Eugene Debs

"The Apostle of Liberty"

Eugene Victor Debs was a labor union organizer and one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, and he ran for U.S. President five times as the Socialist Party candidate.

He was imprisoned twice for his actions and views. First, six months in an Illinois jail for his involvement in the Pullman Strike in 1894. Then in 1918 he was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for speaking out against U.S. involvement in the First World War. President Warren Harding commuted that second sentence after three years, but Debs' health was already severely compromised by prison conditions and he died less than three years later.

His parents were from Alsace, France. They had immigrated to Terre Haute, Indiana, named "High Ground" by its early 18th century French settlers. His parents named him after the French authors Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo.

Deb married in 1885, and he and his wife built a home in Terre Haute in 1890. The house is still standing, toward the northeastern corner of the campus of Indiana State University. It is now operated as a museum. Here are pictures from my visit.

Parking is tightly controlled, as usual around a college campus. The house is surrounded by parking lots on three sides, but all require a student or staff permit. There are four nearby parking spots for the museum, otherwise you'll be parking along a street two blocks to the south.

The original bathroom is still in use, although the fixtures have been replaced. It's in the left rear corner of the house, off the kitchen.

A bathtub probably stood across the small room, where I was standing to take the picture. Bathwater would be heated on the stove in the kitchen, just outside the bathroom door.

The house was built in 1890, very close to the business center of town. The property was served by city gas, water, and electricity.

However, sewers only reached this property later. Waste water would have gone into a septic tank under the back yard, flowing out beneath the lawn from there.

Debs, Unions, and Socialism

Eugene Debs was involved in local and state politics, serving as city clerk of Terre Haute 1879–1883, and as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives 1885–1887.

Labor unions had begun as life insurance organizations, paying for members' funerals and burials, and not much more. Debs became involved with unions as they were becoming advocates for the workers, pushing for safer working conditions and better pay.

He had dropped out of high school at age 14, taking a low-level job with a railroad. In 1871, when he was 16, a locomotive fireman was too drunk to make it to work and Debs was pressed into replacing him. For the next three and a half years he worked as a fireman on the nightly run between Terre Haute and Indianapolis.

He joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875 and became active, serving as a delegate to the national convention in 1877 and becoming associate editor of the organization's monthly Firemen's Magazine in 1878. In 1880 he was appointed Grand Secretary and Treasurer, and editor of the magazine. He stepped down from his BLF office in 1893, organized the American Railway Union, and was elected its first president.

The Pullman Company, on the far south side of Chicago, manufactured sleeping cars along with streetcars and trolleys. The sleeping cars were owned by the Pullman Company, who paid railroads to attach them to trains.

Its workers lived in a company town. In 1894, after the Panic of 1893, the Pullman Company cited falling revenue and cut its employees' wages by 28%. Many of them were ARU members, and they asked the union for support.

Debs initially warned against any boycott or strike, saying that it was too risky given the union's weakness in the face of railroad and federal government hostility.

The membership went ahead despite Debs' warning, refusing to handle Pullman cars or any train to which they were attached. The strike expanded in affected territory, and Deb finally relented after almost all ARU members in the Chicago region supported it.

A 1894 New York Times editorial described Debs as "a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race", and the Pullman Strike came to be called "Debs' Rebellion".

The U.S. Goverment intervened, on the grounds that some of the affected trains also carried U.S. Mail. Debs had supported U.S. President Grover Cleveland in all three of his Presidential campaigns, but Cleveland sent the U.S. Army to break the strike. Thirty striking workers were killed, thirteen of them in Chicago.

Debs was arrested for having violated the government's injunction against the strike. He was represented by Clarence Darrow, who had been a corporate lawyer for a railroad but become a civil libertarian. He went on to fame for the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" in which a high school teacher was accused of violating a Tennessee law against teaching about human evolution in a state-funded school.

Darrow's defense was unsuccessful, and Debs was found guilty and sentenced to six months in jail at Woodstock, Illinois.

Eugene Debs was not a socialist when he was sent to prison, but he became one while imprisoned.

