Debs first experience in politics was as a young man in Terre Haute, as City Clerk, where he served two terms beginning in 1879. In 1894, he ran successfully as a Democrat to represent Terre Haute in the Indiana General Assembly. History considers the 1885 State Assembly a productive legislature, but Debs did not see it that way and chose not to run for another term. By this time his official duties in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen were demanding much of his time and energy, and the labor movement seemed to Debs to be a promising way to the achievement of his reformist goals.

The experience of the Pullman Strike taught Debs that major changes were necessary in our laws if workers’ rights were to be advanced, so after his release from Woodstock his efforts were turned more to the political arena. He eventualy alligned with the American Socialist Party and ran five times as the party’s Presidential candidate.

1894 – The Pullman Strike   “In the 1880s George Pullman built the town of Pullman near Lake Calumet to manufacture his famous railway sleeping cars. All buildings in the town were company owned and rented to workers, churches and stores. The town and surrounding areas were annexed to Chicago in 1889.

The company cut wages a number of times in the 1880s and '90s, but failed to reduce the rent in the company owned housing. This double squeeze lead to dire economic circumstances for the workers. Workers struck the car works May 11, 1894. By late June sympathetic railway workers had agreed to boycott trains carrying Pullman cars nationwide. Federal troops were called in to keep the trains moving and to break the strike, prompting violence and looting in Chicago. With the arrest of the leaders in Chicago, the strike collapsed, and workers returned August 2, 1894.

This strike is widely regarded as being pivotal in labor history. Issues raised included a national rail strike, the use of federal troops and company towns.”

We have repeatedly seen how working people have been treated and how the use of political force, via troops, have been used to control any efforts by workers to gain fair treatment. Big Capitalist Corporations always seek to maximize profit any way they can. This truly is unregulated Capitalism. We are moving toward a similar situation today as Corporate Politicians, appointed judges and administrators reverse or remove laws set in place to protect working people.

Debs progressive idealism showed itself in his political activities. As city clerk he shocked the morality of citizens by refusing to assess fines on prostitutes since the police were not bringing in the pimps or the business men customers of the women of this illicit trade. In the Socialist Party, Debs was not one for the intra-party squables and personal rivalries which often split the party. Debs was the idea man and the great communicator, the never-tiring campaigner and spell-binding orator. He was great at mixing and touching, or in setting down and persuading on a one to one basis. Through the first two decades of the 20th century, the Socialist Party was split over power struggles and differences of opinions, but always united in supporting Debs as its Presidential candidate and leading symbol.

During these campaigns the Socialist Party put a number of issues on the national agenda and advanced perhaps by decades the legislation which achieved a number of objectives for working class America. The list includes giving women the right to vote. (Large numbers of Debs supporters were women) It includes legislation restricting child labor, and protecting workers’ rights to join unions and when necessary to strike. It would also include workplace safety, on the railroads and in the mines and factories.

There has been a tireless campaign to turn people off to the very word Socialism. From the Corporate perspective, anything having to do with any profit going somewhere other than the pockets of the wealthy is portrayed as bad. Socialistic. Liberal. Baaaaad!

Eugene Debs and the Idea of Socialism  Excerpted. By howard Zinn   When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1989, we heard a constant refrain in the press and from the mouths of politicians, that socialism had been discredited, and capitalism was the wave of the future. I was annoyed by the way Stalinism was mistaken for socialism, and wanted to recapture that idea of socialism which had inspired millions of people in this country before the Bolshevik revolution ever existed. No one represented that idea more eloquently than the socialist leader Eugene Debs.

Sam Moore, a fellow inmate of the Atlanta penitentiary, where Debs was imprisoned for opposing the first world war, told, years later, how he felt as Debs was about to be released on Christmas Day 1921: "As miserable as I was, I would defy fate with all its cruelty as long as Debs held my hand, and I was the most miserably happiest man on earth when I knew he was going home Christmas."

Debs had won the hearts of his fellow prisoners in Atlanta. He had fought for them in a hundred ways, and refused any special privileges for himself. That day of Debs' release from Atlanta prison, the warden ignored prison regulations and opened every cellblock to allow over two thousand inmates to mass in front of the main jail building to say goodbye to Eugene Debs. As he started down the walkway from the prison, a roar went up and he turned, tears streaming down his face, and stretched out his arms to the other prisoners.

