Clarence Darrow

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Clarence Darrow
Born	April 18, 1857 Farmdale, Ohio
Died	March 13, 1938 (aged 80) Chicago, Illinois
Alma mater	Allegheny College University of Michigan
Occupation	Lawyer

Clarence Seward Darrow (/ˈdæroʊ/; April 18, 1857 – March 13, 1938) was an American lawyer who became famous in the early 20th century for his involvement in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial and the Scopes "Monkey" Trial. He was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform.

Called a "sophisticated country lawyer", Darrow's wit and eloquence made him one of the most prominent attorneys and civil libertarians in the nation. He defended high-profile clients in many famous trials of the early 20th century, including teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks (1924); teacher John T. Scopes in the Scopes "Monkey" Trial (1925), in which he opposed statesman and orator William Jennings Bryan; and Ossian Sweet in a racially charged self-defense case (1926).

Early life

Clarence Darrow was born in the small town of Farmdale, Ohio, on April 18, 1857, the fifth son of Amirus and Emily Darrow (née Eddy). Both the Darrow and Eddy families had deep roots in colonial New England, and several of Darrow's ancestors served in the American Revolution. Darrow's father was an ardent abolitionist and a proud iconoclast and religious freethinker. He was known throughout the town as the "village infidel". Emily Darrow was an early supporter of female suffrage and a women's rights advocate. 

The young Clarence attended Allegheny College and the University of Michigan Law School, but did not graduate from either institution. He attended Allegheny College for only one year before the Panic of 1873 struck, and Darrow was determined not to be a financial burden to his father any longer. Over the next three years he taught in the winter at the district school in a country community. While teaching, Darrow started to study the law on his own, and by the end of his third year of teaching, his family urged him to enter the law department at Ann Arbor. Darrow only studied there a year when he decided that it would be much more cost-effective to work and study in an actual law office. When he felt that he was ready, he took the Ohio bar exam and passed. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. The Clarence Darrow Octagon House, his childhood home in Kinsman, contains a memorial to him.

Marriages and child

Darrow married Jessie Ohl in April 1880. They had one child, Paul Edward Darrow, in 1883. They were divorced in 1897. Darrow later married Ruby Hammerstrom, a journalist 16 years his junior, in 1903. They had no children.

Legal career

Darrow opened his first little law office in Andover, Ohio, a small farming town just ten miles from Kinsman. Having little to no experience, he started off slowly and gradually built up his career by dealing with the everyday complaints and problems of a farming community. After two years Darrow felt he was ready to take on new and different cases and moved his practice to Ashtabula, Ohio, which had a population of 5,000 people and was the largest city in the county. There he became involved in Democratic Party politics and served as the town counsel. 

In 1880, he married Jessie Ohl, and eight years later he moved to Chicago with his wife and young son, Paul. He did not have much business when he first moved to Chicago, and spent as little as possible. He joined the Henry George Club and made some friends and connections in the city. Being part of the club also gave him an opportunity to speak for the Democratic Party on the upcoming election. He slowly made a name for himself through these speeches, eventually earning the standing to speak in whatever hall he liked. He was offered work as an attorney for the city of Chicago. Darrow worked in the city law department for two years when he resigned and took a position as a lawyer at the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company. In 1894, Darrow represented Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, who was prosecuted by the federal government for leading the Pullman Strike of 1894. Darrow severed his ties with the railroad to represent Debs, making a financial sacrifice. He saved Debs in one trial but could not keep him from being jailed in another.

Also in 1894, Darrow took on the first murder case of his career, defending Patrick Eugene Prendergast, the "mentally deranged drifter" who had confessed to murdering Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, Sr.  Darrow's "insanity defense" failed and Prendergast was executed that same year. Among fifty defenses in murder cases throughout the whole of Darrow's career, the Prendergast case would prove to be the only one resulting in an execution, though Darrow did not join the defense team until after Prendergast's conviction and sentence, in an effort to spare him the noose.