Debs and other imprisoned ARU members received letters, pamphlets, and books from socialists all around the U.S. A socialist newspaper editor from Milwaukee visited Debs in prison, bringing him a copy of Capital. Debs read constantly during his sentence, and emerged from jail in early 1895 as a socialist.

Debs began pushing for the ARU to form a Social Democratic organization. After supporting the Democratic Party's candidate William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 Presidential campaign, which Bryan lost to William McKinley, Debs decided that future socialist policies required an organization outside the existing Democratic Party.

In 1897 the ARU joined with the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth to form the Social Democracy of America political party. After its June 1898 convention, it split up, with Debs elected to the National Executive Board of the Social Democratic Party of America or SDP, with his brother Theodore as its executive secretary.

1912 U.S. Presidential campaign poster for the SDP, Eugene V. Debs for President and Emil Seidel for Vice President.

Debs ran for U.S. President in 1900 as the SDP candidate. He and his running mate received just 0.6% of the popular vote. The following year, the SDP merged with a group split off from the Socialist Labor Party to form the Socialist Party of America, the SPA.

Debs ran as the SPA candidate for U.S. President in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, so five campaigns as a Socialist party candidate in general, once for the short-lived SDP and the other four the successor SPA. He received growing numbers of votes in those elections, with 913,693 votes in 1920 despite his being in federal prison at the time.

Debs and other labor union leaders formed the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. The IWW, often called the "Wobblies", soon split off from the Socialist Party. The IWW advocated more radical actions, while the government and industry continued using violence, often lethal, against striking workers.

The First World War began with the 28 June 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. It had some of the highest casualty numbers of European wars, with military casualties of approximately 9 million deaths plus 23 million wounded, and up to 8 million civilian deaths. Plus, its global movements of people greatly spread the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic, misnamed the "Spanish flu" despite its having originated in the U.S., at the U.S. Army's Camp Funston in Kansas, and spreading from there with the deployment of U.S. troops.

Contemporary magazine depiction of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

Eugene V. Debs speaking in Canton, Ohio, on 16 June 1918, a speech which led to his arrest two weeks later.

The U.S. was initially neutral, but after the Zimmermann Telegram was publicized and Germany began sinking U.S. merchant ships, the U.S. Congress voted to declare war on Germnay in 6 April 1917.

Debs frequently spoke out against the war and the U.S. involvement in it. He criticized U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who had been re-elected in 1916 on a platform of keeping the U.S. out of the war. But then he had asked Congress to vote for "a war to end all wars" that would "make the world safe for democracy".

Wilson called Debs a "traitor to his country". Debs delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio, on 16 June 1918, advocating resistence to the military draft. Two weeks later, on 30 June, Debs was arrested for sedition.

Debs was found guilty and sentenced on 18 September 1918 to ten years in federal prison. At his sentencing hearing he said:

Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

So, yes, he was still in the Atlanta Federal Prison when he was the Socialist Party candidate for U.S. President in 1920, receiving 914,191 votes.

The U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, led numerous raids by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1919–1920 to capture, arrest, and deport suspected socialists, anarchists, and communists, especially Italian immigrants and eastern European Jewish immigrants. These came to be called the Palmer Raids.

By early January 1921 even Palmer thought that Debs should be pardoned, given how his health was rapidly declining under prison conditions. But Wilson refused.

Wilson had lost the 1920 Presidential election to Warren Harding. This was unsurprising after Wilson had suffered a serious stroke in October 1919, leaving him paralyzed on his left side and, according to a neurologist, prone to "disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment".

On 23 December 1921, President Harding commuted Debs' sentence to time served so far, effective two days later, on Christmas.

There is no question of his guilt. [...] He was by no means, however, as rabid and outspoken in his expressions as many others, and but for his prominence and the resulting far-reaching effect of his words, very probably might not have received the sentence he did. He is an old man, not strong physically. He is a man of much personal charm and impressive personality, which qualifications make him a dangerous man calculated to mislead the unthinking and affording excuse for those with criminal intent.

