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Eugene V. Debs

Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.

Early in his political career, Debs was a member of the Democratic Party. He was elected as a Democrat to the Indiana General Assembly in 1884. After working with several smaller unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs led his union in a major ten-month strike against the CB&Q Railroad in 1888. Debs was instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the nation's first industrial unions. After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organized a wildcat strike over pay cuts in the summer of 1894, Debs signed many into the ARU. He led a boycott by the ARU against handling trains with Pullman cars in what became the nationwide Pullman Strike, affecting most lines west of Detroit and more than 250,000 workers in 27 states. Purportedly to keep the mail running, President Grover Cleveland used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was convicted of federal charges for defying a court injunction against the strike and served six months in prison.

In prison, Debs read various works of socialist theory and emerged six months later as a committed adherent of the international socialist movement. Debs was a founding member of the Social Democracy of America (1897), the Social Democratic Party of America (1898) and the Socialist Party of America (1901). Debs ran as a Socialist candidate for President of the United States five times: 1900 (earning 0.6 percent of the popular vote), 1904 (3.0 percent), 1908 (2.8 percent), 1912 (6.0 percent), and 1920 (3.4 percent), the last time from a prison cell. He was also a candidate for United States Congress from his native state Indiana in 1916.

Debs was noted for his oratorical skills, and his speech denouncing American participation in World War I led to his second arrest in 1918. He was convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918 and sentenced to a 10-year term. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921. Debs died in 1926, not long after being admitted to a sanatorium due to cardiovascular problems that developed during his time in prison.

Early life
Eugene Victor "Gene" Debs was born on November 5, 1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Jean Daniel and Marguerite Mari Bettrich Debs, who immigrated to the United States from Colmar, Alsace, France. His father, who came from a prosperous Protestant family, owned a textile mill and meat market. Debs was named after the French authors Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo.

Debs attended public school, dropping out of high school at age 14. He took a job with the Vandalia Railroad cleaning grease from the trucks of freight engines for fifty cents a day. He later became a painter and car cleaner in the railroad shops. In December 1871, when a drunken locomotive fireman failed to report for work, Debs was pressed into service as a night fireman. He decided to remain a fireman on the run between Terre Haute and Indianapolis, earning more than a dollar a night for the next three and half years.

In July 1875, Debs left to work at a wholesale grocery house, where he remained for four years while attending a local business school at night.

Debs joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF) in February 1875 and became active in the organization. In 1877 he served as a delegate of the Terre Haute lodge to the organization's national convention. Debs was elected associate editor of the BLF's monthly organ, Firemen's Magazine, in 1878. Two years later, he was appointed Grand Secretary and Treasurer of the BLF and editor of the magazine in July 1880. He worked as a BLF functionary until January 1893 and as the magazine's editor until September 1894.

At the same time, he became a prominent figure in the community. He served two terms as Terre Haute's city clerk from September 1879 to September 1883. In the fall of 1884, he was elected as a Democrat to represent Terre Haute and Vigo County in the Indiana General Assembly. He served for one term in 1885.

Marriage and family
Debs married Katherine "Kate" Metzel on June 9, 1885, at St. Stephen's Episcopal church. Their home still stands in Terre Haute, preserved on the campus of Indiana State University.

Labor activism
The railroad brotherhoods were comparatively conservative organizations, focused on providing fellowship and services rather than on collective bargaining. Their motto was "Benevolence, Sobriety, and Industry". As editor of the official journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs initially concentrated on improving the brotherhood's death and disability insurance programs. During the early 1880s, Debs's writing stressed themes of self-uplift: temperance, hard work, and honesty. Debs also held the view that "labor and capital are friends" and opposed strikes as a means of settling differences. The brotherhood had never authorized a strike from its founding in 1873 to 1887, a record which Debs was proud of. Railroad companies cultivated the brotherhood and granted them perks like free transportation to their conventions for the delegates. Debs also invited railroad president Henry C. Lord to write for the magazine. Summarizing Debs's thought in this period, the historian David A. Shannon wrote: "Debs's desideratum was one of peace and co-operation between labor and capital, but he expected management to treat labor with respect, honor and social equality".

Debs gradually became convinced of the need for a more unified and confrontational approach as railroads were powerful forces in the economy. One influence was his involvement in the Burlington Railroad Strike of 1888, a defeat for labor that convinced Debs of "the need to reorganize across craft lines", according to Joanne Reitano. After stepping down as Brotherhood Grand Secretary in 1893, Debs organized one of the first industrial unions in the United States, the American Railway Union (ARU), for unskilled workers. He was elected president of the ARU upon its founding, with fellow railway labor organizer George W. Howard as first vice president. The union successfully struck the Great Northern Railway in April 1894, winning most of its demands.

