Eugene Debs: Running for President from a Prison Cell

Eugene Victor Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on November fifth, eighteen fifty-five. By the time he was in his thirties he had watched Indiana railroad workers lose strikes, watched companies use federal courts and federal troops to break organizing drives, and watched men die in accidents that no one was held accountable for. His transformation from a conventional trade unionist into a socialist was not theoretical. It was biographical.

He founded the American Railway Union in eighteen ninety-three. He organized the Pullman Strike of eighteen ninety-four. Federal troops were called in. Workers were killed. Debs went to prison in Illinois for six months. He read Marx, Bellamy, and Kautsky in his cell and emerged in eighteen ninety-five as a socialist. He ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket in nineteen hundred, nineteen oh four, nineteen oh eight, and nineteen twelve.

On June sixteenth, nineteen eighteen, he stood in Canton, Ohio, and gave a speech opposing the war. He was sixty-two years old. He knew what the speech would cost him. Federal agents arrested him within days under the Espionage Act. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

In nineteen twenty, from Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, he ran for president again. He was Prisoner Number Nine Six Five Three. He received nine hundred fourteen thousand one hundred ninety-one votes, or as some sources round it, approximately nine hundred fourteen thousand, which itself was close to a million. He was released in nineteen twenty-one. He died in nineteen twenty-six.

His home in Terre Haute is a museum. It is a modest house for someone who once nearly received a million votes while incarcerated.