You can tell the capitalist system is in trouble when Americans start talking about Eugene Debs. Although the popular image of the great labor and socialist leader has ebbed and flowed since his death a century ago this month, our New Gilded Age has placed him back in the spotlight. Progressive politicians and labor activists, including United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and union organizer Jaz Brisack, quote his speeches with regularity. Last year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traveled to Debs’s home in Terre Haute, Indiana, to introduce Bernie Sanders, who has long cited the Hoosier firebrand as a political hero. And when Zohran Mamdani kicked off his mayorship of the nation’s largest city, he did so by quoting Debs.
Such tributes signify a wider movement. The worldview that Debs championed is more popular now than at any other point since his death, with polls suggesting that Americans, especially young people and people of color, view socialism more positively than they ever have. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the institutional descendant of Debs’s Socialist Party of America, recently surpassed 120,000 members to become the largest socialist organization in US history, and more than 250 members currently serve in elected positions across forty states.
In that respect, Shawn Gude’s American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs could hardly be more timely. This charmingly penned and prodigiously researched study both refreshes familiar stories and prods readers to reconsider common assumptions. For instance, Gude devotes more pages than previous biographers to black socialism and Debs’s racial thinking, revealing less a stodgy, dogmatic relic of the (very) Old Left than a flawed yet often versatile rebel who actively and continuously widened his personal understanding of solidarity. In doing so, American Socialist complicates the erroneous notion of Debs as a rigid and unchanging determinist whose outlook failed to reckon with the complexities of race and class.
Gude’s goal in American Socialist is not to supplant previous — and still eminently useful — biographies by Ray Ginger, Bernard Brommel, and Nick Salvatore, but to “bring Debs’s story to a new generation and a wider audience.” Gude has indeed crafted a popular biography for our times — a compelling portrait of “one of America’s great critics of plutocracy: a man who clambered into capitalism’s boiler room, gazed at its machinery, and announced it was despotic to the core.”
From Respectability to Radicalism
Eugene Debs wasn’t born a radical. He arrived at socialism through sobering experience — with corporate power, capitalist courts, and the daily injustices of living and laboring in Gilded Age America. Born in 1855 to Alsatian immigrants in Terre Haute, he joined the railroad at age fourteen as the nation hurtled toward buccaneer capitalism. Thrown out of work during the economic depression of 1873, Debs soon became an organizer in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, using his rising position to oppose strikes, echo the “law and order” rhetoric of his bosses, and espouse the Brotherhood’s conservative craft union credo of “benevolence, sobriety, industry.” He went so far as to deliver a speech defaming the Great Railroad Strike for its “anarchy and revolution.”
At decade’s end, Debs made his first foray into electoral politics, first as a Democratic city clerk, then a state representative. He proved a moderate labor reformer, respectable and accommodating to business. Notably, he broke with his party in an unsuccessful effort to eliminate racial distinctions from state law but remained decidedly antiradical (even sponsoring a pro-militia bill). Imbued with a Great Man view of history and belief in the power of individual fortitude, he then rose quickly within his whites-only union. Unlike many trades leaders, Debs didn’t openly scapegoat black workers. But nor did he use his position to challenge the color line. Rather, he avoided the subject of race entirely out of either indifference or worry that it would repel white workers. Young Debs’s activism was defined by what Gude calls “parlor room reason,” not organized insurgency.
But class struggle and the violent obstinance of capital soon wrenched Debs out of complacency. Unrewarded by loyalty to the employer class, Debs led his first strike in 1888 against the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. He emerged a changed man, embracing broad federation over craft exclusivism and later eschewing the two-party system. Through a new consciousness that drew from the abolitionists and the Knights of Labor, he became active in the Populist movement and was further stirred by anti-worker violence at Homestead and elsewhere. By the time he founded the American Railway Union (ARU) in 1893 and orchestrated the Pullman Strike the following year, Debs was convinced of the permanent structural conflict between owners and workers.