This was not his first prison experience. In 1894, not yet a Socialist, but an organizer of railroad workers in the American Railway Union, he had led a nationwide boycott of the railroads in support of the striking workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company. . . . Debs was jailed for violating a court injunction prohibiting him from doing or saying anything to carry on the strike. In court, he denied he was a socialist, but during his six months in prison he read socialist literature, and the events of the strike took on a deeper meaning. He wrote later: "I was to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of conflict...in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed...." 

We have to think for ourselves. We can’t sit back and let Corporate propaganda train us and our kids to vote and work against our own self interest. There are many forms of Capitalism and Socialism. Carried to extremes, both are bad.

So, what is the truth here? What is happening today with the Neo-conservative movement? Why are unions slowly becoming irrelevant? What can we do in the face of the tyranny of evil men?

Debs was a tireless campaigner, but the pshysical demands of a presidential campaign were excessive. With no radio and television spots, and with little sympathetic coverage of Progressive, Third Party causes, there was no alternative but to travel incessantly, one city or whistle-stop at a time, in searing heat or numbing cold, before crowds large or small, in whatever hall, park or train station where a crowd could be assembled.

Not likely anyone else had television spots back then! But the point is made. Those who espouse Corporate Values and Ideals have it all. Those who don’t, don’t. Look at our political situation today at the National level. We have Neo-conservatives or 'new conservatives' who are devout followers of Corporate Greed and Corporate Democrats who are pretty much the same. We must change this. The history of the Labor Movement is about changing this.

Different from the fury of the campaign trail during these years was his guest editorials for Appeal to Reason. Published in Girard, Kansas, Debs forceful journalism worked wonders for this progressive weekly as it had done earlier for Locomotive Firemens Magazine. Debs popularity built the readership of Appeal to as much as a million readers, and spread progressive, Socialist ideas to a readership coming from all walks of life and all social strata.

Debs of course wanted a good vote count, but he saw his presidential campaigns also as educational and his real concern was to spread awareness of his vision of a better society, where justice, fraternity and equality would prevail. Debs ran in 1900,1904,1908,1912 and 1920, the last race from Atlanta Prison. The slogan on a campaign poster in 1920 read: “From Atlanta Prison to the Whitehouse, 1920,” and a popular campaign button showed Debs in prison garb, standing outside the prison gates, with the caption: “For President Convict No. 9653, Debs received nearly one million votes that year!

Howard Zinn    Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio in support of the men and women in jail for opposing the war. He told his listeners: "Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles." He was found guilty, and sentenced to ten years in prison by a judge who denounced those "who would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in defending herself against a foreign and brutal power."

In court, Debs had refused to call any witnesses, declaring: "I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone." . . . "While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Picture of Bush talking about the hurricane. But the headline fits his entire administration and policies.

This is America, remember. Free speech and all that. Recall how those who questioned the Iraq war had their patriatism questioned? Now, people who did not want to know are being forced to realize we went to war based on a pack of lies. Follow the money. Good young men and women have died so the likes of Haliburton can make a buck. Corporations are still the same today as they were yesterday. If we don’t regulate and control them, they will regulate and control us.

Perhaps the most colorful campaign was in 1908, when Debs used the Red Special Train to whistle-stop the country. There also was a Red Special Band. Debs spoke from the train to enthusiastic crowds dozens of times a day as he toured the country. Political campaigns before television generated interesting and sometimes novel memorabelia. A 1912 almanac (calendar) printed by the Socialist Party has the months of the year bordered by quotes from Debs such as “I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it, than for what I don’t want and get it.”

The measure of Debs and the Socialist Party is not in vote counts alone. A cartoon from the same 1912 campaign portrays the competition for progressive ideas by the parties, ideas such as voting rights for women, restrictions on child labor, and workers’ right to organize unions. It is highly doubtful if the Republicans and Democratics would have been giving at least lip service to such progressive ideas as early as 1912 had not the Socialists been popularizing these ideas since 1900. In the cartoon just mentioned, Debs is shown skinny dipping, and sees Teddy Roosevelt making off with his cloths. Another candidate is watching from behind bushes, minus his cloths, and says: “Don’t be too upset, Gene, he’s Already taken ours.”

Howard Zinn    Today, when capitalism, "the free market," "private enterprise," are being hailed as triumphant in the world, as the system to be exported to every part of the world, it is a good time to remember Debs, and to rekindle, the idea of socialism.

