps his finest. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives. More than an antiwar speech, it indicted the capitalist system in all its aspects, including its two-party system:.
To turn your back on the corrupt Republican Party and the corrupt Democratic Party—the gold-dust lackeys of the ruling class—counts for something. It counts still more You will have to lay its foundations in industrial democracy. He knew that in the audience government stenographers were recording his every word and that he was likely to go to jail.
Debs was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in jail at the age of sixty-three. From prison, Debs, Prisoner , ran as the presidential candidate for the SP. He received nearly , votes. I am not an old man and do not intend to be. I have no time to get old. I have found it. While Debs declined to join the Communist Party, which was formed while he was in jail, he later acknowledged that was probably a mistake.
His loyalty was to the Socialist Party to which he had dedicated his life. Though he admired the party of Lenin, Debs never understood how the Bolshevik Party was built, nor in the end how the SP had evolved into something far from his conception. Eugene V. Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of the earth.
Skip to main content. US Politics and Society. Review by Bill Roberts. Issue 67 : Reviews Share. By Ray Ginger. John Swinton, after observing Debs address a capacity crowd in , wrote in his weekly paper, Debs in Cooper Union reminded me of Lincoln there.
As Ginger sums it up, Debs had come to believe that devotion to the oppressed must be shown by resistance to the oppressors. He drew the following conclusion in a speech to the BLF convention: A strike at the present time signifies anarchy and revolution…Does the Brotherhood encourage strikers?
When Theodore Roosevelt, in , proposed trust busting and public ownership as a solution to curbing the destructive behavior of monopolies, Debs cut to the chase: Every hint at public ownership is now called Socialism, without reference to the fact that there can be no Socialism, and that public ownership means practically nothing, so long as the capitalist class is in control of the national government. His best known formulation of this attitude was delivered in a speech in Detroit in , when he intoned: I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in someone else could lead you out.
More than an antiwar speech, it indicted the capitalist system in all its aspects, including its two-party system: To turn your back on the corrupt Republican Party and the corrupt Democratic Party—the gold-dust lackeys of the ruling class—counts for something. Search form Search. Revolt in the Middle East: Another world is possible. Issue contents. Top story. Ahmed Shawki and Mostafa Omar.
Matt Swagler. Deepa Kumar. Ken Loach. Noam Chomsky. Stuart Easterling. Federico Fuentes. Jeffery R. Black men, closed out of the A. If working on a Pullman car was degrading, it was also, for decades, one of the best jobs available to African-American men. Its perks included safe travel at a time when it was difficult for black people to make their way between any two American cities without threat or harm.
The A. Philip Randolph. The Pullman strike of , one of the single biggest labor actions in American history, stalled trains in twenty-seven states. Pursued by a U.
Attorney General who had long served as a lawyer for the railroads, Debs and other A. The U. He and seven other organizers were sentenced to time behind bars—Debs to six months, the others to three—and served that time in Woodstock, Illinois, in a county jail that was less a prison than a suite of rooms in the back of the elegant two-story Victorian home of the county sheriff, who had his inmates over for supper every night.
Debs: A Graphic Biography. Very little of this is true. He ran the union office out of his cell. He was allowed to leave jail on his honor. While in jail, he turned away overtures from socialists. The people elected Bryan, it was said, but money elected McKinley. On January 1, , writing in the Railway Times , Debs proclaimed himself a socialist. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. For Debs, socialism meant public ownership of the means of production.
It recognizes the equality in men. In , he campaigned in thirty-three states, travelling on a custom train called the Red Special. Debs was too sick to run in Debs spoke out against the war as soon as it began. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.
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