Pullman Strike

In 1894, Debs became involved in the Pullman Strike, which grew out of a compensation dispute started by the workers who constructed the rail cars made by the Pullman Palace Car Company. The Pullman Company, citing falling revenue after the economic Panic of 1893, had cut the wages of its employees by twenty-eight percent. The workers, many of whom were already members of the ARU, appealed for support to the union at its convention in Chicago, Illinois. Debs tried to persuade union members, who worked on the railways, that the boycott was too risky given the hostility of the railways and the federal government, the weakness of the union, and the possibility that other unions would break the strike.

The membership ignored his warnings and refused to handle Pullman cars or any other railroad cars attached to them, including cars containing US Mail. After ARU Board Director Martin J. Elliott extended the strike to St. Louis, doubling its size to eighty thousand workers, Debs relented and decided to take part in the strike, which was now endorsed by almost all members of the ARU in the immediate area of Chicago. On July 9, 1894, a New York Times editorial called Debs "a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race". Strikers fought by establishing boycotts of Pullman train cars and with Debs's eventual leadership the strike came to be known as "Debs' Rebellion".

The federal government intervened, obtaining an injunction against the strike on the grounds that the strikers had obstructed the US Mail, carried on Pullman cars, by refusing to show up for work. President Grover Cleveland, whom Debs had supported in all three of his presidential campaigns, sent the United States Army to enforce the injunction. The presence of the army was enough to break the strike. Overall, thirty strikers were killed in the strike, thirteen of them in Chicago, and thousands were blacklisted. An estimated $80 million worth of property was damaged and Debs was found guilty of contempt of court for violating the injunction and sent to federal prison.

Debs was represented by Clarence Darrow, later a leading American lawyer and civil libertarian, who had previously been a corporate lawyer for the railroad company. While it is commonly thought that Darrow "switched sides" to represent Debs, a myth repeated by Irving Stone's biography, Clarence Darrow For the Defense, he had in fact resigned from the railroad earlier, after the death of his mentor William Goudy. A Supreme Court case decision, In re Debs, later upheld the right of the federal government to issue the injunction.

Socialist leader
At the time of his arrest for mail obstruction, Debs was not yet a socialist. While serving his six-month term in the jail at Woodstock, Illinois, Debs and his ARU comrades received a steady stream of letters, books and pamphlets in the mail from socialists around the country. Debs recalled several years later:

"I began to read and think and dissect the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke. The writings of [Edward] Bellamy and [Robert] Blatchford early appealed to me. The Cooperative Commonwealth of [Laurence] Gronlund also impressed me, but the writings of [Karl] Kautsky were so clear and conclusive that I readily grasped, not merely his argument, but also caught the spirit of his socialist utterance – and I thank him and all who helped me out of darkness into light."

Additionally, Debs was visited in jail by the Milwaukee socialist newspaper editor Victor L. Berger, who in Debs's words "came to Woodstock, as if a providential instrument, and delivered the first impassioned message of Socialism I had ever heard". In his 1926 obituary in Time, it was said that Berger left him a copy of Capital and "prisoner Debs read it slowly, eagerly, ravenously". Debs emerged from jail at the end of his sentence a changed man. He spent the final three decades of his life proselytizing for the socialist cause.

After Debs and Martin Elliott were released from prison in 1895, Debs started his socialist political career. Debs started agitating for the ARU membership to form a Social Democratic organization. In 1896, Debs supported Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election following Bryan's Cross of Gold speech. After Bryan's loss in the election, a disappointed Debs decided for certain that the future for socialist policies lay outside the Democratic Party. In June 1897, the ARU membership finally joined with the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth to form the Social Democracy of America.

Debs's wife Kate was opposed to socialism and was "hostile" to Debs's socialist revolutionary activism as "it threatened her sense of middle-class respectability". The "tempestuous relationship with a wife who rejects the very values he holds most dear" was the basis of Irving Stone's biographical novel Adversary in the House.

Split to found the Social Democratic Party
The Social Democracy of America (SDA), founded in June 1897 by Eugene V. Debs from the remnants of his American Railway Union, was deeply divided between those who favored a tactic of launching a series of colonies to build socialism by practical example and others who favored establishment of a European-style socialist political party with a view to capture of the government apparatus through the ballot box.

The June 1898 convention would be the group's last, with the minority political action wing quitting the organization to establish a new organization, the Social Democratic Party of America (SDP), also called the Social Democratic Party of the United States. Debs was elected to the National Executive Board, the five-member committee which governed the party, and his brother, Theodore Debs, was selected as its paid executive secretary, handling day-to-day affairs of the organization. Although by no means the sole decision-maker in the organization, Debs's status as prominent public figure in the aftermath of the Pullman strike provided cachet and made him the recognized spokesman for the party in the newspapers.

Presidential elections

Along with Elliott, who ran for Congress in 1900, Debs was the first federal office candidate for the fledgling socialist party, running unsuccessfully for president the same year. Debs and his running mate Job Harriman received 87,945 votes (0.6 percent of the popular vote) and no electoral votes.

Following the 1900 Election, the Social Democratic Party and dissidents who had split from the Socialist Labor Party in 1899 unified forces at a Socialist Unity Convention held in Indianapolis in mid-1901 – a meeting which established the Socialist Party of America (SPA).