To see the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a sign of the failure of socialism, is to mistake the monstrous tyranny created by Stalin for the vision of an egalitarian and democratic society which has inspired enormous numbers of people all over the world.

In the era of Debs, the first seventeen years of the twentieth century-until war created an opportunity to crush the movement-millions of Americans declared their adherence to the principles of socialism.

Those were years of bitter labor struggles, the great walkouts of women garment workers in New York, the victorious multi-ethnic strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the unbelievable courage of coal miners in Colorado, defying the power and wealth of the Rockefellers. The I.W.W. was born-revolutionary, militant, demanding "one big union" for everyone, skilled and unskilled, black and white, men and women, native-born and foreign-born.

This scared the Corporations and the Wealthy! Very sophisticated techniques were used and have been developed to confuse people and make them unthinking, unquestioning proponents of a pure Capitalist system they do not understand. If we want a good life, we have to fight for it and maintain it. Most younger working people have not done that. We see the results today.

In recorded history and in popular imagination Debs is portrayed in extremes either positive or negative. The negative image portrays a radical labor baron, “King Debs,” trying to take over the railroads and destroy property rights, as unpatriotic anti-war extremist who failed miserably five times in tries for the Presidency, or less negatively perhaps as a kind, great-hearted idealist who simply did not grasp the realities of economic life and human nature.

Anything about this ring a familiar tone with you? It should. We hear these sentiments spoken today by the Conservative Corporate media as well as the Radical Right radio talk shows paid for, most of the time, by private funds and not advertising dollars.

The positive image shows a highly effective union leader of turn-of-the-century America, a kind, big hearted and deeply loved man, respected even by prominent Terre Haute business men who chose to overlook his radical leanings. Debs case is often cited as an example of the failure of our legal system to protect his constitutional right of freedom of speech. In organized labor there is enduring respect for Debs as one of the giants among the pioneers of the American labor movement. His kiosk stands in the Labor Hall of Fame, Department of Labor, Washington, DC as a tribute to his contributions to American labor. Labor Unions are among the most active supporters of the Eugene V. Debs Foundation and union members from across Indiana and the Midwest are in regular attendance each fall when an annual award banquet is held in Terre Haute.

Howard Zinn    The point of recalling all this is to remind us of the powerful appeal of the socialist idea to people alienated from the political system and aware of the growing stark disparities in income and wealth-as so many Americans are today. The word itself-"socialism"-may still carry the distortions of recent experience in bad places usurping the name.

But anyone who goes around the country, or reads carefully the public opinion surveys over the past decade, can see that huge numbers of Americans agree on what should be the fundamental elements of a decent society: guaranteed food, housing, medical care for everyone; bread and butter as better guarantees of "national security" than guns and bombs, democratic control of corporate power, equal rights for all races, genders and sexual orientations, a recognition of the rights of immigrants as the unrecognized counterparts of our parents and grandparents,, the rejection of war and violence as solutions for tyranny and injustice.

Eugene Debs, Appeal to Reason (29th December, 1900)

”The machine became more perfect day by day; is lowered the wage of the worker, and in due course of time it became so perfect that it could be operated by unskilled labor of the woman, and she became a factor in industry. The owners of these machines were in competition with each other for trade in the market; it was war; cheaper and cheaper production was demanded, and cheaper labor was demanded.

In the march of time it became necessary to withdraw the children from school, and these machines came to be operated by the deft touch of the fingers of the child. In the first stage, machine was in competition with man; in the next, man in competition with both, and in the next, the child in competition with the whole combination.

Today there is more than three million women engaged in industrial pursuits in the United States, and more than two million children. It is not a question of white labor or black labor, or male labor or female or child labor, in this system; it is solely a question of cheap labor, without reference to the effect upon mankind.”

As the Labor Movement disentigrates before our very eyes, we must talk about ideas and understand what is really going on. Our lives are molded by politics. We can vote our way into a better life. The time to do it is now. Get involved. Lead. Become informed. Becoming active is the only way that any of us can secure a better future for ourselves and out families.

We are at the crossroads. We must choose. Life, beauty, love or death, destruction and hate. These have always been the choices. We hope you make the choice which leads you and yours to a bright and wonderful future.

Homework

Discuss this on the job. Discuss it with family and friends. Read the non-corporate news. Educate others every chance you get.