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eugene v. debs
Eugene V. Debs, Defender of American Liberty
Released from jail on this day 130 years ago, the great socialist and labor leader delivered a speech we would do well to remember in these perilous times.
Nov 22, 2025
On November 22, 1895, Eugene V. Debs was released from Woodstock Jail, where he had been imprisoned for six months for his leadership of the 1894 Pullman strike. Later that day, before a large crowd of supporters at Battery D in Chicago, he spoke on the topic of “Liberty.”
Debs was a great orator, and “Liberty” is a brilliant speech, powerfully evoking both “the spirit of liberty” heralded by the Declaration of Independence, and the promise of a freedom yet to be redeemed by American workers in thrall to plutocratic government. As Nick Salvatore noted in his classic biography, Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, this speech marked an important moment in the evolution of Debs from a radically republican labor activist to the country’s leading socialist.
Debs notes his own situation, “stripped of my constitutional rights as a freeman and shorn of the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship.” He proceeds to defend the American Railway Union as a necessary and legitimate organization of workers, and the strike as a legitimate means of pursuing justice, which” threw down no gauntlet to courts or armies—it simply resisted the invasion of the rights of workingmen by corporations.”
An adamant defense of worker rights, the speech’s overriding theme is unmistakably the political theme of “liberty” and indeed democracy. This is clear from Debs’s opening words:
Manifestly the spirit of ’76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty and as despisers of despotism. I comprehend the significance of this demonstration and appreciate the honor that makes it possible for me to be your guest on such an occasion. The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.
The entire first half of the speech centers on the theme of “personal liberty; or giving it its full height, depth, and breadth, American liberty, something that Americans have been accustomed to eulogize since the foundation of the Republic.” Paying tribute to the republic’s founding—"For the first time in the records of all the ages, the inalienable rights of man, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ were proclaimed July 4, 1776”—Debs proceeds to wax poetically, for eight long paragraphs, about the enduring resonance of that 1776 proclamation, the indivisibility of liberty, and the “more than satanic crime of stealing the jewel of liberty from the crown of manhood and reducing the victim of the burglary to slavery or to prison.” It is for this crime that he morally indicts the railroad magnates and their federal government allies for breaking the strike and imprisoning its leaders.
Debs insists that it is the labor movement that most embodies “the spirit of ’76”:
To the unified hosts of American working men fate has committed the charge of rescuing American liberties from the grasp of the vandal horde that have placed them in peril, by seizing the ballot and wielding it to regain the priceless heritage and to preserve and transmit it without scar or blemish to the generations yet to come.
The ballot, Debs notes approvingly, “has been called a weapon that executes a free man’s will as lighting does the will of God.” Debs rhapsodizes in almost religious tones about the power of democratic elections:
There is nothing in our government it cannot remove or amend. It can make and unmake presidents and congresses and courts. It can abolish unjust laws and consign to eternal odium and oblivion unjust judges, strip from them their robes and gowns and send them forth unclean as lepers to bear the burden of merited obloquy as Cain with the mark of a murderer. It can sweep away trusts, syndicates, corporations, monopolies, and every other abnormal development of the money power designed to abridge the liberties of workingmen and enslave them by the degradation incident to poverty and enforced idleness, as cyclones scatter the leaves of the forest. The ballot can do all this and more. It can give our civilization its crowning glory—the cooperative commonwealth.
Debs appreciated the rhetorical and the inspirational power of the dissenting American political tradition that hearkened back to the Revolution and its “spirit of ’76,” a tradition that included his heroes Jefferson, Paine, Garrison, Phillips, Lincoln, and Anthony. And he firmly believed that civil liberties and regular democratic elections represented forms of genuine if precarious social progress whose defense and expansion offered real opportunities for the furtherance of social and economic justice. He was, in short, a democrat.
