What can the history of American socialism tell us about the present and future of democratic politics? The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in socialism, from Bernie Sanders’s runs for president to the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and recently the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor. Each of these figures has had to face the long-standing assumption in American politics that socialists just can’t find traction in the United States. American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs, by former Jacobin editor Shawn Gude, offers an important corrective, illuminating the forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, and the exceptional efforts of his opponents to crush him and his movement. Along the way, the book reveals a deeper truth: that in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism.
From the beginning of the transformation of the United States into an industrial power, the tycoons, politicians, and judges formed the best-funded union in American history, a cartel that used its bottomless collective pocket to divide and conquer workers—all while promoting the myth of rugged individual success. The collusion of corporate and government interests to suppress worker power has been a constant down the decades, from Jay Gould cutting wages and firing union workers in the 1880s; to the Colorado state militia setting ablaze an encampment of strikers’ families in Ludlow in 1914, killing 11 children; and through thousands of more or less bloodily suppressed labor protests in between. Any history of socialist actions—union drives, strikes, demonstrations, political runs—is incomplete without the story of this ferocious, unequal reaction. And it’s vital for an understanding of Debs himself, of how and why a man would hurl himself time and again into the teeth of this enemy.
An elusive, often frustrating hero, Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, to immigrants from Alsace in northeastern France who ran a grocery store catering to their local French community (in other words, they stocked wine). Gene, his four sisters, and baby brother were raised to be skeptical of organized religion and to question American society’s entrenched inequalities. In the overwhelmingly white Midwest of Debs’s childhood, these were primarily economic. The Civil War was a distant roar, but the downturn that followed affected the family finances enough that 14-year-old Gene quit school to work for the railroad—then barreling across the open plains, transforming remote, windswept way stations into smoke-choked cities, home to a brand-new working class.
He began by scraping the grease off the side of trains, then painting the stripes on the engines. At 16, he became a “fireman,” shoveling coal alongside the engineer driving the locomotive—sweaty, strenuous, dangerous work. He lost his job when the railroad boom of the early 1870s crashed and plunged the country into depression, but Debs still identified as a railway man. In early 1875, he became a charter member of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen—a secretive, exclusive fraternity priding itself on “benevolence, sobriety, industry.” These proto-unions supported their “brothers” and families after accidents, although many workers no doubt felt like the man who said, “I would prefer my limb instead.”
As the economy continued to bubble and burst through the late nineteenth century, the vast expansion of the railroads across the country drew in huge numbers of workers, who knew their importance to America’s industrializing project. As an alternative to exclusive craft unions and fraternities, the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia, preached a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” that would welcome everyone, Black and white, male and female, whether they worked in fields or factories, kitchens or coal mines. The Knights emphasized community as much as battle, with picnics, dances, newspapers, and study groups. Their vision of the labor struggle as a shared, joyous culture would, in time, resonate with American socialists, but few leaders grasped how vital that joy really was.
Eugene Debs’s union activism was, by contrast, conservative and cautious. He distanced himself from the strikes that were becoming more frequent, widespread, and violent, and in 1885, at 29, he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives as a Democrat. There, he fought to introduce a bill to make railroad companies liable for worker injuries, only to see it quashed by the business-friendly state Senate. Tired of the compromises, he served out his two-year term quietly, and did not seek reelection. Debs did not really want to govern; he wanted to run, and run, and run.
As his political star rose, Debs began courting Kate Metzel, a friend of his sister’s, who came from a community of politically radical German immigrants. The two married in June 1885. Their relationship rested on shared ideals, but her personality remains shadowy. Few private letters or diaries survive, although Gude suggests, fairly, that their life together did not unfold as either of them expected. They could not have children, and Kate spent much of her mature life at home in Terre Haute caring for her elderly mother and her motherless nephew. She was a rock for her husband as he roamed, but the cost to her own soul is lost to history. For Debs, home and family were “the sustaining element,” as he wrote his sister, giving him the strength to continue his work of lecturing, writing, and travel. But this rosy view ignored the widening rift between his two closest allies, Kate and his devoted younger brother, Theo, each of whom was growing increasingly jealous of the other’s influence over Debs.
His vision was Manichaean: good versus evil, socialism versus capitalism, humanity versus the “reign of gold.”