From corporate lawyer to labor lawyer

Darrow soon became one of America's leading labor attorneys. He helped organize the Populist Party in Illinois and then ran for U.S. Congress as a Democrat in 1895 but lost to Hugh R. Belknap. In 1897, his marriage to Jessie Ohl ended in divorce. He joined the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 in opposition to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines. He represented the woodworkers of Wisconsin in a notable case in Oshkosh in 1898 and the United Mine Workers in Pennsylvania in the great anthracite coal strike of 1902. He flirted with the idea of running for mayor of Chicago in 1903 but ultimately decided against it. The following year, in July, Darrow married Ruby Hammerstrom, a young Chicago journalist. His former mentor, Governor John Peter Altgeld, joined Darrow's firm following his Chicago mayoral electoral defeat in 1899 and worked with Darrow until his death in 1902. 

Clarence Darrow in 1902

From 1906 to 1908, Darrow represented the Western Federation of Miners leaders William "Big Bill" Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone when they were arrested and charged with conspiring to murder former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905. Haywood and Pettibone were found not guilty in separate trials, and the charges against Moyer were then dropped.

In 1911, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) called on Darrow to defend the McNamara brothers, John and James, who were charged in the Los Angeles Times bombing on October 1, 1910, during the bitter struggle over the open shop in Southern California. The bomb had been placed in an alley behind the building, and although the explosion itself did not bring the building down, it ignited nearby ink barrels and natural gas main lines. In the ensuing fire, 20 people were killed. The AFL appealed to local, state, regional and national unions to donate 25 cents per capita to the defense fund, and set up defense committees in larger cities throughout the nation to accept donations. 

In the weeks before the jury was seated, Darrow became increasingly concerned about the outcome of the trial and began negotiations for a plea bargain to spare the defendants' lives. During the weekend of November 19–20, 1911, he discussed with pro-labor journalist Lincoln Steffens and newspaper publisher E.W. Scripps the possibility of reaching out to the Times about the terms of a plea agreement. The prosecution had demands of its own, however, including an admission of guilt in open court and longer sentences than the defense proposed.

The defense's position weakened when, on November 28, Darrow was accused of orchestrating to bribe a prospective juror. The juror reported the offer to police, who set up a sting and observed the defense team's chief investigator, Bert Franklin, delivering $4,000 to the juror two blocks away from Darrow's office. After making payment, Franklin walked one block in the direction of Darrow's office before being arrested right in front of Darrow himself, who had just walked to that very intersection after receiving a phone call in his office. With Darrow himself on the verge of being discredited, the defense's hope for a simple plea agreement ended. On December 1, 1911, the McNamara brothers changed their pleas to guilty, in open court. The plea bargain Darrow helped arrange earned John fifteen years and James life imprisonment. Despite sparing the brothers the death penalty, Darrow was accused by many in organized labor of selling the movement out. 

Two months later, Darrow was charged with two counts of attempting to bribe jurors in both cases. He faced two lengthy trials. In the first, defended by Earl Rogers, he was acquitted. Rogers became ill during the second trial and rarely came to court. Darrow served as his own attorney for the remainder of the trial, which ended with a hung jury. A deal was struck in which the district attorney agreed not to retry Darrow if he promised not to practice law again in California. Darrow's early biographers, Irving Stone and Arthur and Lila Weinberg, asserted that he was not involved in the bribery conspiracy, but more recently, Geoffrey Cowan and John A. Farrell, with the help of new evidence, concluded that he almost certainly was. In the biography of Earl Rogers by his daughter Adela, she wrote: "I never had any doubts, even before one of my father's private conversations with Darrow included an admission of guilt to his lawyer."

From labor lawyer to criminal lawyer

Darrow in 1913

As a consequence of the bribery charges, most labor unions dropped Darrow from their list of preferred attorneys. This effectively put Darrow out of business as a labor lawyer, and he switched to civil and criminal cases. He took the latter because he had become convinced that the criminal justice system could ruin people's lives if they were not adequately represented.

Throughout his career, Darrow devoted himself to opposing the death penalty, which he felt to be in conflict with humanitarian progress. In more than 100 cases, Darrow only lost one murder case in Chicago. He became renowned for moving juries and even judges to tears with his eloquence. Darrow had a keen intellect often hidden by his rumpled, unassuming appearance. 

A July 23, 1915, article in the Chicago Tribune describes Darrow's effort on behalf of J.H. Fox, an Evanston, Illinois, landlord, to have Mary S. Brazelton committed to an insane asylum against the wishes of her family. Fox alleged that Brazelton owed him rent money, although other residents of Fox's boarding house testified to her sanity.

