For most of the last century, Terre Haute’s Vigo County, in western Indiana, has served as one of the country’s most reliable electoral bellwethers. As goes Vigo, so goes the nation — at least in presidential races, where it has picked the winner of every election since 1956.

But before that, the small city about seventy-five miles southwest of Indianapolis drafted a different sort of footnote in presidential history, as the birthplace and lifelong home of the American socialist movement’s most iconic figure, Eugene V. Debs.

Debs ran for the presidency five times between 1900 and 1920. In 1912, Debs’s campaign represented the high-water mark for the American socialist movement in national politics, pulling in 6 percent of the vote.