Eugene V. Debs' Ideology

[Smash Monogamy]

I never really grasped what kind of society he wanted to create.
Was he for state socialism or some kind of syndicalism? Did he at all believe in communism?

[Geiseric]

He was very close to being a Leninist. He was politically dead and insane by the end of the Russian civil war due to persecution by the US government.

[The Idler]

From the Roots of American Communism by Theodore Draper
https://libcom.org/history/roots-american-communism-theodore-draper

Though the Communists scored a success by acquiring Foster in
1921, they suffered a setback by failing to win over someone even
more impsrtant-Eugene Victor Debs. Ruthenberg visited Debs in
Atlanta Penitentiary in June 1920 to ask him to join the Communist
party. Debs rejected the overture on the ground that he could not
accept the necessity for a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Com-
munists punished Debs by refusing to support his presidential candi-
dacy on the Socialist ticket in 1920 and by showing little interest in
the campaign for his amnesty. When he sent Lenin a telegram in July
1922 protesting against the trial of Russian Social Revolutionaries,
the Communist press treated him roughly. In behalf of his brother,
Theodore Debs wrote to J. Louis Engdahl, then editing the Com-
munist organ: “Gene wishes me to say to you that personally he owes
nothing to the Communists. When he was in that hell-hole at Atlanta
the Communists with but few exceptions ignored him and the rest of
the political prisoners, and their papers, including the one you now
edit, were cold-bloodedly silent, not raising a voice nor lifting a
finger to secure their release, and as far as they were concerned Gene
would still be rotting, were he alive, in his dungeon in Atlanta.” De-
spite these harsh words, the letter ended by declaring that Eugene V.
Debs still considered himself “a loyal supporter of Lenin, Trotzky
and the Soviet Government.’’ At the end of 1922, in his first public
speech after his release from jail, Debs was reported as saying that
“Sovietism is the only good thing that came out of the war.” The
Communist organ commented peevishly: “If Debs is honest in his
declaration then he means that the universal workers’ republic will
be established by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the form of
Soviet Rule. And this includes the United States. Otherwise his re-
marks have no meaning.” :jB
Debs’s reaction to Communism has been generally confused in both
pro-Communist and anti-Communist writings. Pro-Communist writers
have doted on his sentimentalized eulogies of the Bolshevik rzvolut ion
or his friendly attitude toward the Trade Union Educational League.
Anti-Communist writers have lingered on his telegram in behalf of
the Social Revolutionaries or his rejection of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.36 In truth, Debs was much clearer and more consistent in
his sympathies than he has been given credit for being. He tried, not
always successfully, to distinguish between what might be good €or
Russia in terms of Russian development and what was good €or the
United States in terms of American radical traditions. In so doing, he
accepted Russian Bolshevism and rejected American Coiiimunism.
He did not apply the same rules to both.
In all the history of American radicalism, no one succeeded in
reaching out and touching the hearts of more people than did Eugene
Victor Debs. When his gaunt body sagged virtually to the floor and
his long finger stretched out to make a point, his audiences gazed at
him reverently as if they were privileged to be in the presence of a
socialist saint. The Communists, to become a popuiar American move-
ment, desperately needed someone like Debs. He came close enough
to them to make him symbolic of both their success and their failure.
He could not tear himself away from those who claimed the patronage
of the Russian Revolution or offered a class-conscious trade-union
substitute for the A.F. of L.; he would not accept all the new formulas
and slogans that came from abroad or fail to protest against the sup
pression of civil liberties, whether it concerned the Social Revolu-
tionaries in Russia or William 2. Foster in the United States. There
was no room for a Debs in the American Communist movement, and
that is perhaps as good an explanation of its shortcomings as any.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

My great-great-grandmother was a Debsian socialist back in the day.