Gude describes Debs’s conversion to socialism as a “transformation of the soul,” which he declared publicly on New Year’s Day 1897. He had shed the doubts and compromises of his previous organizing, given up the slow work of bargaining for scraps and winning by inches. His vision now was Manichaean: good versus evil, socialism versus capitalism, humanity versus the “reign of gold.” And it was a particularly American vision. As Gude describes it, Debs’s rhetoric fused nationalist and Christian mythology with Marxism, evoking the spirit of Christ and the fire of the abolitionists. It was a brew that appealed to crowds wherever he spoke. The era of political oratory made stars of the unlikeliest speakers, whose photographs or transcripts can barely convey what felt to audiences like an electrical current. Eugene Debs would spend the rest of his life spreading the gospel of this new political religion, and critics and followers alike would frequently compare him to Jesus Christ.
The socialist movement Debs joined contained many factions, and plenty of leaders more pragmatic than Debs, like the more intellectual Victor Berger, who built a solid socialist base in Milwaukee, and was unafraid of compromise for the sake of gaining political power. Nobody in the Socialist Party, however, could challenge Debs’s star power. His first of five runs for president came soon after his conversion, in 1900. On a tiny budget, the candidate had to do the work single-handed, riding the rails for months at a time to lecture to audiences large and small, curious, hostile, and indifferent. In 1908, he traveled from Chicago to the West Coast in a train dubbed the “Red Special,” decked out with flags and snowing the stops with leaflets. The itinerary was relentless. A typical September morning saw him leave Des Moines, Iowa, at 6 a.m. with a schedule of four stops, and four speeches (and at least six more impromptu stops), before the train chugged into Kansas City, Missouri, in the middle of the afternoon, ahead of a speech that evening. Debs was generally blunt about his purpose: to spread the socialist gospel, not to actually make it to the White House.
In those early years of the new century, the makeup of the country’s workforce changed dramatically, and horrors of industrial labor and living conditions—especially the employment of children—became a widespread concern. Middle-class Americans began to press for regulation and government intervention, for reform within the system. To Debs’s disgust, the bombastic Teddy Roosevelt attracted their attention and votes as a Progressive, despite his coziness with big business. His popularity showed that capitalism had left behind its most rampant phase and was now having to engage in public relations.
Yet the promise of reform did little to cool labor energies in the new century. Strikes became bigger and bolder, from the mines of Minnesota to the garment factories of New York City, and the militant rhetoric of the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, founded in 1905, spooked the plutocrats into fierce reprisals. For a brief moment there was an alliance, under the banner of socialism, between well-heeled, reform-minded Americans and fiery rebel workers—potently symbolized by the marriage of WASP millionaire J.G. Phelps Stokes to activist Rose Pastor, a Jewish immigrant cigar worker who became famous as the Lower East Side’s answer to Cinderella. It all pushed Debs and the socialists to the crest of a wave in 1912, the year they garnered almost a million votes for the presidency.
Debs was proud that “the Socialist Party was the first party to make the political discovery woman is a human being,” and he was a staunch supporter of women’s autonomy, from their right to vote to their freedom to access birth control. Yet he did not fully grasp the connection between capitalism and patriarchy drawn by activists like Rose Pastor Stokes, the IWW’s teenage star Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and flame-haired Kansas speaker Kate Richards O’Hare, who appear here in brief cameos. It was one thing to fight for higher wages, and quite another for those wages to depend on granting a factory foreman access to your body. (According to Gude, among the abuses that sparked a 1909 walkout at the Pressed Steel car plant in Pennsylvania was a system in which workers had to offer up their wives and daughters as bribes to keep their jobs.) Socialist feminists went further, however, in showing how sexual coercion on the job reflected patriarchal dominance in society at large. Was Debs, with his habit of visiting brothels during his long stretches living away from home, and his emotional dependence on women who were not his wife, really capable of understanding what socialism meant to women? How far was he willing to share power with them—or anyone?
