All Aboard Eugene Debs’s Red Special
In 1908, on one of his five presidential runs, legendary socialist organizer Eugene Debs embarked on a whirlwind tour across the country on his own train, the Red Special. His mission: spread the socialist gospel to any American who would hear him out.
Eugene Debs’s 1908 socialist presidential campaign saw him crisscross the nation twice and travel over 20,000 miles in one of the most aggressive speaking campaigns a US presidential candidate has ever undertaken. (Archive Photos / Getty Images)
The specially chartered locomotive pulled out of Chicago on a late August day in 1908, heading west, a sleeper car, dining car, and baggage car loaded with socialist pamphlets in tow. Red flags poked out, bunting and streamers festooning the sides.
The passengers were in high spirits. Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs joked that he and his balding brother, Theo, were the resident “long hairs”: “We have three long hairs between us.” Neighbor Stephen Marion Reynolds, whose new biography of Debs was serving as campaign literature, pinned a red flag to his pajamas and explained, “Something might happen in the night, and they would find me dead or unconscious. How would they know I wasn’t a Republican?” As the train raced across the fields of Iowa — flat, flat, flat — a newspaper reporter asked Debs what he’d enjoyed most on the trip so far. “Oh, associating with this brace of despots, I suppose,” Gene quipped.
Debs’s speaking trip was a cavalcade of railroad depots and opera halls, scheduled speeches and impromptu whistle-stops. His September 2 itinerary read like this:
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