Debs was the Socialist Party of America candidate for president in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 (the final time from prison). Though he received increasing numbers of popular votes in each subsequent election, he never won any votes in the Electoral College. In both 1904 and 1908, Debs ran with running-mate Ben Hanford. They received 402,810 votes in 1904, for 3.0 percent of the popular vote and an overall third-place finish. In the 1908 election, they received a slightly higher number of votes (420,852) than in their previous run, but at 2.8 percent, a smaller percentage of the total votes cast. In 1912, Debs ran with Emil Seidel as a running mate and received 901,551 votes, which was 6.0 percent of the popular vote, which remains the all-time highest percentage of the vote for a Socialist Party candidate in a US presidential election. Though Debs won no state's electoral votes, in Florida, he came in second behind Wilson and ahead of President William Howard Taft and former President Teddy Roosevelt. Finally, in 1920, running with Seymour Stedman, Debs won 914,191 votes (3.4%), which remains the all-time high number of votes for a Socialist Party candidate in a US presidential election. Notably, the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920, granting women the federal right to vote across the country, and with the expanded voting pool, his vote total accounted for only 3.4 percent of the total number of votes cast. The size of the vote is nevertheless remarkable since Debs was at the time a federal prisoner in jail for sedition, though he promised to pardon himself if elected.

Although he received some success as a third-party candidate, Debs was largely dismissive of the electoral process as he distrusted the political bargains that Victor Berger and other "sewer socialists" had made in winning local offices. He put much more value on organizing workers into unions, favoring unions that brought together all workers in a given industry over those organized by the craft skills workers practiced.

Founding the Industrial Workers of the World
After his work with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and the American Railway Union, Debs's next major work in organizing a labor union came during the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). On June 27, 1905, in Chicago, Illinois, Debs and other influential union leaders including Bill Haywood, leader of the Western Federation of Miners; and Daniel De Leon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party, held what Haywood called the "Continental Congress of the working class". Haywood stated: "We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class". Debs stated: "We are here to perform a task so great that it appeals to our best thought, our united energies, and will enlist our most loyal support; a task in the presence of which weak men might falter and despair, but from which it is impossible to shrink without betraying the working class".

Socialists split with the Industrial Workers of the World

Although the IWW was built on the basis of uniting workers of industry, a rift began between the union and the Socialist Party. It started when the electoral wing of the Socialist Party, led by Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit, became irritated with speeches by Haywood. In December 1911, Haywood told a Lower East Side audience at New York City's Cooper Union that parliamentary Socialists were "step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step". It was better, Haywood said, to "elect the superintendent of some branch of industry, than to elect some congressman to the United States Congress". In response, Hillquit attacked the IWW as "purely anarchistic".

The Cooper Union speech was the beginning of a split between Haywood and the Socialist Party, leading to the split between the factions of the IWW, one faction loyal to the Socialist Party and the other to Haywood. The rift presented a problem for Debs, who was influential in both the IWW and the Socialist Party. The final straw between Haywood and the Socialist Party came during the Lawrence Textile Strike. The decision of the elected officials in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to send police, who subsequently used their clubs on children, disgusted Haywood, who publicly declared that "I will not vote again" until such a circumstance was rectified. Haywood was purged from the National Executive Committee by passage of an amendment that focused on the direct action and sabotage tactics advocated by the IWW. Debs was probably the only person who could have saved Haywood's seat.

In 1906, when Haywood had been on trial for his life in Idaho, Debs had described him as "the Lincoln of Labor" and called for Haywood to run against Theodore Roosevelt for president, but times had changed and Debs, facing a split in the party, chose to echo Hillquit's words, accusing the IWW of representing anarchy. Debs thereafter stated that he had opposed the amendment, but that once it was adopted it should be obeyed. Debs remained friendly to Haywood and the IWW after the expulsion despite their perceived differences over IWW tactics.

Prior to Haywood's dismissal, the Socialist Party membership had reached an all-time high of 135,000. One year later, four months after Haywood was recalled, the membership dropped to 80,000. The reformists in the Socialist Party attributed the decline to the departure of the "Haywood element" and predicted that the party would recover, but it did not. In the election of 1912, many of the Socialists who had been elected to public office lost their seats.

Leadership style
Debs was noted by many to be a charismatic speaker who sometimes called on the vocabulary of Christianity and much of the oratorical style of evangelism, even though he was generally disdainful of organized religion. Howard Zinn opined that "Debs was what every socialist or anarchist or radical should be: fierce in his convictions, kind and compassionate in his personal relations." Heywood Broun noted in his eulogy for Debs, quoting a fellow Socialist: "That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as he's around I believe it myself".

Although sometimes called "King Debs", Debs himself was not wholly comfortable with his standing as a leader. As he told an audience in Detroit in 1906:

"I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition."

Sedition conviction and appeal to U.S. Supreme Court

Debs's speeches against the Wilson administration and the war earned the enmity of President Woodrow Wilson, who later called Debs a "traitor to his country". On June 16, 1918, Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the military draft. He was arrested on June 30 and charged with ten counts of sedition.