The story of Debs’s first incarceration and radicalization is familiar to readers on the Left, but Gude delivers it with both rigor and style. Like so many revolutionaries, Debs underwent his greatest transformation while in prison. Abandoned by Samuel Gompers and his American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions, Debs devoured books by Edward Bellamy and Laurence Gronlund. He read Karl Kautsky and Karl Marx, too. As Gude puts it, the Pullman Strike constituted an almost spiritual awakening, “a baptism . . . out of which a new Debs was born. He was now, and would forever be, a radical working-class agitator.”
The Debs Formula
Debs soon declared himself a socialist, one committed to unions and not utopian schemes. Believing that a workers’ republic would soon dawn (after all, how could the sharp contradictions and profound inequalities of industrial America persist?), Debs embraced the “political socialism” of organizing a working-class party to contest elections, popularize socialist ideas, and act as the political arm of the labor movement. He learned a new language of Marxism, then distilled it for Oklahoma farmers, New York garment women, Montana copper miners, and Louisiana sharecroppers. Fueled by a mix of radical Christianity and American history, he charged through nonstop cross-country tours spanning five presidential campaigns. As he advocated a big tent that was both ballot- and strike-conscious, the question of how to win immediate reforms with the ultimate goal of winning socialism defined Debs’s crusade for the next quarter century.
Debs’s party made socialism a force in American politics for the first time in US history, but political mobilization and governance proved grueling. Intraparty rifts emerged along class, strategic, and regional lines. Debs felt that conservatives, led by Victor Berger, “diluted the revolutionary aims” with their fixation on electability. But unlike his future Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) compatriot Bill Haywood, he couldn’t imagine a democratic revolution occurring in the United States without attaining power through the ballot box. At times, it appeared that the popular Debs was the only personality holding it all together.
As an independent party (and not the electoral arm of unions, like the British Labour Party), the Socialist Party (SP) likewise ran afoul of Gompers, who eagerly supported the two capitalist parties. Debs walked what Gude describes as the tightrope of “how to press mainstream organized labor away from exclusionary positions without isolating the Socialist Party.” At times, Debs seemed to believe that, if he only attacked AFL bureaucrats strenuously enough, their rank and file would bolt toward socialist reform.
The SP also struggled at times to forge a coherent vision. According to Gude, Debs “never laid out precisely what a democratic socialist economy would look like.” While railroads, steel mills, coal mines, and other large industries would be publicly owned and subject to democratic oversight, Debs never outlined the precise role of workers, cooperatives, small firms, or markets within his envisioned socialist state. Like many fellow socialists, Debs thought it premature or potentially divisive to formulate a specific blueprint for life after capitalism.
Although its electoral achievements were remarkable, the party stalled. Debs received nearly a million votes while running from prison in 1920, but that was proportionally fewer than his 1912 tally. Gude details how many working-class voters couldn’t bring themselves to back Debs for a host of reasons, from party loyalty and patronage to simple political viability. “Debs was still a long shot, even if they believed in his ideals,” he reminds, “and, of course, plenty didn’t.” For all of Debs’s energy and magnetism, after two decades the SP seemed pressed hard against an electoral ceiling.
Why? Much of the answer lay in the party’s basic lack of resources and machinery. Violent state repression during World War I exacerbated those disadvantages, leading many socialists to shun electoral democracy in favor of revolutionary action. But the answer also lay in the herculean — and still unsettled — task of how to unite the world’s most diverse working class.
Something to Offer?
Like socialists today, Debs encountered the problem of how to organize workers who were deeply atomized by race, gender, age, ethnicity, language, region, religion, and national origin. The SP’s default position was to maintain that capitalism exploited all workers equally, advocate for “race-neutral” goals, and insist that racism would resolve itself naturally through material struggle. A capacious movement naturally required making space for all kinds of disciples, but socialists adhered to an unofficial white standard, viewing active anti-racism as undesirable either in principle or because it would supposedly fracture their fragile movement.
Scholars and activists have spent a century critiquing what Philip S. Foner termed this “Debsian view” of racial evasion. That critique originated with black leftists at the time, who underscored the SP’s shortcomings on the race question (convinced of the party’s unseriousness on race, Hubert Harrison resigned his membership in 1914). During the sectarian battles of the 1920s and ’30s, Communist Party theoreticians weaponized Debs’s (often decontextualized) statements to discredit the SP by exposing its complicity with white supremacy. The result was, at times, a caricature of the Socialists’ alleged racial indifference.
