Presidential Campaigns in U.S. History: Eugene Debs

1. C-SPAN: The Contenders
2. Eugene Debs Museum
3. American Experience: election of 1912
4. Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive
5. 1912 Election Results and Map
6. Editorial Cartoons from the 1912 campaign
7. Eugene Debs Foundation and Museum

For Debs, Socialism was as much about the dignity and humanity of the individual worker as it was about abstract questions of the proper organization of the American means of production or the distribution of wealth. This placed much of Debs’ rhetoric firmly within an American as well as a European political context; Debs spoke in the optimistic, evangelical cadences of a home-grown American radical tradition, drawing on Emerson, Robert Owen, or John Brown as much as on Marx or Engels. This often made Debs as many enemies as friends within the Socialist Party itself, and for most of his career Debs sought to remain aloof from the fierce factional infighting of the American Left. But it also gave Debs a broader popular appeal than any other American Socialist could muster, and his personal charisma and persuasiveness before an audience were second to no other American politician of any stripe.

 -eHistory at OSU

A reading of Eugene Debs speech at a campaign rally for the 1912 election. After this speech, he was arrested and jailed.

 Election of 1912: EHistory at OSU

• Woodrow Wilson won
• Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was runner-up
• William Howard Taft, the incumbent, LOST
• Eugene Debs also lost, but he was arguably the best known Socialist in American history

Image available from WikiMedia Commons