He ended his speech with the hope that “American lovers of liberty are setting in operation forces to rescue their constitutional liberties from the grasp of monopoly and its mercenary hirelings.” That hope was not in vain, even if the Pullman strike was suppressed and Debs twice found himself in prison for refusing to be silenced, in 1895 and then in 1918 when imprisoned for his famous “Canton address,” critiquing WWI. The labor movement he helped to lead played a crucial role in advancing many of the policies—from the 8-hour workday to occupational safety and health regulation to “social security” broadly understood—that most Americans today simply take for granted. Debs was indeed one of the 20th century’s true crusaders for civil liberties and democratic inclusion. And his distinctive vision of a democratic socialism established an enduring legacy whose most recent heir is New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, who indeed quoted Debs in his victory speech.
At a time when the Trump administration is attacking liberty on a daily basis, targeting everyone on the left as a “radical lunatic” and “enemy from within,” and seeking to destroy the very possibility of political dissent and opposition, Debs’s paean to “Liberty” on November 22, 1895—and his commitment to its active promotion—has never been more relevant.Keep ReadingShow Less
Mamdani Won New York City, But the Battle for Winning a Working-Class Agenda Has Just Begun
The battle for a more affordable and egalitarian society is just beginning. Leaders like Zohran Mamdani need to gain even deeper traction with working-class voters, no matter how working class is defined and no matter their racial identity—if they want to win.
Nov 07, 2025
It truly is amazing that a Democratic Socialist has become mayor of the largest city in the United States, and that in the first line of his acceptance speech he quoted Eugene V. Debs, the brave socialist labor leader who was imprisoned in 1985 during the Pullman Strike and again in 1918 for his opposition to WWI:
“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”
Mamdani’s youth, charisma, humor, and incredible organizational skills led to this remarkable achievement. He worked hard and he earned it, and so did the many progressive groups that supported him.
Mamdani may have the abilities and the working-class agenda to become a major transformational political leader. Free buses, free childcare, and a rent freeze are concrete and achievable, but the opposition will be fierce, especially as he intends to increase taxes on the rich and corporations to pay for these programs. And powerful landlords will be up in arms. This is the definition of class struggle.
There will be major battles ahead that won’t be settled by Mamdani’s charisma and negotiating skills alone.
Mamdani is operating in the belly of the beast called runaway inequality. It’s nearly impossible to wrap our minds around the wealth that’s concentrated in New York. There are 123 billionaires living in NYC with a combined net worth more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars. And those numbers are surely an underestimate, given the many who have hidden their purchases of luxurious Manhattan apartments using shell companies.
To succeed against the rich and powerful, Mamdani will need a mass movement behind him, and that movement has to include enthusiastic support and the active participation of New York’s working class and labor unions.
Does he already have it? Is his victory the result of overwhelming support from highly educated liberals? Or has his working-class agenda also excited the working class more broadly, the way Eugene Debs did when he received nearly a million votes in his run for president in 1912?
All we have to go by, right now, are the exit polls, which aren’t really designed to include a clear demographic definition of the working class. But there is some suggestive information.
Let’s start with the standard media definition of working class based on education: You are often counted as being in the working class if you don’t have a four-year college degree. By this definition, Mamdani received most of his support from college-educated voters and ran behind Cuomo among working-class voters.
- New Yorkers are well educated: 58 percent of all the voters in this election had a four-year college degree or higher.
- This highly educated group overwhelmingly supported Mamdani over Cuomo, 57 percent to 37 percent.
- But Mamdani ran behind Cuomo among those who never attended college, 41 percent to 48 percent. One out of five voters are in this group.
The picture becomes blurrier if working-class is defined as having a lower income. New York voters are fairly evenly split between those whose family income is less than $100,000 year (58%), and those with $100,000 or more in family income (42%). And Mamdani’s support was identical between the two groups (51%), an almost exact match with his final vote of 51.5 percent.
But a closer look at the income brackets shows that Mamdani didn’t do as well with those with family incomes under $30,000. That group accounts for 16 percent of all voters. They favored Cuomo 50 percent to Mamdani’s 41 percent. But Mamdani won every other income bracket except those with family incomes of $300,000 or more, which he lost to Cuomo 61 percent to 34 percent. No way was a Democratic Socialist going to do well with the group he promised to tax more heavily to pay for his agenda.
