Eugene Victor Debs Eugene Victor Debs example essay topic

Eugene Victor Debs Eugene Victor Debs was the most well known as a leader of the American Socialist Party. Eugene Debs had no executive positions but he was most popular leader of the socialist movements in American history. He was a revolutionary and he wanted to establish a socialism in America. Eugene V. Debs was born on fifth of the November, 1855. His father Jean Daniel Debs small storekeeper was originally from the Colmar, Alsace and emigrated with his wife Marguerite Marie Debs to Terre Haute, Indiana.

Eugene Victor was named for two writers Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. Eugene Debs was five years old when the Civil war has started. Gene had extraordinary memory and desire to learn, he became bored with the infinite repetition of studies in reading, writing, and ciphering, therefore Eugene has decided to leave the school in 1870 and to take job in railroad engine house. At that time, Eugene Victor, thin, tall, about six feet tall, with angular power boy, began cleaning oil from the trucks of freight engines.

Everybody in Terre Haute liked Gene for his open-handed and genuine manner. By 1872 he was promoted to locomotive fireman in Terre Haute. In 1874 Eugene became a clerk in a wholesale grocery business, helping to found the next year the first local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman. Finally, in the autumn of 1874, Eugene left his job after one of his friends slipped under a locomotive and was killed. In July 1877, the railroad workers revolted against their working conditions; employers ignored their revolt and made things worse: Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio cut their wages. Thousands of workers left their working places and made mass disorder.

These events confused and stunned Eugene Debs. In 1878 Gene become associate editor of the Locomotive Firemen's magazine and in 1880 he was promoted to the magazine's editor as well as treasurer and grand secretary of Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. However, the union effort was not successful first few years. In 1880 Debs was elected for the City Clerk in Terre Haute and in 1881 he ran for re-election. In spite of he was elected a City Clerk, Eugene worked every night in the Brotherhood. Debs was impressing his coworkers how he worked with an insistence On 1882 convention his contribution of Brotherhood member growth gave him new prestige.

Eugene Victor needed money, when in January 1884 his second term as City Clerk expired. He was broke, he ate whatever he could find and slept wherever it happened to be. In 1883 the depression had been started and was cutting living standards. By January 1885 When Debs has sworn into the state House if Representatives, he had already made a bill which would require railroad companies to compensate their employees for injuries suffered on duty. In that year Eugene was elected to one term in the lower house of the Indiana legislature. On June 1885, despite Eugene was broke, he got married on Katherine M etzel in St. Stephen Church.

However, Kate learned through the marriage what is it to be a wife of a labor leader; Debs was gone from Terre Haute for weeks, when he came home he was often tired and exhausted. In 1892 Debs left the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and next year he found the American Railway Union. The American Railway Union is the labor organization was welcome to all railroad workers. The first major strike against James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad had been won on eighteen's day of struggle. But later that year, the union was destroyed in the Pullman Co. struggle. Debs was sent to jail for six months in contempt of court.

In prison Eugene studied socialism and met socialist leaders. In 1896 Debs supported William Jennings Bryan in election for president, but the next year Eugene organized the Social Democratic party of America. By 1904 he becomes a presidential candidate of the Socialist party. Debs was had been president of the Socialist party five different times: in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. In 1918, at the beginning of the World War I, Eugene Debs gave speech to Ohio Socialists in which he exposed the war.

The federal government accused Debs under the Espionage Act. He was sent to jail for ten years. On December, 1921, Debs was finally discharged by president Warren Harding. After, in 1919, Communists split off from the party, Eugene, after he was released, wanted to unite the communists with socialists. Again, in 1924 Debs supported Senator Robert M. LaFollette for election of president of United States. Eugene V. Debs dies on October 20, 1926, at Lindlahr Sanitarium in Illinois.

Eugene Victor Debs was struggling for his ideal of Socialism, however he could not do anything with it, because it was utopia-nobody can be equal, and equality as we know is the ideal of socialism.