How Eugene Debs Became a Socialist

Before Eugene Debs became the most popular socialist in American history, he was an innovative and courageous labor leader. As leader of the American Railway Union (ARU), founded in 1893, he attempted to gather all the crafts in what was then the nation’s most essential industry into a single organization that could force employers to raise the wages and improve the working conditions of millions of wage-earners. The ARU’s claim to class unity was crippled, however, when its members voted, against Debs’s advice, to bar African Americans from joining. In the 1930s, the CIO took up the task of organizing workers by industry, instead of by individual trades. And this time, radical activists helped convince “labor’s new millions” to exclude nobody.

As this excerpt from Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography (illustrated by Noah Van Sciver, written by Paul Buhle and Steve Max with Dave Nance, and published by Verso this March) reminds us, th...