National renown

Leopold and Loeb

In the summer of 1924, Darrow took on the case of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, the teenage sons of two wealthy Chicago families who were accused of kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks, a 14-year-old boy, from their stylish southside Kenwood neighborhood. Leopold was a law student at the University of Chicago about to transfer to Harvard Law School, and Loeb was the youngest graduate ever from the University of Michigan; they were 18 and 17, respectively, when they were arrested. When asked why they committed the crime, Leopold told his captors: "The thing that prompted Dick to want to do this thing and prompted me to want to do this thing was a sort of pure love of excitement... the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different... the satisfaction and the ego of putting something over." 

Chicago newspapers labeled the case the "Trial of the Century" and Americans around the country wondered what could drive the two young men, blessed with everything their society could offer, to commit such a depraved act. The killers had been arrested after a passing workman spotted the victim's body in an isolated nature preserve near the Indiana border just half a day after it was hidden, before they could collect a $10,000 ransom. Nearby were Leopold's eyeglasses with their distinctive, traceable frames, which he had dropped at the scene. 

Leopold and Loeb made full confessions and took police on a hunt around Chicago to collect the evidence that would be used against them. The state's attorney told the press that he had a "hanging case" for sure. Darrow stunned the prosecution when he had his clients plead guilty in order to avoid a vengeance-minded jury and place the case before a judge. The trial, then, was actually a long sentencing hearing in which Darrow contended, with the help of expert testimony, that Leopold and Loeb were mentally diseased. 

Darrow's closing argument lasted 12 hours. He repeatedly stressed the ages of the "boys" (before the Vietnam War, the age of majority was 21) and noted that "never had there been a case in Chicago where on a plea of guilty a boy under 21 had been sentenced to death." His plea was designed to soften the heart of Judge John Caverly, but also to mold public opinion, so that Caverly could follow precedent without too huge an uproar. Darrow succeeded. Caverly sentenced Leopold and Loeb to life in prison plus 99 years. Darrow's closing argument was published in several editions in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and was reissued at the time of his death.

The Leopold and Loeb case raised, in a well-publicized trial, Darrow's lifelong contention that psychological, physical, and environmental influences—not a conscious choice between right and wrong—control human behavior. Darrow's psychiatric expert witnesses testified that both boys "were decidedly deficient in emotion". Darrow later argued that emotion is necessary for the decisions that people make. When someone tries to go against a certain law or custom that is forbidden, he wrote, he should feel a sense of revulsion. As neither Leopold nor Loeb had a working emotional system, they did not feel revolted.

During the trial, the newspapers claimed that Darrow was presenting a "million dollar defense" for the two wealthy families. Many ordinary Americans were angered at his apparent greed. He had the families issue a statement insisting that there would be no large legal fees and that his fees would be determined by a committee composed of officers from the Chicago Bar Association. After trial, Darrow suggested $200,000 would be reasonable. After lengthy negotiations with the defendants' families, he ended up getting some $70,000 in gross fees, which, after expenses and taxes, netted Darrow $30,000, worth over $375,000 in 2016.

Scopes Trial

Clarence Darrow circa 1925

In 1925, Darrow defended John T. Scopes in the State of Tennessee v. Scopes trial. It has often been called the "Scopes Monkey Trial," a title popularized by author and journalist H.L. Mencken. The trial, which was deliberately staged to bring publicity to the issue at hand, pitted Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in a court case that tested Tennessee's Butler Act, which had been passed on March 21, 1925. The act forbade the teaching of "the Evolution Theory" in any state-funded educational establishment. More broadly, it outlawed in state-funded schools (including universities) the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." 

During the trial, Darrow requested that Bryan be called to the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. Over the other prosecutor's objection, Bryan agreed. Popular media at the time portrayed the following exchange as the deciding factor that turned public opinion against Bryan in the trial:

Darrow: "You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, Mr. Bryan?"

Bryan: "Yes, sir; I have tried to.... But, of course, I have studied it more as I have become older than when I was a boy."

Darrow: "Do you claim then that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?"
Bryan: "I believe that everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there; some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: 'Ye are the salt of the earth.' I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people."

After about two hours, Judge John T. Raulston cut the questioning short and on the following morning ordered that the whole session (which in any case the jury had not witnessed) be expunged from the record, ruling that the testimony had no bearing on whether Scopes was guilty of teaching evolution. Scopes was found guilty and ordered to pay the minimum fine of $100. 