Cutting it up into two income slices, Mamdani did slightly better with upper-income voters than lower-income voters. Those with family incomes of less than $50,000 gave 47 percent of their votes to Mamdani, and those with more than $50,000 supported him with 52 percent of their votes.
Revenge of the White Working Class?
Unlike Debs, Mamdani did not come out of the labor movement. He’s well-educated, an Asian immigrant born in Africa, and Muslim. Was that all too much for the allegedly racist white working-class? The exit polls don’t provide the crosstabs to give us definitive answers, but we can get some clues.
Here’s Mamdani’s support by ethnicity (of all educational and income groups):
- White 46 %
- Black 55 %
- Hispanic 49 %
- Asian 61 %
- Other 51 %
It’s hard to point the finger at white racism when support for Mamdani is almost identical between white voters and Hispanic voters. The big outlier is Asian, Mamdani’s own ethnic group.
The breakdown by gender shows less support among white men, but again the gaps are not gigantic:
- White men 43%
- White women 48%
- Black men 60%
- Black women 52%
- Hispanic men 52%
- Hispanic women 48%
Since we don’t know the income or education levels of these white men it’s not possible to see if working-class white men were less supportive, but that’s probably the case given the overall lower Mamdani numbers among those without four-year college degrees. However, while it’s not possible to tease apart racial identity and class when it comes to working-class voters of all shades, nothing big jumps out to suggest that this contest was about racial identity.
Mamdani needs those working-class voters, no matter how working class is defined and no matter what their ethnicity. He’s developed enormous support among liberal, well-educated New Yorkers, and that’s all to the good. But to take on the world’s richest, most powerful elites, that enthusiasm must spread deeply into the working class, where—even in New York—MAGA festers.
There will be major battles ahead that won’t be settled by Mamdani’s charisma and negotiating skills alone. That will require a mass movement in support of the progressive ideas the city’s new mayor campaigned on, the kind of movement New York hasn’t seen since the 1930s. Let’s hope Mamdani can reach even more deeply into the working class to strengthen his support. He’s going to need them.
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Labor Day, Chicago, and Presidential Despotism Then and Now
Trump is poised to commemorate Labor Day this week by reenacting on the streets of Chicago one of the most dictatorial and violent acts of federal repression in U.S. history.
Sep 01, 2025
On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday.
Five days later, on July 3, 1894, Cleveland dispatched two thousand U.S. Army troops to Chicago, Illinois to suppress the Pullman strike, over the objections of the city’s mayor and the state’s governor.
Much separates that situation from the very situation facing Chicago, and the entire country, today in the face of Donald Trump’s threats to militarize our cities. Yet the parallels are striking. And so, this Labor Day, it is worth revisiting that earlier ignominious episode, to be reminded that conflict, violence, and repression are central features of U.S. history, and to remember that there have always been Americans willing to stand up to the repression, even at the risk of their jobs, their liberties, and their very lives.
The strike, which had begun in May 1894 as a wildcat action by workers at the Pullman Company’s Chicago factory, had within weeks snowballed into an enormous boycott, organized by the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU), that involved approximately 250,000 workers spread across over twenty states. The boycott brought interstate rail transport to a standstill. At the instigation of Attorney General Richard Olney, working in tandem with Pullman managers and allies, the federal government responded by obtaining a federal court injunction against the union and its boycott, and then mobilizing federal troops, along with thousands of other U.S. marshals and state militia, to enforce the injunction. Within weeks the strike was broken, the union offices ransacked, and upwards of a dozen people were killed and over fifty wounded by the violent escalation caused by the military deployment. In addition, six union leaders, most famously ARU President Eugene V. Debs, were arrested; convicted of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act; and sentenced to prison terms of up to six months for their role in organizing the boycott.
The suppression of the strike, a major episode in U.S. history, is inextricably linked to the history of the federal Labor Day holiday that Americans celebrate every year.
