page_title: Eugene V. Debs
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Eugene V. Debs / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a photograph of Eugene V. Debs with a group of young Socialists in Chicago. One of the men, on the far right, is Louis Eisner, the father of the late Professor Elliot Eisner.
context_page_description: Eugene Victor "Gene" Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World and five times the 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, 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.
context_section_description: Debs helped motivate the American Left to organise 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.
  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. It has been argued that Debs was important in first advocating for reforms which were subsequently implemented by more moderate left-leaning politicians, such as banking reform and child labor laws.
  On May 22, 1962, Debs' 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' 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.
  The town of Debs, Minnesota is named after Debs.
  Former New York radio station WEVD (now ESPN radio) was named in his honor.
  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.
  There are at least two beers named after Debs, namely Debs' Red Ale and Eugene.
caption: Debs sitting with five young socialists in Chicago, with the man on the far right, Louis Eisner, being the father of Stanford University professor Elliot Eisner
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