Debs while in prison in Woodstock, Illinois, in 1895 – Public Domain

Zohran Mamdani’s quoting of Eugene Debs in his recent victory speech (for mayor of New York City) should awaken interest in the man who gained a name for himself as “Mr. Socialism.”

For seventeen years Debs was the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, starving himself of sleep to bone up on politics, economics, and history. With painstaking effort he made himself into a manager’s worst nightmare: an educated union man who could unravel the knots of capitalist contradiction, making the need for revolution plain for all to see.

Unable to ignore workers’ constant pleas for help, he went everywhere he was called, never managing to get his suitcase unpacked. In bad years he donated up to $900 of his $1500 salary to keeping the union and its magazine afloat, steering the workers through strikes, depression, and looming bankruptcy.

Night after night he went tramping through railroad yards, where his constant agitation got him thrown out of the roundhouse (a circular building used for servicing and storing trains) and ejected from trains.

He became a magnificent popular speaker, eventually making socialism as American as the Liberty Bell. He praised the fighting spirit of the workers and heaped scorn on the mining companies and “cockroach” small shop capitalists who exploited them. Even those who had heard it all before couldn’t resist his spell. When he rehearsed his speeches at home his neighbors came out onto their porches to eavesdrop.

By the time he ran for president for in 1904 (the second of five attempts, the last one from a prison cell), socialism had elbowed its way onto the national political scene. Schoolteachers warned of its growing menace; workers jammed meeting halls to hear of its glowing promise.

Debs was the unanimous choice to represent the Socialist Party that year. In the wake of a dizzying spate of corporate mergers, three hundred firms controlled more than forty percent of the industrial capital of the country and monopoly quickly emerged as the dominant issue of the campaign. Selling out auditoriums with paid admissions, Debs ridiculed Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting schemes for their failure to realign class power, and scoffed at the notion that a state dominated by gigantic private corporations could ever alleviate the workers’ distress: “Government ownership of public utilities means nothing for labor under capitalist ownership of government,” he thundered.

With muckraking journalists continuing to expose the profit system’s massive fraud, waste, and abuse, more and more people inclined to the belief that capitalism was doomed.

The socialist Appeal to Reason boasted a readership of half a million, educating a huge mass of farmers, factory-workers, and railwaymen in the Mid-West alone. Its December anti-trust issue that year piled up three million advance orders, the largest edition of........

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