Eugene V. Debs

(1855 - 1926)

Eugene V. Debs dropped out of school at age fourteen and left Terre Haute, Indiana, to work for a railroad, eventually becoming a locomotive firefighter and president of the American Railway Union. During his prison term for leading the Chicago Pullman Palace Car Company strike in 1895, he started reading Karl Marx, which led to his repeated presidential campaigns on the Socialist Party ticket. In 1920 he received nearly a million votes, his personal best, while imprisoned for advocating against the World War I military draft. His sedition case went to the Supreme Court, where it was upheld; he lost his U.S. citizenship as a result. The Senate resolution restoring Debs’ citizenship in 1976, fifty years after his death, noted that “his ultimate goal in the true American tradition was the fullest and most meaningful human freedom and liberty for all citizens” and that “no citizen of these United States has since been sentenced to prison for speaking out against war.”