LIFE OF EUGENE DEBS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVII, Issue 8, 7 December 1926, Page 11

LIFE OF EUGENE DEBS.

STRANGE, EVENTFUL HISTORY. ECHO OF A GREAT STRIKE. SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 3. Eugene Debs, the internationally known Socialist, who has died at Chicago at the age of 71, had a strange and meteoric career, the most striking incident of which was the fact he received a million votes for the office of President while ho was in gaol. Born in Indiana, Mr Debfe was for five years a locomotive fireman and spent five years in a grocery warehouse. His activities during the next few years were divided between railroading and politics. Ho was city clerk of liis native town for four years, and was then elected to the Indiana Legislature. He opened his Labour activties in 1880, when he was chosen secretary and treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Then lie became president of the American Railway Union, which refused to haul Pullman cars in the big railway strike in the later nineties, which hit Chicago and 'the central western States very hard.

Rioting and destruction followed. President Cleveland opposed the strike, and restored order with Federal troops. Mr Debs was sent to gaol for contempt of Court. Mr W. H. Taft, later President, now Chief Justice of the United States, was a Judge at the time, and issued the writ. It was the greatest railway strike in American history. After six months in prison Mr Debs became a Socialist lecturer, writer and organiser. His sister is quoted as saying, just after his death, that he paid from his lecture earnings the sum of £IO,OOO which the union owed after the strike. Mr Debs made his first bid for the Presidency in 1900, when he got 87,814 votes. He ran again in 1904, 1903 and 1912 securing nearly a million votes at the fourth time, after a country-wido tour in a special train. About a million votes were also cast for him in 1920, when he was a prisoner in the Federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Georgia. Ho had been sent there for a speech he made in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, in which he assailed the United States part in the war. He reiterated the speech when he faced the Judge and Jury. Ho was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment on a. charge of attempting to obstruct the draft. President Wilson turned, a deaf ear to appeals on Mr Dcbs’s behalf, and it was not until Christmas, <1921, that ho was released, at the order of President Harding. When he left prison, his friends predicted that he would* not

live long. He suffered a nervous-break-down, recovered and retired from politics. With the late Mr Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labour ; Mr Debs had some bitter controversies. Mr Gompers leaned toward the Democratic Party, but backed Republican Congressmen and others when they were friendly to Labour.