Eugene Victor Debs (5 November 1855 – 20 October 1926) was a member of the Indiana Senate (D) from the 8th district from 1885 to 1889, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and five times the Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States.
Biography[]
Eugene Victor Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on 5 November 1855, the son of Alsatian immigrant parents. Debgs worked for the US railroad system at 14, and and he was a member of the Democratic Party early in his political career. In 1884, Debs was elected to the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat, and he worked with several small unions such as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Debs was instrumental in founding the American Railway Union, one of the nation's first industrial unions, and he signed many into the ARU after the Pullman Palace Car Company wildcat strike of 1894. President Grover Cleveland used the US Army to put down the strike, and Debs was arrested and imprisoned. Debs read various works of socialist theory while he was in prison, and he founded the Socialist Party of America in 1901. In 1900, 1904, 1908, 1908, 1912, and 1920, and he also ran for the US Congress in 1916 as a Socialist. Debs was noted for his oratory, and he was imprisoned in 1918 for denouncing the United States' participation in World War I. In December 1921, President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence, and he died in a sanatorium in 1926 after developing cardiovascular problems.