Eugene V. Debs--American Socialist and Freethinker

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The name of Debs is known in America as a labor leader, and several times a Presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, the last time receiving almost a million votes when he was in the Federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia in 1920. But few are aware of his long-standing and significant connections to the Freethought movement.

His parents came from Colmar in Alsace. His father’s people had supported the French Revolution, and Daniel (the father) became a pronounced Freethinker. He married a Catholic woman, and they came to America in late 1848, settling in Terre Haute, on the western border of the State of Indiana. While their first four children were baptized in the local Catholic cathedral, by the time of Eugene’s birth in 1855, his parents agreed the ceremony was unnecessary.

The family was proud of their radical French heritage. Their new son was named, in fact, for Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. In later life, Gene recalled "the first book my father ever gave me was a copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary," and he declared that Voltaire was "a Titan upon the World’s vast stage. The American people are densely, pitifully ignorant of him."

While young Gene was not obliged to attend church, one day he found himself at a mass in the cathedral. "The priest," he remembered, "delivered an address on Hell. I shall never forget it as long as I live. He pictured a thousand demons and devils with horns and bristling tails, clutching pitchforks steeped in brimstone, and threatening to consume all who did not accept the interpretation of Christianity as given by the priest. I left that church with a rich and royal hatred of the priest as a person, and a loathing for the church as an institution, and I vowed that I would never go inside a church again."

Similarly, when in school, he received a Bible as a prize in a spelling contest. Inside, the teacher wrote: "Read and obey." Debs later remarked: "I never did either."

Debs early went to work on the railroad, and the first period of his life is marked by his rise to office in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen for workers who shoveled coal into the boilers of steam engines.

Debs was jailed after the defeat of the Pullman strike in 1894, an important milestone in his political radicalization. At the turn of the century, he helped found the Socialist Party of America. Today it is difficult to realize the extent of the socialist movement at that time. While it was not officially a party newspaper, the Appeal to Reason newspaper, published in the small southeast Kansas town of Girard, had 500,000 subscribers, and was the largest circulation socialist newspaper in the world before World War I. While it was not formally a Freethought publication, its name suggests its general philosophical orientation.

The Socialist Party was large and diverse enough to include all types of people, from respectable politicians and Christian ministers, to militant "direct action" miners. However, it is also notable that some of its minister members had been forced out of their denominations and out of their original churches. Similarly, Debs often noted, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church steadfastly opposed the Socialists.

As in Europe, the outbreak of World War I split the Socialist Party in America. There is not room here to describe that situation in detail, but Debs himself, and most of the grassroots militants, opposed the war, and condemned Socialists who became Social Chauvinists. Many comrades went to prison for speaking and organizing against the war. By the spring of 1918, Debs felt that he could not leave them to their fate, but had to defend them outright. In a speech in Canton, Ohio, where three Socialists were in jail, Debs condemned the war in decisive terms. His prosecution and conviction soon followed. At age sixty-three, he was sentenced to ten years in prison.

When he arrived at Atlanta, he learned that attendance at chapel was compulsory for all prisoners; complying only once, Debs determined to refuse thereafter. The prison authorities ended the chapel rule. Always sympathetic and popular, Debs soon became a friend to hundreds of his fellow inmates. While in prison, he read the entire Bible for the first time, and was horrified at the cruel God of the Old Testament. Curiously, the only picture Debs kept in his cell was one of Jesus Christ. When a minister visited him, Debs recalled, "I told my friend of the cloth that I did not believe Christ was meek and lowly, but a real, living, vital agitator who went into the Temple with a lash and a knout and whipped the oppressors of the poor." Christ was attacked "not because he told men to love one another. That was a harmless doctrine. But when he touched their profits and denounced them before their own people he was marked for crucifixion."

After two years in prison, Debs was pardoned by President Harding at Christmas, 1921. The splitting of the Socialist Party grieved him, but with advanced age and infirmity, there was nothing he could achieve to make it whole. During his latter years, which ended with his death in 1926, Debs was often described by those who knew him as a kind of secular saint, who had remained loyal to his principles. But clearly in his personal views on religion, and in his published articles and letters, he was a Freethinker.

Today the Debs Home, a modest white frame house in Terre Haute is a shrine to his life, the labor movement, and the Socialist Party. Information can be obtained by writing the Debs Foundation, Box 843, Terre Haute, Indiana 47808.