Eugene Victor Debs was born in 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana, to immigrant parents from France. He left school at 14 to work in the railroad yards, scraping paint off locomotives and later shoveling coal as a fireman, one of the most dangerous jobs on the rails. Debs joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and rose quickly, becoming editor of its magazine and its national secretary-treasurer. He also won local office, serving as Terre Haute’s city clerk and as a member of the Indiana legislature, giving him early experience in both the labor movement and politics.

Debs came to believe that railroad workers were weakened by being divided into separate craft unions that companies could play against each other. In 1893 he founded the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the first industrial unions in the country, open to all railroad workers regardless of trade. It was a major step forward, though the union’s members voted to exclude Black workers over Debs’ objection, a decision that hurt the union. The ARU grew to more than 150,000 members within a year and won a major strike against the Great Northern Railway. In 1894, it backed workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company, who had their wages slashed while their rents in the company town stayed the same. The union’s boycott of Pullman cars shut down rail traffic across much of the country until the federal government obtained a court injunction and President Cleveland sent in troops. The strike was crushed, the ARU was destroyed, and Debs was jailed for six months.

Prison changed Debs. He saw that courts, troops, and politicians had sided with corporations, and he concluded that workers needed political power of their own. He became a socialist, helped found the Socialist Party of America, and ran for president five times. In 1912 he won about 6 percent of the national vote. When he spoke out against US entry into World War I, he was convicted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. In 1920 he ran for president from his cell as Convict No. 9653 and received more than 900,000 votes. At his sentencing he declared, “while there is a lower class, I am in it.” President Harding commuted his sentence in 1921, and Debs died in 1926.

Debs and Samuel Gompers represent two paths for labor politics: Gompers rewarded friends within the existing parties, while Debs believed workers needed a political movement of their own. That debate is still alive today. For organizers, Debs’ life offers lasting lessons. Workers are strongest when they organize across job titles and divisions, solidarity fails when any group of workers is excluded, and a win at work can be erased unless workers also build power in government.