SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
eugene v. debs
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
On Imprisoning Presidential Candidates: From Eugene Debs to Donald Trump
It is hard to imagine Trump serving even any time in prison for the alleged felonies he has committed, let alone anywhere near the 2.5 years served by Debs, the American socialist leader imprisoned for speaking out against war and in favor of civil liberties like free speech. How's that for justice?
Jun 03, 2024
Now that a New York jury convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal hush money paid to a porn star and to evade campaign financial regulations, speculation has begun about his sentencing. Even though his outrageous behavior towards and slander of the district attorney, the judge, the witnesses, and the jury should warrant a punitive sentence, up to and including prison, it is highly unlikely that he will spend any time in jail.
However, for those who argue this is a first-time offense for a white-collar crime, this neglects the whole pattern of lying and fraud for which he and his business associates have already been convicted in a civil case. Moreover, given the credible allegations of rape, and the guilty judgment in the E. Jean Carroll defamation and sexual abuse case, Trump clearly is a serial offender against a whole host of individuals and institutions.
As much as Trump rails against a “rigged” justice system, he has been treated with the kind of latitude and privilege befitting a wealthy white member of the ruling elite.
It is, of course, Trump’s political crimes that constitute other egregious felonies for which he has already been indicted. Unfortunately, through delay and the intervention of a politically compromised U.S. Supreme Court, the Orange Blob has avoided wearing the Orange Suit of a jailed prisoner. In addition, because of the feckless Merrick Garland, Trump’s incitement to insurrection and efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election were not immediately prosecuted. Thus, it may be that Trump avoids going to prison for any of these political crimes.
As much as Trump rails against a “rigged” justice system, he has been treated with the kind of latitude and privilege befitting a wealthy white member of the ruling elite. However, over a century ago, another presidential candidate was not as fortunate when it came to what passed for justice during World War One. While there may be some oblique reference in the mainstream media to the 1920 presidential candidate of the Socialist Party sitting in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, it is important to recount the context in which Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to a ten-year prison term.
Debs, like the majority of the members of the Socialist Party of the United States, opposed the U.S. participation in WWI and denounced conscription as a vehicle for providing “cannon fodder” for the slaughter-fest. The presumption of a constitutional right to free speech, however, was contravened by the passage in 1917 of Espionage Act and in 1918 of the Sedition Act. Under these acts, the Wilson Department of Justice arrested hundreds of prominent opponents of the war and conscription. Indeed, when Debs came to Canton, Ohio in June 1918 to address the Ohio Socialist Party convention, three of its leaders were already serving sentences and being tortured in jail for antiwar speeches.
Addressing the thousands gathered to hear his talk on June 16, 1918, Debs defended the right to free speech during wartime even as he attempted to lay out a carefully constructed criticism of conscription. Nonetheless, there was enough in the address for a Cleveland federal grand jury on June 29, 1918 to indict Debs for alleged violations of both the Espionage and Sedition Acts. During the September 1918 trial, he reminded a jury composed of well-to-do residents of rural and small Ohio towns that “the right of free speech” should be upheld “in war as well as in peace.” Debs did not try to obscure the fact that he opposed the war precisely because it was the “ruling classes that make war upon one another, and not the people.”
Unmoved by Debs’s arguments, the jury found him guilty on all the charges and the judge then sentenced him to ten years in prison. Released on $10,000 bail (nearly a quarter of a million in today’s dollars), he began an appeal process that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Writing for the unanimous decision of the Court on March 10, 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. re-affirmed that Debs’s Canton speech was “seditious.” A little more than one month later, Debs was sent to a maximum-security prison before being transferred to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on June 14, 1919. It was in that facility that Debs received over 900,000 votes in the 1920 presidential election.
Upon being sent to prison, there were requests from progressive and liberal voices, including from AFL union members, for President Wilson to pardon Debs. All those appeals were rebuffed. When Warren Harding took over the presidency in 1921, there was even a louder chorus urging a general amnesty for all those languishing in prison as a consequence of their vocal opposition to WWI. Although rejecting a general amnesty, Harding pardoned Debs in December 1921, commuting the reminder of his ten-year sentence.
It is hard to imagine Trump serving even any time in prison for the alleged felonies he has committed, let alone anywhere near the two and a half years served by Debs. Moreover, if Trump manages by hook or crook (and the arcane electoral college is definitely an antidemocratic hook) to recapture the White House, one can imagine self pardons for federal crimes and the overturning of state crimes. Finally, given Trump’s avowed intentions to punish his political opponents, round up and deport migrants, and to shape his own “Justice” Department, any prospect of a Trump presidency must be viewed with alarm.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Romance Is the New Realism: Eugene Debs and the Age of Corona
In this pandemic-era, it has become increasingly clear that we are only as healthy as the least insured—hence the poorest—in our society.