His trial defense called no witnesses, asking that Debs be allowed to address the court in his defense. That unusual request was granted, and Debs spoke for two hours. He was found guilty on September 12. At his sentencing hearing on September 14, he again addressed the court and his speech has become a classic. Heywood Broun, a liberal journalist and not a Debs partisan, said it was "one of the most beautiful and moving passages in the English language. He was for that one afternoon touched with inspiration. If anyone told me that tongues of fire danced upon his shoulders as he spoke, I would believe it." Debs said in part:

Your honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government; that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means. ...

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul. ...

Your honor, I ask no mercy, I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more fully comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come into their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the Southern Cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches the Southern Cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of Time upon the dial of the universe; and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the look-out knows that the midnight is passing – that relief and rest are close at hand.

Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

Debs was sentenced on September 18, 1918, to ten years in prison and was also disenfranchised for life. Debs presented what has been called his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:

"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."

Debs appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the court examined several statements Debs had made regarding World War I and socialism. While Debs had carefully worded his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act of 1917, the Court found he had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and military recruitment. Among other things, the Court cited Debs's praise for those imprisoned for obstructing the draft. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated in his opinion that little attention was needed since Debs's case was essentially the same as that of Schenck v. United States, in which the court had upheld a similar conviction.

Debs went to prison on April 13, 1919. In protest of his jailing, Charles Ruthenberg led a parade of unionists, socialists, anarchists, and communists on May 1 (May Day) in Cleveland, Ohio. The event quickly broke into the violent May Day riots of 1919.

1920 presidential run
Debs ran for president in the 1920 election while imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Campaign pins reading "Convict No. 9653 for President" accompanied his campaign. He received 914,191 votes (3.4 percent), a slightly smaller percentage than he had won in 1912, when he received 6 percent, the highest number of votes for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the United States. During his time in prison, Debs wrote a series of columns deeply critical of the prison system. They appeared in sanitized form in the Bell Syndicate and were published in his only book, Walls and Bars, with several added chapters. It was published posthumously.

In March 1919, President Wilson asked Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer for his opinion on clemency, offering his own: "I doubt the wisdom and public effect of such an action." Palmer generally favored releasing people convicted under the wartime security acts, but when he consulted with Debs's prosecutors – even those with records as defenders of civil liberties – they assured him that Debs's conviction was correct and his sentence appropriate. The President and his Attorney General both believed that public opinion opposed clemency and that releasing Debs could strengthen Wilson's opponents in the debate over the ratification of the peace treaty. Palmer proposed clemency in August and October 1920 without success. At one point, Wilson wrote: "While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines sniping, attacking, and denouncing them. ... This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration." In January 1921, Palmer, citing Debs's deteriorating health, proposed to Wilson that Debs receive a presidential pardon freeing him on February 12, Lincoln's birthday. Wilson returned the paperwork after writing "Denied" across it.

Debs met with the newly inaugurated President Warren G. Harding, but was returned to jail. Attorney General Harry Daugherty leaked word of the meeting to the press.

On December 23, 1921, President Harding commuted Debs's sentence to time served, effective Christmas Day. He did not issue a pardon. A White House statement summarized the administration's view of Debs's case:

"There is no question of his guilt. ... He was by no means, however, as rabid and outspoken in his expressions as many others, and but for his prominence and the resulting far-reaching effect of his words, very probably might not have received the sentence he did. He is an old man, not strong physically. He is a man of much personal charm and impressive personality, which qualifications make him a dangerous man calculated to mislead the unthinking and affording excuse for those with criminal intent."

Last years

When Debs was released from the Atlanta Penitentiary, the other prisoners sent him off with "a roar of cheers" and a crowd of fifty thousand greeted his return to Terre Haute to the accompaniment of band music. En route home, Debs was warmly received at the White House by Harding, who greeted him by saying: "Well, I've heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally."

In 1924, Debs was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Finnish Socialist Karl H. Wiik on the grounds that "Debs started to work actively for peace during World War I, mainly because he considered the war to be in the interest of capitalism."

He spent his remaining years trying to recover his health, which was severely undermined by prison confinement. In late 1926, he was admitted to Lindlahr Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois. He died there of heart failure on October 20, 1926, at the age of 70. His body was cremated and buried in Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Legacy

Debs helped motivate the American left to organize political opposition to corporations and World War I. American socialists, communists, and anarchists honor his work for the labor movement and motivation to have the average working man build socialism without large state involvement. Several books have been written about his life as an inspirational American socialist.

The Vermont senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has long been an admirer of Debs and produced in 1979 a documentary about Debs which was released as a film and an audio LP record as an audio-visual teaching aid. In the documentary, he described Debs as "probably the most effective and popular leader that the American working class has ever had". Sanders hung a portrait of Debs in city hall in Burlington, Vermont, when he served as mayor of the city in the 1980s and has a plaque dedicated to Debs in his congressional office.

On May 22, 1962, Debs's home was purchased for $9,500 by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, which worked to preserve it as a Debs memorial. In 1965 it was designated as an official historic site of the state of Indiana, and in 1966 it was designated as a National Historic Landmark of the United States. The preservation of the museum is monitored by the National Park Service. In 1990, the Department of Labor named Debs a member of its Labor Hall of Fame.

While Debs did not leave a collection of papers to a university library, the pamphlet collection which he and his brother amassed is held by Indiana State University in Terre Haute. The scholar Bernard Brommel, author of a 1978 biography of Debs, has donated his biographical research materials to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where they are open to researchers. The original manuscript of Debs's book Walls and Bars, with handwritten amendments, presumably by Debs, is held in the Thomas J. Morgan Papers in the special collections department of the University of Chicago Library.

Eugene Township in Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, was likely named after Debs. The community of Debs in Minnesota's Beltrami County may have also been named after him.

Eugene V Debs Hall in Buffalo, NY is a 501(c)7 nonprofit social club; and home to the Eugene V. Debs Local Initiative, a project to document and commemorate Buffalo's labor movement history.

Former New York radio station WEVD (now ESPN radio), then owned by the socialist Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward, took its call letters from his initials and was known as the "Debs Memorial Station."

Debs Place, a housing block in Co-op City in the Bronx, New York, was named in his honor. The Eugene V. Debs Cooperative House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was named after Debs.

Debs School, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1926 in Hinsdale County, Colorado, was named in honor of Debs; the building also served as a community gathering spot for the rural area. Noteworthy for its unique ornamental concrete block construction, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

There are at least two beers named after Debs, namely Debs's Red Ale and Eugene.

The Oregon State Senator Eugene "Debbs" Potts was named in Debs's honor.

Representation in other media

 * John Dos Passos included Debs as a historical figure in his U.S.A. Trilogy. Debs is featured among other figures in the 42nd Parallel (1930). His affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World prompted actions by such fictional characters in the novel as Mac.
 * Fifty Years Before Your Eyes (1950) is a documentary including historic footage of Debs, among others, directed by Robert Youngson.
 * The narrator of Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut is named Eugene Debs Hartke in honor of Debs (p. 1). A minor character in Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick is also explicitly named in honor of Debs.
 * Debs appears in the Southern Victory Series novels The Great War: Breakthroughs and American Empire: Blood and Iron by Harry Turtledove.
 * Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders voices Debs in a 1979 documentary about his political career.
 * The alternate history collection Back in the USSA by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne is set in a world where Debs leads a communist revolution in the United States in 1917.
 * In the third episode of The Plot Against America HBO miniseries, fictional characters Herman Levin and Shepsie Tirchwell discuss if they voted for Debs or Franklin D. Roosevelt during the past election for President of the United States.

Works

 * Locomotive Firemen's Magazine (editor, 1880–1894). Vol. 4 (1880) | Vol. 5 (1881) | Vol. 6 (1882) | Vol. 7 (1883) | Vol. 8 (1884) | Vol. 9 (1885) | Vol. 10 (1886) | Vol. 11 (1887) | Vol. 12 (1888) | Vol. 13 (1889) | Vol. 14 (1890) | Vol. 15 (1891) | Vol. 16 (1892) | Vol. 17 (1893) | Vol. 18 (1894).
 * Debs: His Life, Writings, and Speeches: With a Department of Appreciations (1908). Girard, Kansas: Appeal to Reason.
 * Labor and Freedom (1916). St. Louis: Phil Wagner. Audio version.
 * Letters of Eugene V. Debs. J. Robert Constantine (ed.). In Three Volumes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. —Abridged single volume version published as Gentle Rebel: Letters of Eugene V. Debs. (1995).
 * Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs. Tim Davenport and David Walters (eds.).
 * Volume 1, Building Solidarity on the Tracks, 1877–1892. (2019). Chicago: Haymarket Books.
 * Volume 2, The Rise and Fall of the American Railway Union, 1892–1896. (2020). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020.
 * "Susan B. Anthony: Pioneer of Freedom" (July 1917). Pearson's Magazine. 38: 1. pp. 5–7.
 * Walls and Bars: Prisons and Prison Life In The "Land Of The Free" (1927). Chicago: Socialist Party of America.

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James Rouse

James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 – April 9, 1996) was an American businessman and founder of The Rouse Company. Rouse was a pioneering American real estate developer, urban planner, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based philanthropist. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award, for his lifetime achievements.

Early life and education
James "Jim" Rouse was born in Easton, Maryland, to Lydia Agnes (née Robinson) and Willard Goldsmith Rouse, a canned-foods broker. His father, a lawyer trained at Johns Hopkins University, once ran for state's attorney for Harford County. When he lost, the Rouse family moved from Bel Air, Maryland, to Easton. Rouse grew up in Easton (then population: 5,000) on a well-to-do street on the edge of town. He was taught at home by his mother until second grade when he transferred to a public school. In 1930, Rouse lost his father to bladder cancer, his mother to heart failure, and his childhood home to bank foreclosure. His brother Bill paid for him to attend the private preparatory Tome School in Port Deposit, Maryland, for a year.

Facing money problems and unable to continue at the Tome School, the Rouse family sought a way for him to attend college by appealing to his oldest sister, who had married a United States Navy officer stationed in Hawaii. Rouse declared himself his sister's dependent and, with Navy connections now secured, was thereby able to attend the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa at a greatly reduced cost. Rouse later attended the University of Virginia. He declared his major as political science and waited tables at a local boarding house. Because he was unable to cover the gap between his scholarship and his remaining expenses, he left Charlottesville and moved to Baltimore to try to make it on his own.

Career
He found a job parking cars at the St. Paul Garage for one year. He later remarked that he got the job even though he could not drive, and had convinced his foreman to teach him rather than fire him. In May 1935, Rouse wrote Millard Tydings, who found him a position with the Federal Housing Administration as a clerk specializing in completing FHA loans to eastern Maryland banks. Although he had only two years of undergraduate college on his transcript, in the 1930s that was enough to qualify for law school. He borrowed money in March 1936 from Guy Hollyday who was a loan officer with the Title Guarantee and Trust Company seeking FHA loan guarantees and attended classes three nights a week at the University of Maryland School of Law. He was hired at age 22 by his mentor Hollyday.

While working at the FHA during the New Deal, Rouse was tasked with enforcing racially discriminatory guidelines. Rouse used antisemitic quotas when building in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore. In 1951, Rouse enforced a quota of no more than 12% Jewish residents for the Maryland Apartment in north Baltimore until 75% of the apartments were rented.

Rouse graduated in 1937 and in 1939 left the FHA and became partner with Hunter Moss at a mortgage banking firm called the Moss-Rouse Company funded by a $20,000 loan from Moss's sister, which would eventually become the Rouse Company. The company would specialize in FHA backed loans, and hired Churchill G. Carey from Connecticut General, with his former company providing loan capital to Moss-Rouse. Both Moss and Rouse served during WWII, with Moss joining the Marines and Rouse the Navy. Rouse was able to defer duty while his wife was pregnant, shipping out to Hawaii to work on John Henry Towers staff on July 4, 1942. Rouse returned from the war and went back to work with Moss, using his gambling assets. By 1951, the Moss-Rouse Company had become the largest mortgage banking company in the state of Maryland. In 1954, the two partners split, with Moss summarizing the split this way: "[Rouse] was a person who liked to do things in a big way. I liked the smaller company. So we split up."

As he was growing his business, Rouse pursued various civic activities. He co-founded the Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA) and became involved in Baltimore, Maryland's efforts to rehabilitate its decayed housing stock through The Baltimore Plan. The national publicity of this program led to his participation in Dwight D. Eisenhower's National Housing Task Force starting in 1953. He introduced (or at least helped popularize) the term "urban renewal" to describe the series of recommendations made by that task force.

Shopping malls
In 1958, Rouse built Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, the first enclosed shopping center east of the Mississippi River and the first built by a real estate developer. His company used the term "mall" to describe the development, which was an alternative to the more typical strip malls usually built in the suburbs (the "mall" in "strip mall" came into usage later, after the enclosed mall had been popularized by Rouse's company). Although many now attribute the rise of the shopping mall to the decline of the American downtown core, Rouse's focus at the time was on the introduction of malls as a form of town center for the suburbs.

His company became an active developer and manager of shopping center and mall properties, even as he shifted focus to new projects which eventually included planned communities and festival marketplaces.

In late 1973, the Columbia project took a downturn as Maryland land developers such as Joel Kline, and politicians such as Governor Marvin Mandel, and Vice President Spiro Agnew were indicted on various charges of corruption related to land speculation. Rouse was indicted for donations to Mandel's 1974 campaign which violated campaign contribution limits, but the charges were dropped because they had been brought outside the one-year limit.

Harundale Mall has since been replaced by Harundale Plaza. In 1999, the mall reopened and redeveloped as Harundale Plaza, a strip shopping center. Stores include A.J. Wright, a Super Fresh supermarket, Outback Steakhouse, Hollywood Video, Burlington Coat Factory, and a U.S. Post Office, along with several other typical strip-mall stores. The signature "rock" from Harundale Mall is now at Harundale Plaza.

Planned communities
In the 1960s Rouse turned his focus to planned communities. After engaging in a planning exercise for the Pocantico Hills estate of the Rockefellers, Rouse constructed his first planned residential development: the Village of Cross Keys in Baltimore. On June 16, 1961, Rouse bought 68 acre inside the city from the Baltimore Country Club for $25,000 an acre. Rouse excitedly proclaimed that this undertaking "will be the largest, and potentially most important development in the history of Baltimore." Rouse hoped that he could bring to the residential field "some of the fresh thinking, good taste and high standards which we believe have marked our shopping center developments."

