Debs, Eugene V(ictor) (1855-1926)

US labour leader and socialist who organized the Social Democratic Party in 1897 (known as the Socialist Party from 1901). He was the founder and first president of the American Railway Union in 1893, and was imprisoned for six months in 1894 for defying a federal injunction to end the 1894 Pullman strike in Chicago. An ardent socialist and union man, he ran for the US presidency five times as the Socialist Party's candidate.

Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and at age 15 he went to work on the railroads. After serving as secretary of his local branch of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, he became the union's national secretary and editor of its magazine. He was elected to the Indiana state legislature in 1884. In 1905, he helped found the radical labour organization Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which he eventually disavowed because of its use of violence. He opposed US intervention in World War I and in 1918 spoke out against the trials being conducted under the 1917 Espionage Act, under which individuals opposed to the USA participating in the war were being charged with sedition. It was for this that he was sentenced to ten years in jail. Public protest persuaded President Harding to release him in 1921. In 1920 he polled nearly a million votes, the highest socialist vote ever in a US presidential election, despite having to conduct the campaign from a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia.