Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, Eugene Victor Debs was a city clerk, a state representative, and a one-term US congressman. However, he’s best remembered as a labor activist and five-time Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States.
In 1912, running in the US presidential election for the fourth time, Debs won 6 percent of the vote, a respectable showing for a third-party candidate of the left. The man who won that year’s election with 41.8 percent of the vote, Woodrow Wilson, would later call Debs a “traitor to his country” for speaking out against World War I. As was made clear in a statement at his sentencing for sedition based on his resistance to the military draft, Debs suspected that he came from an entirely different country than Wilson:
“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, 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.”
Fittingly for a son of the Hoosier State, Indiana State University is home to a major repository of Debs’s papers. The Eugene V. Debs Collection has more than 4,800 items, digitized and accessible on JSTOR. The collection started with letters, telegrams, typescripts, and manuscripts donated by Debs’s niece, Marguerite Debs Cooper, in 1967. Her father (Eugene’s brother, Theodore) worked for years as Eugene’s assistant and secretary. Many other items have been added to the collection since.
Exploring the archive gives one a great sense of the quotidian details of history, the vagaries of the paper trail (you’ll really appreciate the typed ones, although most of the handwriting is perfectly legible), and the rhetoric of an earlier age.