Familiar with bad housing in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Rouse now had an opportunity to demonstrate what housing within a city's borders could be like. "There is a real need for residential development," he said, "in which there is a strong sense of community; a need to feed into the city some of the atmosphere and pace of the small town and village; a need to create a community which can meet as many as possible of the needs of the people who live there; which can bring these people into natural contact with one another; which can produce out of these relationships a spirit and feeling of neighborliness and a rich sense of belonging to a community." In a city that practiced strict racial segregation, Rouse intended Cross Keys to be open to all who could afford to live there. The development was a mixture of townhouses, garden apartments, a high-rise apartment house designed by Frank Gehry, stores grouped around a village square, and an office complex. By 1970, the Village of Cross Keys had become among the most desirable places to live in the Baltimore area.

While Cross Keys was still under construction, Rouse decided to build a whole new city. The creation of Columbia, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was the greatest adventure of Rouse's life. Columbia was the ultimate opportunity: the chance to embody his ideals in a whole new city. For the undertaking that would become Columbia, Rouse turned to his partner in previous projects, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company ("CG"). At a meeting at company headquarters in Hartford, Rouse made his pitch to CG's top real estate and mortgage people and the company's chairman of the board, Frazar B. Wilde. The questioning was mostly negative, until Wilde joined in. He expressed the view that CG couldn't lose. If Rouse's project did not succeed, the land could always be sold, and probably for a higher price than what it cost.

The land for the new city would be owned by a subsidiary called Howard Research and Development Corporation. CG would own half of that corporation and Rouse's corporation the other half. Rouse would be responsible for the management of the acquired land and for preparing a master plan for development. CG also put up some of the money for Columbia's infrastructure. The rest was supplied by Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and the Chase Manhattan Bank.

By the end of the summer of 1963 close to 14000 acre of Howard County farmland had been acquired, and the time was at hand to begin planning what to do with it. Rouse wanted to hear from a wide assortment of experts and scholars. He brought together an assemblage which became known as "The Work Group." It consisted of top people in health, family life, education, recreation, government, transportation, and employment. Ultimately emerging was the idea that the new city should be a real multi-faceted city, not a bedroom suburb. It should be possible for its residents to find everything they needed right there—jobs, education, recreation, health care, and any other necessity.

Rouse was not reluctant to bring up his home town of Easton as a model for Columbia. Consensus formed around the idea that the basic subdivision within the new city should be the village, a unit of 10,000 to 15,000 people. This number was thought to be the most likely to foster a local feeling of identification: for merchants to get to know their customers, ministers their memberships, and teachers their pupils and parents.

Within the city, there would be 12 villages. Each village would have a central gathering place where people of different income levels and types of housing would cross paths and mix. Each village would have a middle school and a high school, a teen center, a supermarket, a library, a hospital, an auditorium, offices, restaurants, some specialty shops, and a few larger recreational facilities. It also would have a multi-denominational house of worship known as an "interfaith center" based on the Gordon Cosby's Ecumenical Church of the Savior called the Kittamaqundi Community. The hope was that one building would be used by several religions.

In addition to the villages there would be a core area that would function as the new city's "downtown." Here would be the main cluster of retail stores (arranged as a mall), a hotel and conference center, a hospital, movie theaters and a concert hall, a community college, and branches of the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Peabody Conservatory of Music.

The main entertainment area was to be known as Tivoli, after the entertainment area in Copenhagen. Early on, Rouse said that he hoped Tivoli would be a place "where, under the benign influence of having fun and relaxing in familiar ways, people would have opportunities, especially attractive and conveniently presented, for discovering new ways to enjoy their free time—new foods, new visual and tactile aesthetic experiences, even new social relations." Rouse wanted the town center in Columbia to provide the most comprehensive range of recreational activities and services that had ever been contemplated in a new town.

The recession of the 1970s hit Columbia hard, and CG had to refinance the project, reducing The Rouse Company's stake. CG later pulled out of the project completely in 1985, but by that time it had returned to profitability.

Festival marketplaces
Rouse shifted focus from suburban retail to urban malls, which he called "festival marketplaces," of which the Faneuil Hall Marketplace was the first and most successful example. Completed in 1976, and partly funded with assistance from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace (comprising Quincy Market and other spaces adjacent to Boston's Faneuil Hall) was designed by architect Benjamin C. Thompson and was a financial success, an act of historic preservation, and an anchor for urban revitalization. Later the Boston Museum of Fine Arts established an annex at the Quincy Market, and the mall generated more foot traffic than the museum. Initially, there were critics who predicted the project would fail, while other dismissed its early success as a fad. Calvin Trillin and Peter Hall each invoked Disneyland in their claims that Faneuil Hall Marketplace was an example of fake urbanism. Robert Campbell, an architecture critic, rejected this kind of criticism as snobbery, and claimed that the festival marketplace was effective at getting people out of their cars and getting them to experience the city. In his planning for the project, Rouse imagined that people would not just shop, that they would also be entertained. However, he later claimed that he had not anticipated its popularity as a tour bus destination.