Early in his career, Debs moved cautiously on what was known as the “race question,” seeing it, as many Northerners did, as a Southern problem, and one that class solidarity would in time solve naturally. But the brutalities of Jim Crow disillusioned him, and by the time The Birth of a Nation was enthralling white audiences across the country in 1915, he was spitting blood. In a letter protesting the film’s racist distortions of history, he went so far as to call out the sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women, writing that, if truly told, Black history “would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning” than those in the film. His outrage was so rare that it was reprinted in a number of Black newspapers, and put him in contact with the rising new generation of “New Negro” activists in Harlem. Gude argues persuasively that this is where the energy and the optimism of socialism migrated after Debs’s death, smack in the middle of the rip-roaring capitalist ’20s—to Harlem, and then into the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Debs understood capitalism as a scourge that reached beyond America’s borders. He railed against U.S. empire-building and warmongering abroad, whether in Cuba in 1898 or in Mexico in 1914, when President Wilson sent troops, as Debs put it, to die “fighting for Rockefeller and his class.” That was April. By late summer, what was then called the European War had engulfed the foreign policy agenda. Debs joined the chorus protesting “preparedness,” the military buildup that was the pet cause of his old adversary Teddy Roosevelt. But when Wilson, reelected as the peace candidate in 1916, swept the United States into the war the following spring, the repercussions for protesters and leftists were immediate, and crushing. The Espionage Act criminalized dissent, while vigilantes calling themselves the American Protective League hauled off suspected draft dodgers in unmarked vans. The battered IWW was broken, and the thriving socialist press abruptly silenced.
In June 1918, Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, in defense of socialism. He denounced war in general as a tool of the oppressors, and urged the crowd to remember that they were human beings, with minds and souls to develop, not wage slaves or cannon fodder. Two weeks later, the 62-year-old was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1920, two years after the end of the war, he mounted his fifth and final presidential run from his Atlanta prison cell. After President Harding commuted his sentence the day before Christmas in 1921, Debs used his experience of incarceration to write about the horrors of the prison system, especially the way it robbed poor Black boys of their future. But his health was shot, and less than five years after his release, America’s leading socialist died at the age of 70.
Almost immediately, arguments over his legacy began. His ability to inspire listeners in every corner of the country, to connect and convince them that he cared about them and had a balm for their pain, was powerful, but fundamentally at odds with the movement’s democratic ethos. Debs himself worried that socialism could not grow by following a powerful leader, but at the same time he wasn’t willing to give up the spotlight. There was always another audience.
Gude grapples throughout his book with this contradiction in Debs, the grandiose visionary and the man who craved constant affirmation, and whose heavy drinking at times meant that he needed a junior party member to get him to the stage on time. After a failed run for Congress in 1916, he plunged into an emotional affair with a married woman several years his junior, with whom he exchanged passionate letters up until the end of his life. In his final years, he embraced alternative health therapies and wrote enthusiastically to his brother from one sanitarium of the powers of such wellness cures as cold plunges, touching grass, and avoiding processed foods. These human peculiarities of Debs resist a clear narrative, and apparently did nothing to undermine his followers’ faith. He didn’t connect with people by confessing his own failings, but clearly his flaws helped him toward his spirit of nonjudgmental humanism, which allowed him to meet his fellow human beings where and how they were.
For all his wide knowledge across the vast range of American working lives, Eugene Debs was a Midwesterner at heart, and his politics belonged to Terre Haute, a small town under a big sky, rather than socialism’s urban hotbeds, Chicago or New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York isn’t explained by Debs, although he quoted him in his inauguration speech (“I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity”). There’s perhaps a more pertinent line of inheritance from the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee, who proudly got their name by installing a sewer system in the sanitation-deprived town, to Mamdani’s equally unglamorous, useful project of filling potholes across the city. Action, not oratory.
The international socialists who inspired Debs at the start of his conversion were wildly excited at the prospects for American labor. How far might a nation go that had no kings to depose, no entrenched hierarchies to uproot, a country so young and iconoclastic and resource-rich? It was a disillusion as brutal as the mines and the mills, to see how powerful the pushback would be. The promise of American socialism is still unfulfilled, but this is a country in which almost anything can be resisted, rethought, and reinvented. Even politics. Even capitalism. Perhaps the story of Eugene Debs, told as meticulously as this, shows us that reinvention will not come from a single leader, no matter how inspiring, but from the collective resistance, and joyful community, of ordinary people.
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