May 01, 2020
I was first exposed to Eugene Victor Debs through Kurt Vonnegut novels. That sci-fi social critic was a lifelong fan and referenced Debs in several of his books. Since then, mine has been a whirlwind historical love affair. The passion and eloquence of this former worker turned labor leader, and eventual five-time Socialist candidate for president is undeniable. His work and example have spoken to me in different ways at various points in my life--but never before has Debs seemed more relevant.
"While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
His lifelong fight for social justice, and an end to war, did not come without costs. It rarely does. In 1918, Debs was arrested under the Sedition Act--a recent statute that criminalized constitutionally-protected speech--after he delivered peaceful oratory opposed to America's entry into World War I. Later, just after he'd been sentenced to a decade in prison, Debs proclaimed before a Cleveland federal court that:
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Sounds a bit like something Christ might reputedly have said in the early Synoptic Gospels, no? Of course, Debs has always been a secular saint, of sorts, in progressive left and nascent antiwar circles. Still, my love for Debs--and personal penchant for plastering this particular quote on t-shirts and social media--has struck many critics as naive. That is, until now.
Corona's empathy-gift amidst the mass of lonely death is that it demonstrates--in a rather concrete sense--that none are better than the "meanest" (or "sickest") among us. Even the prosperous cannot forever hide, or wall themselves off, from the inequities of the global system. After all, it is often forgotten that Debs, and the socialists of his day, had a distinctly international vision that transcended the illusory boundaries, and "imagined communities," crafted by the powerful.
In this pandemic-era, it has become increasingly clear, per another Debs-enthusiast, Bernie Sanders, that we are only as healthy as the least insured--hence the poorest--in our society. The same may be said of those recently released from behind (domestic) bars or the prison-like boundaries of America's cruel worldwide sanctions-stranglehold regime. For ours is a technologically mobile world in which the virus respects no borders and "speaks" Mandarin just as well as Italian or English.
America's--and the world's--corona response will be put to this "Debs-test," and heaven forbid it be found wanting.
A Lower Class
The COVID-19 outbreak has exposed the liability of carrying a permanent domestic underclass--particularly given the peculiar, ineffectiveness of America's employer-based healthcare system. These under- or un-insured folks also tend to serve the food, pump the gas, and pack the boxes for online delivery that the more privileged in society have come to expect with immediacy. Workers are, so to speak, no longer invisible. The poor can infect and spread disease just as (perhaps more) rapidly as the rich.
What's more, corona has laid bare the immense leverage of the working class--especially those in the service industry--over the bourgeois and wealthy stratums in society. Moving forward, the potential power of a general service strike could be profound. Sure, Jeff Bezos and his--or others'--bureaucratic "company men" can immediately fire Christian Smalls, a strike leader at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse, but his indecently superfluous billions can't counter the moral and rational weight of the striker's position. One wonders if that genie can ever be stuffed back into what was always a rather narrow nozzle of the proverbial bottle.
Can the U.S. afford to continually don the blindfold, bow to the Pentagon fiction that endless war has any other real enemy than the fear of falling military-industrial-complex profits, and ignore the human costs of unnecessary American conflicts of choice?
So too for the foreign indigent in countries and societies utterly unprepared for pandemic. In Africa, for example--where 85 percent of the population still survives on less than $5.50 a day--many national governments are turning to overt civil liberties squelching because, in addition to being power-opportunists, they know implicitly that they are unprepared for even a modest outbreak. Will the obscene global wealth distribution--whereby the richest 10 percent possess 85 percent of the total, and the bottom half claim barely one percent--seem sustainable if and when shattered societies produce refugees on a scale that puts those from the "Arab Winter" to shame?
Furthermore, war, of course, has shown its true colors as history's great epidemic exacerbation device. Can the U.S. afford to continually don the blindfold, bow to the Pentagon fiction that endless war has any other real enemy than the fear of falling military-industrial-complex profits, and ignore the human costs of unnecessary American conflicts of choice? After all, in this moment--though one must question the long-term sincerity--even the very "meanest" among the world's states, the theocratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has called a corona-induced ceasefire to its American-complicit terror war on Yemen. There has never been a better--or more imperative--time for the U.S. to deescalate its own countless far-flung wars, scale-down its national security posture, and prioritize diplomacy and humanitarianism.