The other prisoners in Atlanta saw him off with "a roar of cheers", and Debs traveled north by train to Washington to meet Harding. Then he continued west, being greeted by a crowd of 50,000 people at the train station in Terre Haute.

However, he never recovered his health after his time in prison. Five years later he was admitted to a sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, and he died there of various cardiovascular problems on 20 October 1926.

Ground Floor — Parlor

Back to the tour of the house beyond the bathroom!

The house was built with a central heating system, but they also added fireplaces in many of the rooms.

The upholstered furniture didn't belong to Debs, but old photos show that it's an identical match to the furniture they owned.

Ground Floor — Library

The library has elaborately carved book cases and mantel.

One book is Debs' copy of The Jungle, inscribed and signed by the author, Upton Sinclair.

"To Eugene V. Debs with the kind regards of The Author"

The elaborate marquetry table holds a collection of pins and buttons. The large red banner is a lapel pin that Debs sometimes wore.

At bottom center is one of the "For President: Convict No. 9653" pins from his 1920 campaign. You can buy a replica at the gift shop that's now in the kitchen of the house.

Ground Floor — Dining Room

The dining room has another elaborate ceramic tile surround and carved wood mantel. The tiles are from a local factory, some authors have tried to make this scandalous by describing them as expensively imported Italian tiles. This is part of how his wife has frequently been falsely portrayed as "a bitter, money-obsessed clothes horse, a woman more interested in her fancy house than in supporting Gene’s work or his beliefs."

Going Upstairs

A staircase beside the front door leads upstairs.

Eugene Debs died in October, 1926. His wife, Kate, lived in the house for another ten years. After she died in December, 1936, a history professor at Indiana State University bought the house. He lived there until about 1950, when the ΘΧ fraternity bought it.

When the fraternity moved out, most of the interior was covered in white paint. But at least the stained glass windows remained.

The Debs Foundation was organized in 1962 to purchase and renovate the house and then open it as a museum.

A framed poster was moved from an auditorium on campus to the staircase landing.

Front Bedroom and Study

The front bedroom is directly above the parlor. I looked under the bed but saw no chamber pot. If you needed to go to the bathroom in the night, you went downstairs and back through the kitchen to the one bathroom.

I believe that the fraternity added a bathroom on the second floor, but it's closed off now and not readily visible to visitors.

A passage leads from the front bedroom to a study that Debs used, directly accessible without going out into the hallway.

The desk is Debs', returned to the house after the professor and then the fraternity had moved out.

Small Study

A small study toward the rear of the house, above the kitchen, was also used by Debs and contains his typewriter and writing implements.

It also contains a cell door from the jail in Woodstock, Illinois, where Debs was imprisoned for six months after the Pullman Strike, and where he became a socialist. This isn't the door from Debs' cell, but it's from another cell in that jail, identical to what he was locked behind.

The Attic Becomes a Dormitory

The fraternity converted the third floor attic into a dormitory. Its walls were covered by wood paneling in the 1962 renovation, and then a regional artist was commissioned to decorate it with paintings depicting Debs' life.

Also on the walls are some posters from Debs' labor addresses and political campaigns.

I told the docent at the house that Debs' story reminded me of Dashiell Hammett, an acclaimed author who supported socialist causes and was hounded to death by the U.S. Govenment.

Allan Pinkerton claimed to have foiled an 1861 plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln, and provided the Union Army with military intelligence during the U.S. Civil War. Through this he founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

Hammett, born in 1894, became an investigator for the Pinkerton agency. The company had been playing an increasing role as strike-breakers ever since the Civil War. The agency sent Hammett to Montana around 1917, where he and other operatives infiltrated the striking copper miners. The mine owners offered a group of Pinkerton operatives $5,000 to help to kill Frank Little, who was the IWW leader organizing the miners. Hammett turned down the offer to help kill Little, who soon was lynched from a train trestle near Butte.