Historians since have offered greater nuance. Lamenting the SP’s failure “to adopt a specialized program for the Negro people,” Ray Ginger saw the party as immobilized by “Berger’s prejudice,” on the one hand, and “Debs’s oversimplified analysis” on the other. Later critics, especially in the New Left, cited Debs’s more feeble or decontextualized statements (“We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races”) as proof of his inadequacy or indifference, but others recognized Debs as moving personally toward anti-racist practice. Nick Salvatore traced how Debs’s racial mindset “changed over the course of his career” from a “one-dimensional” outlook toward, by the end of his life, “a fundamental critique of white American culture itself.”
Gude’s account enriches this discussion tremendously by balancing the deficiencies of both Debs and the SP more broadly against myriad external limitations and near-impossible party dynamics. Utilizing new sources and subtle insights into black socialism, American Socialist complicates Ginger’s racist vs. apathetic binary and vitalizes Salvatore’s conclusions. It does so by situating Debs’s transforming views alongside African American politics and SP imperatives.
There was little in Debs’s upbringing — one of racial segregation in southern Indiana — to suggest that he would become a racial equalitarian, much less an opponent of racial injustice. That metamorphosis came slowly and through material struggle. As early as the 1890s, Debs leveraged his position as president of the American Railway Union to challenge the union’s whites-only code, perhaps out of personal conviction, but clearly as a matter of union interest. When some delegates defended racial restriction because black workers had been used as strikebreakers (and avowed that Debs himself would be hanged for such an offense in the South), Debs cited that as the best reason to welcome them into the union. His speeches in defense of black membership sometimes reflected popular prejudices (he did not “advocate association with the negro,” for example), and his inclusionary position went down in narrow defeat, but progressive black newspapers praised his efforts.
Although Debs as an early socialist trafficked in lazy generalizations and pushed an overly narrow “class-first” logic, such as in his 1903 assertion, “There is no ‘Negro problem’ apart from the general labor problem,” Gude leaves little doubt that the Hoosier firebrand was “a radical on race for his day.” Racial conservatives within the SP certainly “had no difficulty seeing the radicalism of Debs’s overall positions,” the author contends, which sometimes alienated him from other white socialists. And when turn-of-the-century black publications criticized Debs, they did so “invariably from the Right, with an attitude of Booker T. Washington–style accommodationism.”
There was more to come. Chronic race riots, especially in his native Indiana, inspired Debs to write more prodigiously on the “race question.” He assailed state SP platforms that included Jim Crow clauses, publicly attacked popular racist literature, and famously refused to speak at venues that excluded African Americans. As his worldview solidified, what Gude calls the “bigoted tics that had previously seeped into his speeches” became less common; he grew more vocal, and his race thinking became more sophisticated.
Debs also learned from the black left. Critically, that engagement coincided with the turn against the self-help and entrepreneurial approach of Booker T. Washington, whom Debs allies such as George Washington Woodbey assailed as “a good servant of capitalism.” Influenced by African American delegates William Costley, a California trade unionist, and two Indiana coal miners, John H. Adams and Edward D. McKay, the 1901 SP founding convention adopted a six-paragraph resolution stating that owners sought to foment “race hatred between the white worker and the black” and “betray the negro in his present helpless struggle against disfranchisement and violence.”
Pinpointing racism as a national, union-inhibiting dilemma and viewing black support as essential to any workers’ movement worthy of the name, Debs looked South. In a 1903 organizing drive through Dixie, he “hoped to peel off trade union members and former Populists” through class-based interracial appeals that flouted regional norms. Likely inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, published that same year, Debs addressed the problem of white identity.
Like Du Bois, he recognized the irony by which the region’s poor whites, “themselves the foul product of the capitalist system,” were “held in lowest contempt by the master class, yet esteeming themselves immeasurably above the cleanest, most intelligent and self respecting negro.” Walking back his former “color-blind” approach and earlier claims regarding the identical condition of white and black wage earners, Debs acknowledged that black workers were “doubly enslaved.”
