The Socialist Party aimed to become a major party in the 20th century America.
In the years prior to World War I it elected two members of Congress, over 70 mayors, and huge numbers of state legislators and city councilors.
Despite the success of the American Federation of Labor national union, American radicalism was not dead.
The number of those who felt the American capitalist system was fundamentally flawed was in fact growing fast.
American socialists based their beliefs on the writings of Karl Marx, the German philosopher.
Many asked why so many working Americans should have so little while a few owners grew incredibly wealthy. No wealth could exist without the sweat and blood of its workforce.
They suggested that the government should own all industries and divide the profits among those who actually created the products.
While the current management class would stand to lose, many more people would gain. These radicals grew in number as industries spread. But their enemies were huge.
This was the time of the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers.
Now along comes the founder of American Socialism.
Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1855 to a family of French immigrants.
Working his way up through the railroad industry, Debs formed the American Railway Union in 1892.
Two years later he found himself leading one of the largest strikes in American history — the great Pullman strike. When its workers refused to accept a pay cut, The Pullman Car Company fired 5000 employees.
To show support, Debs called for the members of the American Railway Union to refrain from operating any trains that used Pullman cars.
When the strike was declared illegal by a court injunction, chaos erupted.
President Grover Cleveland ordered federal troops to attack the strikers and Debs was arrested. Soon order was restored and the strike failed.
Debs was not originally a socialist, but his experience with the Pullman Strike and his subsequent six-month jail term led him to believe that drastic action was necessary.
He made the following statement to the Court, while being convicted of violating the Sedition Act (Sept. 18, 1918)
Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that 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.
Debs chose to fight in the political arena. In 1900 he ran for President as a socialist and received 87,000 votes.
The following year, leading sympathizers joined with him to form the Socialist Party. At its height, the party numbered over 100,000 active members.
Debs ran for President four more times. In the election of 1912 he received over 900,000 votes.
After being arrested for antiwar activities during World War I, he ran for President from his jail cell and still received 919,000 votes.
Debs died in 1926 having never won an election, but over one thousand Socialist Party members had been elected to state and city governments.
So who was this guy? What did he say to gain so many followers?
Do he and the modern democratic socialists here in the US have anything in common?
Let’s take a look.
Eugene Victor Debs was born November 5, 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana.
He was a Socialist Party candidate for U.S. president five times between 1900 and 1920.
Debs left home at age 14 to work in the railroad shops and later became a locomotive fireman.
In 1875 he helped organize a local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, of which he was elected national secretary and treasurer in 1880.
He also served as city clerk of Terre Haute (1879–83) and as a member of the Indiana legislature (1885).
From his earliest days, Debs pushed for the organization of labor by industry rather than by craft. After trying unsuccessfully to unite the various railroad brotherhoods of his day, he became president (1893) of the newly established American Railway Union.
Debs’s union gained national recognition when it conducted a successful strike for higher wages against the Great Northern Railway in April 1894.
Debbs himself became famous when he was sentenced to six months in jail (May–November 1895) for his role in leading the Chicago Pullman Palace Car Company strike.
During his prison term at Woodstock, Illinois, Debs was deeply influenced by his broad reading—including the works of Karl Marx—and grew increasingly critical of traditional political and economic concepts, especially capitalism.
After announcing his conversion from populism to socialism in 1897, he led the establishment of the Socialist Party of America.
Debs was the party’s presidential candidate in 1900 but received only 96,000 votes, a total he raised to 400,000 in 1904.
In a 1905 speech, he argued:
“Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.
You do not need the capitalist. He could not exist an instant without you. You would just begin to live without him. You do everything and he has everything, and some of you imagine that if it were not for him you would have no work. As a matter of fact, he does not employ you at all; you employ him to take from you what you produce, and he faithfully sticks to this task.
If you can stand it, he can; and if you don’t change this relation, I am sure he won’t. You make the automobile, he rides in it. If it were not for you, he would walk; and if it were not for him, you would ride.”
Debs was again the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1908, 1912, and 1920 (he refused the nomination in 1916).
His highest popular vote total came in 1920, when he received about 915,000 votes.
Ironically, he was in prison at the time, serving a sentence for having criticized the U.S. government’s prosecution of persons charged with violation of the 1917 Espionage Act.
During World War I, Debs was a highly visible and vocal pacifist. On June 16 of 1918 he delivered a famous antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio.
He protested against World War I, which was raging in Europe. He was arrested because of the speech and convicted in a federal court in Cleveland, Ohio, under the wartime espionage law.