A Criminal Element
All too often America is--per its long-standing claims--exceptional, only in all the wrong ways. No other country wages as many aggressive overseas wars, or imprisons quite so much of its own population, as the USA. Seen in this decidedly inconvenient light, Uncle Sam is as criminal as any other nation. The COVID-moment, however, is a time for rare self-awareness, an historical knowledge of national self. As South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission illustrated, only an honest accounting of past crimes opens a clear path to future redemption.
Victim and victimizer become inextricably linked in the folly of foreign war and domestic repression. To channel that Nazarene stoic again, the U.S. must place its own past and present house in order before it "casts stones" of dispersion at even the most flawed "enemy" states. Allow the great corona-equalizer to establish and hold our government to account through a sort of humanitarian litmus test, and one finds the U.S. doesn't stack up so well against Cuba, for example.
Nor, according to the United Nations, and just about every human rights or medical organization, does Washington's "economic warfare" sanctions regime--which is quite literally killing innocents--live up to America's promise. Finally, lest we forget that unnecessary, aggressive wars of choice--which no nation today wages with the alacrity and consistency of the United States--are, according to the postwar Nuremberg Principles (which Washington had a decisive hand in molding), the supreme "crime against peace."
Our Souls in Prison
Even with America's uniquely draconian-sentences, inmates usually return to society, bringing with them the scars of institutional violence, mental health deterioration, the scarlet letter of employment barriers, and now, potentially, the coronavirus.
Prisoners eventually come home. Even with America's uniquely draconian-sentences, inmates usually return to society, bringing with them the scars of institutional violence, mental health deterioration, the scarlet letter of employment barriers, and now, potentially, the coronavirus. It can be distinctly difficult to socially-distance while incarcerated, and so terrifying is the likelihood of an outbreak in these prison petrie-dishes that many inmates nation and worldwide are literally going "over-the-walls" because it is a living nightmare--or "death sentence"--inside.
What can be said about a nation that embarks on a self-proclaimed "Freedom Agenda" abroad whilst simultaneously locking up a higher proportion of its population at home than any other country in the world--including such "enemies" as Russia, China, and Cuba? The hypocrisy is so stark it provokes pure bewilderment. That the U.S. incarcerates at such insane rates leaves the rational man or woman with the stark realization that either there's a uniquely American predisposition to crime, or, far more likely, that the nation's criminal justice system largely invents "criminals" and inherently lacks "justice."
Nor does the United States of Incarceration end at the ocean's edge. The prison-industrial-complex is a two-way street. Mass incarceration is the "empire come home," and vice versa. The Islamic State was largely conceived in America's Iraqi prison farm, and U.S. detainee abuse in Saddam Hussein's old jails helped make "terrorists" out of countless Arabs and Muslims from West Africa to Central Asia. So, in these pandemic times, let us finally admit that Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are Riker's Island, and the police murder of Eric Garner is the military murder of Diluwar of Yakubi at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.
Finally, as Americans ponder the implications of coronavirus's spread within their jails, and in the carceral state that is the world under U.S. military hegemony, it's long past time to consider--per Dostoyevsky--exactly what "the degree of civilization in" American society "can be judged" to be after "entering its prisons."
A "Kinship with All Living Beings"
Eugene Debs lived out, quite literally, the second and third stanzas of his oft-quoted courtroom declaration. Official branded a "criminal element," for a time he was "not free." He'd ultimately serve three years of his ten year sentence in Illinois, West Virginia, and Atlanta's Federal Penitentiary. Nevertheless, in 1920, with a certain ironic flair unique to the man, Debs ran, again--this time from the inside of a cell--on the Socialist ticket for president of the country that jailed him. His campaign buttons sported a photo of a weathered Debs clothed in prison garb in front of his ubiquitous cell bars. The caption read: "For President, Convict No. 9653."
So beloved was this "caged bird's" song, that he still received over 900,000 votes--during the height of the First Red Scare--when it was genuinely dangerous to support such "radical" figures. It was the highest vote tally in U.S. history for a Socialist Party presidential candidate.
Yet today, as a deadly pandemic--that respects neither class nor imaginary national boundaries--rages and exposes the systemic rot of America's domestic structures, and puts the lie to the absurd fiction that far-flung forever war ensures homeland security, my guess is a new Eugene Debs would garner millions more votes. Bernie Sanders may have disappointed his movement--in the interest of not ending up like Ralph Nader--by endorsing the former "senator from MBNA," Joe Biden, and left Americans with the paltry choice between a billionaire race-baiting demagogue and a corporate stooge.
Still, call me crazy, but precisely a century after he had the temerity to run from prison, this moment--and the future--may belong to Eugene Debs.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular