Why was eugene debs important

Debs protested censorship in his opinion columns in socialist newspapers such as Social Revolution , but as the war continued, the government shut down many papers that printed his writing. In May , Congress passed the Sedition Act, further tightening restrictions on dissent. Enraged, Debs set out in June on a new speaking tour of the Midwest. He knew he was courting prosecution, and maybe even welcomed it. He barnstormed Illinois and Indiana, speaking against the war without incident, before he headed to Ohio for the state Socialist convention in Canton.

Before speaking at the convention picnic, Debs visited the nearby Stark County Workhouse, where three Ohio Socialist leaders were serving one-year sentences for opposing the draft. For two hours on the bandstand in Canton, Debs defended imprisoned anti-war activists from accusations of disloyalty. Denouncing the U. Supreme Court for striking down a law against child labor, he declared that socialism would triumph over capitalism. Two weeks later, Debs was walking into a Socialist picnic in Cleveland when U.

He was charged with ten counts of violating the Espionage and Sedition acts during his Canton speech. I abhor war. I would oppose the war if I stood alone. The jury found Debs guilty on three counts, and the judge sentenced him to ten years in prison. Newspaper editorials across the nation cheered his conviction.

Supreme Court, which ruled in that expressing sympathy for men who resisted the draft made Debs himself guilty of the same offense. Debs reported to prison in Moundsville, West Virginia, in April Debs received almost a million votes - six percent of the ballots cast. After four consecutive losing presidential campaigns, in Debs decided to run for an Indiana Congressional seat.

He campaigned on a pacifist platform of American neutrality in the First World War. Once the United States entered the war, Debs was arrested for violating the Espionage Act after making what the district attorney of Canton, Ohio called an anti-war speech in Debs in fact only mentioned the war once, but under this repressive new law, was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary.

Nominated for a fifth time as the Socialist Party's presidential candidate in , Debs campaigned from his jail cell and garnered over a million votes. Despite repeated pleas from Debs' supporters, President Wilson refused to release Debs from prison. President Harding finally ordered him set free on Christmas Day Debs lived until , leaving a legacy best summed up in his own words. Discover the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst who helped bring down gangsters and break up a Nazi spy ring in South America.

He got a raise when he was promoted to fireman, which meant working in the locomotive next to the engineer, shovelling coal into a firebox—as much as two tons an hour, sixteen hours a day, six days a week. If they were lucky, and lived long enough, firemen usually became engineers, which was safer than being a switchman or a brakeman, jobs that involved working on the tracks next to a moving train, or racing across its top, in any weather, at the risk of toppling off and getting run over.

All these men reported to the conductors, who had the top job, and, on trains owned by George Mortimer Pullman, one of the richest men in the United States, all of them—the engineers, the firemen, the brakemen, the switchmen, and even the scrapers—outranked the porters.

Pullman porters were almost always black men, and ex-slaves, and, at the start, were paid nothing except the tips they could earn by bowing before the fancy passengers who could afford the sleeping car, and who liked very much to be served with a shuffle and a grin, Dixie style.

Every man who worked on the American railroad in the last decades of the nineteenth century became, of necessity, a scholar of the relations between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the masters and the slaves, the riders and the ridden upon. No student of this subject is more important to American history than Debs, half man, half myth, who founded the American Railway Union, turned that into the Social Democratic Party, and ran for President of the United States five times, including once from prison.

Debs, who wrote a lot about manliness, always said that the best kind of man was a sand man. He had, though, something of a morbid fear of ashes. In prison—having been sentenced, brutally, to ten years of hard time at the age of sixty-three—he had a nightmare. Debs worked for the railroads a little more than four years. In the wake of the Panic of , he lost his job at Vandalia and tramped to East St. Louis looking for work; then, homesick, he tramped back to Terre Haute, where, in , he took a job as a labor organizer, and, later, as a magazine editor, for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen.

He hung his old scraper on the wall, part relic, part badge, part talisman, of his life as a manual laborer. Debs was a tall man, lanky and rubbery, like a noodle. He had deep-set blue eyes and lost his hair early, and he talked with his hands. When he gave speeches, he leaned toward the crowd, and the veins of his temples bulged.

He was clean-shaven and favored bow ties and sometimes looked lost in crumpled, baggy suits. Crumb character, though not so bedraggled and neurotic. People could listen to him talk for hours. Crowds massed to hear him by the tens of thousands.

But even though Debs lived until , well into the age of archival sound, no one has ever found a recording of his voice. Debs could speak French and German and was raised in the Midwest, so maybe he talked like the Ohio-born Clarence Darrow, with a rasp and a drawl. It is not to be missed.

Debs began his political career as a Democrat. I am as much ashamed of that as I am proud of having gone to jail. At the time, he was opposed to strikes. For a long time, Debs disavowed socialism.

He placed his faith in democracy, the franchise, and the two-party system. For Debs, this was Americanism, a tradition that had begun with the American Revolution. He also spent some time with a pencil, doing sums. Imagine, he wrote in an editorial, that a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt started out with two million dollars—a million from his grandfather and another million from his father.

In , Debs argued for an industrial union, a federation of all the brotherhoods of railroad workers, from brakemen to conductors, as equals.