By Scott A. Grant
mail@floridanewsline.com
In the late 1800s carrying over in the next century, the Socialist Party in the United States reached the apex of its popularity. It was a time of pronounced wealth disparity and atrocious conditions for workers. Robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie amassed immense fortunes. At the same time, many poor women and children labored 10-hour days, six days a week for mere pennies.
Angered by these seeming inequities, downtrodden Americans embraced a variety of leftist movements like labor unions, anarchism, and socialism. The pre-eminent socialist of the time, Eugene V. Debs of Indiana, would run for President five times, the fifth and final time from the confines of a federal prison in Atlanta.
Debs became famous as a union organizer. He co-founded the International Workers of the World (IWW) and the American Railway Union (ARU). In his role at ARU, Debs was seen as a leader of the debilitating Pullman Strike of 1894. When President Grover Cleveland sent troops to break that strike, Debs was charged and convicted of contempt of court and sentenced to six months in prison.
His jailing just made him more popular with the disgruntled working class and led directly to his first run for President in 1900. Debs ran as the standard bearer for the Social Democratic Party of America. He received 0.6 percent of the vote. He ran again in 1904 and 1908 receiving about three percent of the vote in each of those elections.
In the election of 1912, the Socialist ticket carried six percent of the vote nationally. This is still the most successful performance by a Socialist candidate in American history. Debs found himself running against three Presidents: former President Teddy Roosevelt, current President William Howard Taft, and soon to be future President Woodrow Wilson.
Despite this formidable opposition, Debs did well nationally and even better in some states. In Florida, he finished second to Wilson, ahead of both Roosevelt and Taft with more than nine percent to the total vote. Taft and Roosevelt split the tiny Republican minority and Debs took advantage of rising pro-socialist sentiment in the poorer sections of the state. In St. Johns County, he received more than 10 percent of the vote.
Eugene Debs sat out the 1916 election, but became a vocal opponent of America’s involvement in World War I. Following a speech in Canton, Ohio in 1918, he was arrested and convicted of sedition under the Espionage Act of 1917. Debs lost his citizenship and was sentenced to 10 years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
Debs ran for a fifth and final time for President in 1920 from his prison cell. Warren G. Harding ran a “Front Porch Campaign.” Neither man campaigned actively. Harding ran on a campaign slogan of “America First,” and promised a “return to normalcy.” Debs ran as convict No. 9653. Democrat James M. Cox and his running mate Franklin D. Roosevelt won most of the south. Harding took the rest.
This was the first election where women were allowed to vote. With an expanded electorate, Debs polled a record 914,000 votes. No Socialist candidate before or since has gotten as many votes. President Harding commuted Debs’ sentence and freed him on Christmas Day 1921. His US citizenship was returned posthumously in 1976.
Scott A. Grant is a local historian and author who enjoys telling the forgotten stories of our past. He welcomes your comments at scottg@standfastic.com