“As Americans, we have boasted of our liberties and continue to boast of them. They were once the nation’s glory, and, if some have vanished, it may be well to remember that a remnant still remains.” —Eugene V. Debs
It was also a turning point in the evolution of Debs, who emerged from prison radicalized both as a labor leader and as an increasingly vocal public figure, who went on to be a founder and unrivalled leader of the Socialist Party of America, and who eventually ran for U.S. president five times as that party’s candidate. Debs’s speech, “Liberty,” given on November 22, 1895 upon his release from Woodstock Jail, is one of the great speeches in American history. It is a speech that ought to be revisited every Labor Day, but it has a special resonance this year, in the face of Donald Trump’s very public plans to once again deploy armed federal forces on the streets of Chicago, Boston, and other cities.
Debs began his speech by invoking America’s revolutionary origins:
Manifestly the spirit of ’76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty and as despisers of despotism. I comprehend the significance of this demonstration and appreciate the honor that makes it possible for me to be your guest on such an occasion. The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.
He then proceeded to describe the government’s suppression of the Pullman strike as a “flagrant violation of the Constitution, the total abrogation of law and the usurpation of judicial and despotic power” that stripped the ARU leadership, and by extension all strikers, of their “constitutional rights . . . [and] the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship.” He then outlined the more general significance of the repression in ways that have clear current relevance:
. . .[T]he defeat of the American Railway Union involved questions of law, constitution and government which, all things considered, are without a parallel in court and governmental proceedings under the Constitution of the Republic. And it is this judicial and administrative usurpation of power to override the rights of states and strike down the liberties of the people that has conferred upon the incidents connected with the Pullman strike such commanding importance as to attract the attention of men of the highest attainments in constitutional law and of statesmen who, like Jefferson, view with alarm the processes by which the Republic is being wrecked and a despotism reared upon its ruins. . .
The ways that the suppression of the strike influenced Debs have been analyzed in a number of classic biographies, and they deserve sustained attention.
But here I want to shift the focus from Debs to another protagonist of the Pullman drama, the man that Debs admired and eulogized as “the Liberator”: John Peter Altgeld, the liberal Democratic Governor of Illinois who strongly opposed Grover Cleveland’s deployment of federal troops, and remained an outspoken critic of the deployment and what it represented. As Debs put it:
In the railroad strikes in 1894 he expanded to his true proportions. There he proved to be the fearless champion of the people. He stood upon the boundary line of Illinois and protested against the military usurpation of the President, and though overwhelmed, he proudly vindicated his high honor, and he, more than any other man, retired Grover Cleveland and his pirate crew from American politics.
Altgeld, to be clear, was no labor activist, as Debs well knew. In his capacity as Governor, he had on occasion deployed state troopers to quell strike-related violence, and had unabashedly justified such deployments, in circumstances that warranted them, as part of his job as Governor and chief law enforcement officer of the state. But the way that he approached his executive authority, and publicly articulated his commitment to upholding the law, made him, for Debs, “in the highest sense a statesman.”
When the strike broke out, Altgeld publicly criticized the exploitative conditions at Pullman that had precipitated the strike. And as Pullman and its allies began accusing the striking workers of stopping rail traffic by force, laying the grounds for the strike’s violent suppression weeks later, Altgeld insisted that the vast majority of the strikers were law-abiding citizens; that the primary reason rail traffic was halted was an insufficient number of workers willing to cross a picket line; and that the best way for rail traffic to be restored was for the workers’ demands to be heard.
Altgeld was ignored, overridden by President Cleveland’s military deployment, and eventually defeated in his bid for re-election. But he was unbowed.
In 1896, he gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York City entitled “Federal Interference in the Chicago Strike” (the most important primary documents related to the strike are collected in an extraordinary book edited and introduced by Colston E. Warne, entitled The Pullman Boycott of 1894: The Problem of Federal Intervention, and published in 1955 by D.C. Heath). The speech presented a withering critique of Grover Cleveland’s deployment of federal troops that centered on respect for the rule of law and the “spirit of the laws” in a democracy.