Debs’s most rapid evolution occurred during the mid- to late 1910s. Influenced by activists of color and pressured by demographic change that saw black workers (and potential voters) begin settling in Northern cities, white socialists as a whole became more attentive to race. It was a matter of both political opportunity and ideological sincerity. Socialists had long dispatched black speakers including Woodbey into black communities while using emancipationist language to liken Debs to John Brown, but they slowly codified that racial progressivism into the party line. By 1918, a new SP platform condemned “hanging and burning; widespread political disfranchisement, and loss of civil rights” in the South and demanded that Dixie comply with the Fourteenth Amendment.
Debs continued to drive home the old idea of statutory equality (“The Socialist Party knows neither color, creed, sex, nor race”) but now occasionally jumped into the civil rights fray, even when he had seemingly little to gain electorally. He joined a public campaign to save a black Arkansas teenager named Earl Gilchrist from the death penalty in 1911; four years later, he walked a picket line with black Terre Hauteans to protest D. W. Griffith’s white supremacist blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation.
Such efforts drew praise from black leaders including Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, who invited Debs to address her Negro Fellowship League. Meanwhile, Debs befriended black Socialists including Ross D. Brown, Chandler Owen, and A. Philip Randolph, who championed the Hoosier in his radical newspaper, The Messenger. Their growing influence became a part of what Gude describes as Debs’s broader “reassessment on race” predicated on “more immediate measures to combat racial oppression.”
Gude details how Debs’s racial education continued until his death and encompassed the cultural elements of white supremacy. In one of his final columns, Debs covered the Osage Indian murders in Oklahoma, deploring the killings and mocking the idea of the “White Man’s Burden.” He exhausted some of the last political energies of his life collaborating with Randolph, a close comrade and future civil rights elder whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, according to Gude, had become a “living embodiment of Eugene Debs’s emancipatory dream.”
Debs’s racial views were hardly perfect, his language sometimes problematic, particularly as an early socialist. But as various black reformers noted and as Gude rightly maintains, it is undeniably significant that at the pinnacle of Jim Crow — as social scientists concocted new racial taxonomies, Yankee imperialists proclaimed “survival of the fittest,” and prominent race leaders urged social deference — Debs was the only national politician advocating the “obliteration of the color line.”
The Limits of Equality
But if Debs evolved toward a deeper understanding of the layered oppressions facing workers of color, why didn’t the Socialist Party adopt an actively anti-racist program? Why didn’t the foremost white economic justice advocates of their day attempt to organize black workers at the point of production, launching organizing drives into the Southern fields to recruit miners and sharecroppers (in the vein of the Communist Party)? Why didn’t the early SP systematically campaign against lynching or racism in housing, education, transportation, or the courts? The answer is manifold, involving a combination of indifference, strategic and ideological missteps, structural constraints, and open hostility.
First, as Gude illustrates in detailed and dramatic terms, the party was perpetually fractured between racial progressives and racial reactionaries. Debs’s views represented one such camp, but he never possessed a stranglehold over the entire party or its competing factions (in fact, by 1904 Debs was already retreating from party policymaking). To further confuse the issue, racism/anti-racism didn’t always map neatly onto other right/left divides within the party. For example, SP activist William English Walling helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but ended up supporting US involvement in World War I.
Moreover, even progressives like Debs largely failed, especially in the party’s first decade, to articulate how SP reforms would undermine racism, perhaps seeing a direct confrontation with Jim Crow as what Gude calls “a diversion from Socialists’ fundamental battle.” Debs’s own statements during this time proved contradictory. He spoke to the compounded oppression of the “doubly enslaved” only to then misguidedly state that “when the working class have triumphed in the class struggle . . . the race problem will disappear.”