Other examples of Rouse Company "festival marketplace" developments include South Street Seaport in New York City, The Gallery at Market East, in Philadelphia, Harborplace in Baltimore, St. Louis Union Station in St. Louis, Downtown Portland's Pioneer Place, and the Riverwalk Marketplace of New Orleans. The early festival marketplaces like Faneuil Hall and Harborplace led TIME magazine to dub Rouse "the man who made cities fun again."

Retirement
After 40 years at the Rouse Company, Rouse retired from day-to-day management in 1979. Soon afterwards, he and his wife founded the Enterprise Community Partners, a not-for-profit foundation funded in part by a for-profit subsidiary, The Enterprise Development Company, and focused on seeding partnerships with community groups that would address the need for affordable housing and associated social services for poor neighborhoods. In 1984, Jim Rouse was soliciting business representing both Rouse Company as CEO and Enterprise Development as president. The Rouse Company board of directors asked Jim Rouse to leave as CEO of the Rouse Company and his position in Enterprise Development which ended his involvement with the company he founded.

Rouse was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1981. In 1988, Rouse was awarded the second Honor Award from the National Building Museum.

The Rouse Theatre in Wilde Lake High School is named after James. In May 2006, an approximately four-mile stretch of Maryland Route 175 between Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 29 in Columbia, Maryland, was named after Rouse and his wife, Patty. The Jim Rouse Visionary Center opened in 2006 in a formerly contaminated Whiskey Warehouse in Baltimore.

Awards
In 1978, Rouse received the S. Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

In 1981, Rouse received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

In 1995, Rouse was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.

Personal life
James Rouse's first wife was Elizabeth Jamieson "Libby" (née Winstead) whom he married on May 3, 1941. His daughter Robin is the mother of actor Edward Norton. His son Jim applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War with his father's support. In May 1970, Rouse posted full page anti-war ads in The Washington Post and later The New York Times that upset the new Nixon administration. Rouse separated from Libby in 1973, and married Myrtle Patricia "Patty" Traugott, from Norfolk, Virginia, in November 1974. He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on April 9, 1996. Patty Rouse died on March 5, 2012.

Rouse's nephew, Willard Rouse III, was also a real estate developer.

Homage
His grandson Edward Norton, upon graduating from Yale University in 1991, moved to Japan to work for the Rouses' foundation. Later, Norton directed the film Motherless Brooklyn, released in 2019, "as an homage to the things [James Rouse] cared about". In particular, the movie denounces the controversial urbanist Robert Moses, accused of lust for power, questionable ethics, vindictiveness, and racism.

title: James Rouse


text:
Chester (disambiguation)

Chester is a city in Cheshire, England.

Chester may also refer to:

Canada

 * Chester, Nova Scotia
 * Municipality of the District of Chester, Nova Scotia
 * Chester (TTC), a subway station in Toronto
 * Rural Municipality of Chester No. 125, Saskatchewan

Ireland

 * Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

United Kingdom

 * Chester (district), an administrative area of Cheshire (1974–2009)
 * Chester-le-Street, County Durham

United States

 * Chester, Arkansas
 * Chester, California, in Plumas County
 * Chester, Connecticut
 * Chester, Georgia
 * Chester, Idaho
 * Chester, Illinois
 * Chester, Indiana
 * Chester, Iowa
 * Chester, Maine
 * Chester, Maryland
 * Chester, Massachusetts, a New England town
 * Chester (CDP), Massachusetts, the main village in the town
 * Chester, Minnesota
 * Chester, Mississippi
 * Chester, Montana
 * Chester, Nebraska
 * Chester, New Hampshire
 * Chester, Orange County, New York
 * Chester (village), New York
 * Chester, Warren County, New York
 * Chester, Ohio
 * Chester, Oklahoma
 * Chester, Pennsylvania
 * Chester, South Carolina
 * Chester, South Dakota
 * Chester, Texas
 * Chester, Vermont
 * Chester (CDP), Vermont
 * Chester, Virginia
 * Chester (Homeville, Virginia), listed on the NRHP in Virginia
 * Chester, West Virginia
 * Chester, Wisconsin
 * Chester Borough, New Jersey

Animals

 * Chester (horse), an Australian racehorse and sire (1874–1888)
 * Chester Cheetah, the mascot for the snack food Cheetos
 * Chester White, a breed of domestic pig from Pennsylvania

Arts and entertainment

 * Chester (band), a Canadian bubblegum pop band, active primarily from 1972 to 1975
 * Chester (album), by Josh Rouse
 * "Chester" (song), an American Revolutionary War anthem composed by William Billings

Ships

 * Chester-class cruiser
 * HMS Chester, disambiguation page
 * USS Chester (CA-27), a heavy cruiser commissioned in 1930
 * USS Chester (CL-1), a light cruiser in service from 1908 to 1921

Other uses

 * Chester F.C., a football club based in Chester, England
 * ChesterBus, a bus operator in Cheshire, England
 * Chester (given name)
 * Chester (surname)
 * Chester (placename element)
 * Earl of Chester, another title of the Prince of Wales
 * City of Chester (UK Parliament constituency) a constituency of the UK Parliament

title: Chester (disambiguation)