🇺🇸 U.S. Badass: Eugene V. Debs

Eugene V. Debs ran for President of the United States five times, went to prison for it once, and got nearly a million votes while sitting in a federal penitentiary. He was not a fringe figure. He was, for a period of American history that gets conveniently underplayed, one of the most popular political figures in the country — and the government eventually decided the only way to deal with him was to lock him up for the crime of giving a speech.

Born in 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs started as a railroad worker and became one of the most effective labor organizers of the 19th century. He founded the American Railway Union and led the Pullman Strike of 1894, a nationwide railroad shutdown that got him federal prison time for the first time — six months for violating a court injunction. He went in a labor organizer and came out a socialist, having spent his sentence reading Marx and concluding that the entire economic system, not just individual bad employers, was the actual problem.

He co-founded the Socialist Party of America in 1901 and ran for president five separate times — 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 — building the party into a genuine national political force. In 1912 he won 6 percent of the popular vote, nearly a million ballots, running on public ownership of railroads and utilities, an eight-hour workday, women's suffrage, and the abolition of child labor. Positions that sounded radical in 1912 and are now, largely, uncontroversial policy in most developed democracies.

Then World War I happened, and Debs did the thing that got him destroyed by the state: he gave a speech in Canton, Ohio in June 1918 opposing the draft and American involvement in the war, arguing that working class men were being sent to die for capitalist interests that had nothing to do with them. Under the Espionage Act of 1917 — a law explicitly designed to criminalize dissent against the war — Debs was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison for the crime of expressing a political opinion out loud.

He ran for president a fifth time in 1920 from a prison cell in Atlanta. Federal prisoner number 9653 received 913,693 votes running a campaign entirely from inside a penitentiary, with no ability to travel, no meaningful media access, and a federal government that considered his continued existence in public life a problem to be managed. President Woodrow Wilson — the same Wilson who screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House — refused to grant him clemency out of personal contempt. Wilson's successor, Warren Harding, commuted his sentence in 1921. Debs walked out of prison to a crowd of 50,000 supporters.

His health never recovered from the imprisonment. He died in 1926 at 70, five years after his release, his body worn down by years in federal custody for the specific crime of telling the truth about who profits from war and who dies in it.

They gave him ten years for a speech. He gave them back nearly a million votes from inside a cell. That's not a symbolic victory. That's an actual accounting of who the public believed.

"While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

This week's U.S. Badass got a ten-year federal sentence for opposing a war on behalf of the working class — and ran for president from his cell anyway, because a locked door was never going to be the thing that shut him up.