The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Tireless Socialist

A new biography of Eugene Debs makes clear that in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism.

What can the history of American socialism tell us about the present and future of democratic politics? The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in socialism, from Bernie Sanders’s runs for president to the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and recently the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor. Each of these figures has had to face the long-standing assumption in American politics that socialists just can’t find traction in the United States. American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs, by former Jacobin editor Shawn Gude, offers an important corrective, illuminating the forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, and the exceptional efforts of his opponents to crush him and his movement. Along the way, the book reveals a deeper truth: that in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism.

From the beginning of the transformation of the United States into an industrial power, the tycoons, politicians, and judges formed the best-funded union in American history, a cartel that used its bottomless collective pocket to divide and conquer workers—all while promoting the myth of rugged individual success. The collusion of corporate and government interests to suppress worker power has been a constant down the decades, from Jay Gould cutting wages and firing union workers in the 1880s; to the Colorado state militia setting ablaze an encampment of strikers’ families in Ludlow in 1914, killing 11 children; and through thousands of more or less bloodily suppressed labor protests in between. Any history of socialist actions—union drives, strikes, demonstrations, political runs—is incomplete without the story of this ferocious, unequal reaction. And it’s vital for an understanding of Debs himself, of how and why a man would hurl himself time and again into the teeth of this enemy.

An elusive, often frustrating hero, Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, to immigrants from Alsace in northeastern France who ran a grocery store catering to their local French community (in other words, they stocked wine). Gene, his four sisters, and baby brother were raised to be skeptical of organized religion and to question American society’s entrenched inequalities. In the overwhelmingly white Midwest of Debs’s childhood, these were primarily economic. The Civil War was a distant roar, but the downturn that followed affected the family finances enough that 14-year-old Gene quit school to work for the railroad—then barreling across the open plains, transforming remote, windswept way stations into smoke-choked cities, home to a brand-new working class.

He began by scraping the grease off the side of trains, then painting the stripes on the engines. At 16, he became a “fireman,” shoveling coal alongside the engineer driving the locomotive—sweaty, strenuous, dangerous work. He lost his job when the railroad boom of the early 1870s crashed and plunged the country into depression, but Debs still identified as a railway man. In early 1875, he became a charter member of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen—a secretive, exclusive fraternity priding itself on “benevolence, sobriety, industry.” These proto-unions supported their “brothers” and families after accidents, although many workers no doubt felt like the man who said, “I would prefer my limb instead.”

As the economy continued to bubble and burst through the late nineteenth century, the vast expansion of the railroads across the country drew in huge numbers of workers, who knew their importance to America’s industrializing project. As an alternative to exclusive craft unions and fraternities, the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia, preached a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” that would welcome everyone, Black and white, male and female, whether they worked in fields or factories, kitchens or coal mines. The Knights emphasized community as much as battle, with picnics, dances, newspapers, and study groups. Their vision of the labor struggle as a shared,........

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