He was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison and disenfranchised for life — i.e. losing his citizenship.
While running his campaign from prison in 1920, Debs outlined his vision of a socialist future:
“Under Socialism no man will depend upon another for a job, or upon the self-interest or good will of another for a chance to earn bread for his wife and child. No man will work to make a profit for another, to enrich an idler, for the idler will no longer own the means of life. No man will be an economic dependent, and no man need feel the pinch of poverty that robs life of all joy and ends finally in the county house, the prison and potters’ field…
Industrial self-government, social democracy, will completely revolutionize the community life. For the first time in history the people will be truly free and rule themselves, and when this comes to pass poverty will vanish like mist before the sunrise.
When poverty goes out of the world the prison will remain only as a monument to the ages before light dawned upon darkness and civilization came to mankind.”
President Warren Harding pardoned Debs in 1921.
Debs supported himself during his campaign years with earnings from his writings and lectures.
From 1907 to 1912, Debs was the associate editor of Appeal to Reason, which was published in Girard, Kansas.
The magazine achieved a circulation of several hundred thousand, due to Debs` powerful writing. Debs also was regarded as one of the most gifted public speakers of his era, rivaling the great preachers and politicians of the time.
Having received his presidential pardon in December 1921, Debs arrived home in Terre Haute,where he received a tremendous welcome from thousands of Terre Haute citizens. Ill health prevented him from resuming active participation in politics.
Debs would spend the rest of his life trying to recover his health, which declined while in prison confinement.
He still wrote numerous articles and made several speeches, until 1926, when he was admitted to a hospital just outside of Chicago. He died there on October 20th, and his body was brought back to Terre Haute for burial.
A poster of Eugene V. Debs, hangs on the wall of Bernie Sanders office as a tribute to Sanders’ self-proclaimed hero.
Now Bernie, Congress’ only self-identified democratic socialist, campaigned with the movement’s newest star, New York City congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former bartender who defeated one of the most powerful House Democrats in the primaries.
Her victory poured gasoline onto a fire that was already beginning to burn brighter. The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) paid membership has hovered around 6,000 in recent years, said Allie Cohn, a member of the group’s national political team.
Last week, its paid membership hit 45,000 nationwide.
There is little distinction made between the terms “democratic socialism” and “socialism” in the group’s literature.
The DSA constitution describes their members as socialists who “reject an economic order based on private profit” and “share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”
The policies defining modern-day democratic socialism include: Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition and the abolition of the federal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE.
Manhattan Institute fellow Brian Riedl went through the simple math of what free actually costs. It’s a lot.
It’s not just the free aspect, but the fact that the democratic socialists have made so many promises that must be paid for that will make it so tough to swallow for most voters.
Riedl looked at the 10-year costs of all the various promises made by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other self-described democratic socialists.
He was as generous as could be in his estimates, often accepting the democratic socialists’ cost estimate even when it was patently and absurdly too low.
It’s quite a laundry-list of promises with enormous costs: “Free college” ($807 billion); Social Security expansion ($188 billion); single-payer health care ($32 trillion); guaranteed jobs at $15 per hour plus benefits ($6.8 trillion); infrastructure ($1 trillion); student loan debt forgiveness ($1.4 trillion).
Net cost: about $42.5 trillion over 10 years, give or take a few hundred billion.
As it is, current federal estimates expect about $44 trillion in tax revenues over that same period, with a deficit of roughly $12.4 trillion. Remember: All this democratic socialist spending comes on top of what we’re already spending.
Even after massive cuts in other programs, such as slashing defense by half, or adding in phantom savings from supposed cuts in state health spending and anti-poverty programs, you still come up $34 trillion short over 10 years.
To raise $34 trillion, Riedl calculates, would require “seizing roughly 100% of all corporate profits as well as 100% of all family wage income and pass-though business income above the thresholds of $90,000 (single) or $150,000 (married), and absurdly assuming they all continue working.”
Or, he said, you could go to a VAT tax — a national sales tax on all goods and services. But it would have to be huge: a tax of 87% on everything you buy.
The bottom line is, these utopian ideas are not fiscally sane. And we mean that literally. They are a bizarre fantasy that should be discarded immediately by any reasonable person interested in an economically prosperous future.
That some believe that replacing capitalism with socialism makes you better off shows the profound failure of our nation’s education system.
Because it’s something that has never happened in the history of mankind. And young people, who are among socialism’s most ardent fans, don’t seem to even know this.
Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez?
Are these the people the next generation are looking to in order to solve all our problems?
I sure hope not.