Altgeld began by observing that as Governor he had always adhered to a simple rule—if local law enforcement officers requested assistance, he would offer it, within the limits of the law. This policy had on his account proven quite successful. Until June of 1894 in Chicago, when “five days in advance of any trouble,” Olney and Cleveland “decided to reverse the policy and practice of the government and take an entirely new departure by setting a precedent of having the President interfere at pleasure and having the . . . United States government take the corporations directly under their wings . . . in order to have the American people submit to the violation of the Constitution and the laws of the land as well as of every principle of self-government. . . the trouble at Chicago was, by systematic effort and deliberate misrepresentation, so magnified as to make it seem that we were bordering on anarchy, and that consequently federal interference was necessary.”
In his speech, Altgeld quoted from his direct appeal to President Cleveland on July 5 to withdraw the troops, in which he reiterated that there was little serious disorder in Chicago, and that the state was ready and able to keep the peace, and needed no federal intervention. Altgeld observed in the appeal that “the newspaper accounts have in many cases been pure fabrications, and in others wild exaggeration,” and insisted that there was no national emergency that could possibly justify deploying the U.S. army in an American city, and that “local self-government is a fundamental principle of our Constitution.”
Altgeld’s letter to Cleveland minced no words: “As Governor of the State of Illinois, I protest against this, and ask the immediate withdrawal of the federal troops from active duty in this state.”
Cleveland rebuffed Altgeld in a terse reply, to which Altgeld then responded with a long, point by point rebuttal, reproduced in his speech. Its central argument was clearly stated. If the President:
has the legal right to order Federal troops into any community of the United States . . . whenever there is the slightest disturbance . . . without regard to the question as to whether that community is able to and ready to enforce the law itself . . at his pleasure, and can keep them [the troops] there as long as he chooses . . [then] the principle of self-government either never did exist in this country, or else has been destroyed, for no community can be said to possess local self-government, if the executive can, at his pleasure, send military forces to patrol its streets under pretense of enforcing some law. The kind of local self-government that could exist under these circumstances can be found in any of the monarchies of Europe, and it is not in harmony with the spirit of our institutions.
In short, two years after the fact, Altgeld was saying quite clearly that President Cleveland’s decision to ignore the most reliable accounts of the facts on the ground, and to supersede the explicit appeal of the Governor, represented nothing less than a tyrannical violation of the U.S. Constitution that threatened not simply the striking workers or the city of Chicago but every citizen in the entire country.
That was then, and this is now.
As this year’s “No Kings!” demonstrations emphasized, in the half-year since assuming office, President Trump has every day acted more and more like a monarch or a dictator. In recent weeks the Trump administration has federalized the National Guard, and deployed U.S. military personnel, in Los Angeles and in Washington, DC, overriding the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. Last week, Trump signed an executive order creating “specialized” National Guard units under the direct command of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to be deployed “to deal with public order issues” in a range of American cities.
And by all accounts, Trump plans in the coming week to deploy such federal armed forces on the streets of Chicago, over the strong objections of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has now signed an executive order denouncing the militarization of his city; calling on Trump to “stand down”; pledging that city police will not cooperate with the deployed federal forces; and directing all city officials to “pursue all available legal and legislative avenues to resist coordinated efforts from the federal government” that violate the rights of Chicagoans.
Last week, Trump issued a Labor Day “Proclamation” calling upon “all public officials and people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that honor the contributions and resilience of working Americans.” He surely knows little if anything about the working class history that he invokes, just as he cares little about the public and private sector workers whose unions he seeks to weaken and destroy, including the millions of immigrant workers he seeks to harass, detain, and deport. But on the basis of what Altgeld called “pure fabrications” and “wild exaggerations,” i.e., lies, Trump is poised to commemorate Labor Day this week by reenacting on the streets of Chicago one of the most dictatorial and violent acts of federal repression in U.S. history.
In his 1895 “Liberty” speech, Debs noted that: “As Americans, we have boasted of our liberties and continue to boast of them. They were once the nation’s glory, and, if some have vanished, it may be well to remember that a remnant still remains.” That remnant, which at key moments in the 20th century seemed to expand, seems now to be shrinking by the day. Whether it will survive the next few years is an open question.
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