A year later, Hammett enlisted in the U.S. Army. He fell ill in the 1918 pandemic, and weakened by the flu, contracted tuberculosis. After a hospital stay and discharge from the Army, he worked some for Pinkerton in a strictly investigative role. He continued working for the Pinkerton agency in San Francisco until February 1922, when he had found that with his weakened lungs he could no longer spend the night tailing someone through the cold fog.

He got a job writing advertising copy for a jewelry company, and soon began writing fiction. His first published fiction was the The Smart Set, an upscale society magazine, in 1922. His style of gritty detective stories was much better suited to the pulp crime magazines. In 1923 Black Mask, one of the most popular pulp detective and crime magazine, published his story "Arson Plus".

He introduced a nameless investigative operator called "the Continental Op", working for the Continental Detective Agency, fictional but clearly based on the Pinkerton Agency. The character appeared in many of his short stories.

In 1927 Hammett finished a full-length novel featuring the Continental Op. It was serialized as "Poisonville" in 1927–1928 in Black Mask, and then published as a novel under the title Red Harvest in 1929. The story was inspired by the 1920 Anaconda Road Massacre in Butte, Montana, three years after Hammett's experiences there with Pinkerton.

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When Sergio Leone's movie A Fistful of Dollars was released in 1964, someone told Akira Kurosawa that Leone had stolen Kurosawa's story from his 1961 movie Yojimbo, to which Kurosawa supposedly replied that he had taken the idea for his movie from Hammett's novel Red Harvest.

Hammett published The Maltese Falcon in 1930. It was made into a movie in 1941, an early film noir.

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Hammett had turned to antifascist and civil rights causes in the 1930s. Then he joined the Communist party in 1937. But in early 1942, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hammett somehow talked his way back into service in the U.S. Army.

Here was a rail-thin 48-year-old disabled veteran of the First World War with a history of tuberculosis, once again serving as a Sergeant in the U.S. Army. He spent most of the next three years in the bleak and mostly frozen Aleutian Islands. He edited an Army newspaper and coauthored The Battle of the Aleutians, an illustrated history of that theater of the war.

Hammett returned from his Army service in the Aleutian Islands with emphysema as his latest pulmonary problem. He returned to political activism after the war, and became President of the Civil Rights Congress.

The CRC was labeled as a Communist front group, and Hammett was summoned to testify in a 1951 United States District Court case. Hammett refused to provide the information the government demanded, the identity of contributors to a fund to pay the bail for eleven men appealing their convictions. He was found in contempt of court and sent to federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky for six months, where he had to clean toilets and mop floors.

In 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy summoned Hammett to testify before the Senate Committee on Government Operations and the House Un-American Activities Committee on the topic of books written by Communist authors.

Hammett was blacklisted and all radio programs featuring his characters were dropped, removing all his sources of income. His health worsened. In 1961 he died of lung cancer, diagnosed just two months before.

He was a veteran of two World Wars and so he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. J. Edgar Hoover, a truly horrible man, attempted to block Hammett's burial.

Headed for Home

There are a few Citgo stations around Terre Haute, so I made sure to fill my tank on my way out of town.

Many Americans would be horrified by this, given Citgo's connections to Venezuela. Because, umm, they feel that Saudi Arabia, a country with nightmarish human rights practices, whose government butchers journalists with bone saws, is somehow far more in line with American values.

I much prefer Venezuelan fuel when I can find it.

The highway north from Terre Haute passed Duke Energy's Cayuga Station power plant. Its two primary coal-fired generating units can produce 1,062 MW_e. A third peaking unit can generate 121 MW_e from natural gas or oil, and there are also four smaller peaking units run by oil-powered internal combustion engines, generating 2.6 MW_e each.

In 2006, it emitted 86,174 tons of SO₂ or sulfur dioxide into the air. That was 12.1 kilograms of SO₂ for each kilowatt-hour generated, the second-worst SO₂ emission rate in the U.S. Upgrades in 2008 significantly improved that.

I continued north on federal and state highways, literally the product of small-S socialism, passing through Boswell, Indiana, which proclaims itself to be "The Hub of the Universe".