There were also practical intraparty constraints. The Socialists were a small, cash-poor party, and many members saw expensive and potentially dangerous organizing campaigns as infeasible. Debs likewise commanded overwhelmingly white audiences, which made his message of equality noteworthy but also placed functional limits upon it. The party relied on dollars and support from the bona fide white supremacists who were an everyday presence within the party’s big tent (as late as 1912, the peak year of SP dues-paying membership, the convention featured a report that argued racism “is not so much a result of social as of biological evolution”).
Perhaps most critically, broader social and cultural conditions were distinct — and more challenging to multiracial organizing — during Debs’s peak influence. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, racially progressive Socialists grappling with the “race problem” in a nation barreling away from racial equality were fighting a rising tide. In most ways, according to Gude, “the space to organize had closed as the noose of Jim Crow tightened.” The great tragedy of early socialism is that Debs’s personal anti-racism never translated into a concrete movement to recruit black workers within the SP.
A Growing Man
Eugene Debs was, as the abolitionist Horace Greeley once referred to Abe Lincoln, a “growing man.” More than previous biographers, Gude illuminates the ways Debs never stopped learning, sharpening his socialist perspective, or recalibrating and expanding his conception of solidarity. From hard compromises within the ARU to his cofounding of the IWW to pondering the formation of an “American Labor Party,” Debs pursued a never-ending quest of how best to empower workers and win socialism.
American Socialist evocatively highlights this ongoing political education. As socialism brought Debs into a global movement, he progressed from a Democrat who supported immigrant exclusion as the solution to labor competition to a staunch internationalist who championed labor organization abroad and insisted that US workers had far more in common with toilers of other countries than with their own elites. Drawing on personal experience, Debs likewise became an ardent critic of the carceral state, deeming prisons a form of “torture” rather than rehabilitation. And although he had always backed women’s suffrage, his gender views and allyships radicalized with time as well. According to Gude, Debs was eternally “finding another injustice to rail against” and “never seemed to see one without immediately dedicating himself to fighting it.”
Flexible transformation meant that Debs wore a cast of rotating hats, often at the same time: a humanist whose politics were imbued with Christian symbolism; a world citizen who presented socialism as entirely consistent with American political traditions; and a racial equalitarian whose words and policy proposals often fell short of his ideals even as he moved toward anti-racism — a theme that is one of the book’s most compelling features.
Indeed, Gude’s attention to race vis-à-vis earlier biographers evinces how leftists have long grappled with the precise relation between racism and capitalism, including how to undertake class-struggle anti-racism in moments of comparative decline. As in Debs’s time, US workers today — run ragged by rising costs and crushing workloads, disciplined through scarcity discourses and techno-authoritarian surveillance, and isolated through remote and gig labor — appear, at times, almost hopelessly segmented. Owners use religious, generational, and immigration issues to pit blocs of workers against one another. Politicians and media elites leverage various identities to subvert discussions of inequality, labor rights, and material redistribution. Meanwhile, nonreactionary alternatives, including (an easily commodified) liberal “anti-racism,” aggravate the issue by ignoring class politics, absolving capital, and reducing racism to a problem of individual attitudes or cultural representation. Debs’s life, in Gude’s capable hands, exposes these difficulties of multiracial organizing in conditions of anti-worker propagandization and weak structural power for labor.
Although he traces Debs’s legacy from the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Highlander Folk School to Martin Luther King Jr’s opposition to the Vietnam War, Gude suggests that the “Debsian spirit” has never held more purchase than it does in our current New Gilded Age. Importantly, then, this captivating book isn’t for socialists so much as it is for those who, exposed to the injustices of today, relate to Debs’s expanding consciousness and sense of indignation. It’s for any emerging critic of our wildly undemocratic economy — one that is fixed for the ultrarich while the seemingly powerless majority languish in exploitation and unaffordable and unresponsive systems in housing, education, and health care. It’s for all who recognize that capitalism is failing to deliver on its promise of freedom.
Debs’s politics were, at their brightest, tenacious in undercutting what Gude calls “all forms of unaccountable power — rich over poor, men over women, white over Black, colonizer over colonized — as poisonous to human freedom.” A page-turning delight, American Socialist is an engaging and valuable tool for anyone who seeks to win a world where that kind of freedom reigns supreme.
This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.
