Almost a Century Ago, Another Democratic Socialist Ran for President of the United States—from His P

Published on Saturday, November 28, 2015
by Common Dreams

Almost a Century Ago, Another Democratic Socialist Ran for President of the United States—from His Prison Cell

by Lawrence Wittner

In the early twentieth century, roughly a century before Bernie Sanders’s long-shot run for the White House, another prominent democratic socialist, Eugene V. Debs, waged his own campaigns for the presidency.

Debs began his political career as a labor leader. Growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana, he dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to work on the railroads, scraping the grease from the trucks of freight engines. In later years, convinced that the division of workers into small craft unions made them easy pickings for the giant railroad corporations, Debs founded the American Railway Union, leading it in the dramatic Pullman Strike of 1894. Taking the side of the railroad corporations, the federal government acted to crush the strike, send Debs and other union leaders to jail, and destroy the American Railway Union.

As Debs brooded on these events, he concluded that, although industry-wide unions were vital, they could not win their battles for economic and social justice while giant corporations dominated the government. In Europe, workers were forming labor and socialist parties. Why not in America? At the beginning of 1897, in an open letter to the remnants of the American Railway Union, he wrote: “I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough.”

In 1901, together with small groups of union activists, former Populists, socialists, and a sprinkling of intellectuals and reformers, Debs established the Socialist Party of America. Socialist Party campaigns were a mixture of “immediate demands”—minimum wages, maximum hours, abolition of child labor, and women’s suffrage—and utopian visions. On the municipal level, the party challenged local corruption and championed improved public services. Each reform, the party stressed, extended democracy from politics to the economy, leading to the ultimate goal of “the cooperative commonwealth.”

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