A year later, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Dayton court on a procedural technicality—not on constitutional grounds, as Darrow had hoped. According to the court, the fine should have been set by the jury, not Raulston. Rather than send the case back for further action, however, the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the case. The court commented, "Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case." 

The event led to a change in public sentiment and an increased discourse on the creation claims of religious teachers versus those of secular scientists — i.e., creationism compared to evolutionism — that still exists. It also became popularized in a play based loosely on the trial, Inherit the Wind, which has been adapted several times on film and television.

Ossian Sweet

On September 9, 1925, a white mob in Detroit attempted to drive a black family out of the home they had purchased in a white neighborhood. During the struggle, a white man was killed, and the eleven black men in the house were later arrested and charged with murder. Ossian Sweet, a doctor, and three members of his family were brought to trial, and after an initial deadlock, Darrow argued to the all-white jury: "I insist that there is nothing but prejudice in this case; that if it was reversed and eleven white men had shot and killed a black man while protecting their home and their lives against a mob of blacks, nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted. They would have been given medals instead...." 

Following a mistrial, it was agreed that each of the eleven defendants would be tried individually. Darrow, alongside Thomas Chawke, would first defend Ossian's brother Henry, who had confessed to firing the shot on Garland Street. Henry was found not guilty on grounds of self-defense, and the prosecution determined to drop the charges on the remaining ten. The trials were presided over by Frank Murphy, who went on to become Governor of Michigan and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Darrow's closing statement, which lasted over seven hours, is seen as a landmark in the Civil Rights movement and was included in the book Speeches that Changed the World (given the name "I Believe in the Law of Love"). The two closing arguments of Clarence Darrow, from the first and second trials, show how he learned from the first trial and reshaped his remarks.

Massie Trial

The Scopes Trial and the Sweet trial were the last big cases that Darrow took on before he retired from full-time practice at the age of 68. He still took on a few cases such as the 1932 Massie Trial in Hawaii. 

In his last headline-making case, the Massie Trial, Darrow, devastated by the Great Depression, was hired by Eva Stotesbury, the wife of Darrow's old family friend Edward T. Stotesbury, to come to the defense of Grace Fortescue, Edward J. Lord, Deacon Jones, and Thomas Massie, Fortescue's son-in-law, who were accused of murdering Joseph Kahahawai. Kahahawai had been accused, along with four other men, of raping and beating Thalia Massie, Thomas's wife and Fortescue's daughter; the resulting 1931 case ended in a hung jury (though the charges were later dropped and repeated investigation has shown them to be innocent). Enraged, Fortescue and Massie then orchestrated the murder of Kahahawai in order to extract a confession and were caught by police officers while transporting his dead body. 

Darrow entered the racially charged atmosphere as the lawyer for the defendants. Darrow reconstructed the case as a justified honor killing by Thomas Massie. Considered by The New York Times to be one of Darrow's three most compelling trials (along with the Scopes Trial and the Leopold and Loeb case), the case captivated the nation and most of white America strongly supported the honor killing defense. In fact, the final defense arguments were transmitted to the mainland through a special radio hookup. In the end, the jury came back with a unanimous verdict of guilty, but on the lesser crime of manslaughter. As to Darrow's closing, one juror commented, "[h]e talked to us like a bunch of farmers. That stuff may go over big in the Middle West, but not here." Governor Lawrence Judd later commuted the sentences to one hour in his office. Years later Deacon admitted to shooting Kahahawai; Massie was found "not Guilty" in a posthumous trial.

Religious beliefs

"Why I Am An Agnostic"

As part of a public symposium on belief held in Columbus, Ohio, Darrow delivered a speech, later titled "Why I Am An Agnostic", on agnosticism, skepticism, belief, and religion. In the speech, Darrow thoroughly discussed the meaning of being an agnostic and questioned the doctrines of Christianity and the Bible. He concluded that "the fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom."

Mecca Temple Debate

In January 1931 Darrow had a debate with English writer G. K. Chesterton during the latter's second trip to America. This was held at New York City's Mecca Temple. The topic was "Will the World Return to Religion?". At the end of the debate those in the hall were asked to vote for the man they thought had won the debate. Darrow received 1,022 votes while Chesterton received 2,359 votes. There is no known transcript of what was said except for third party accounts published later on. The earliest of these was that of February 4, 1931, issue of The Nation with an article written by Henry Hazlitt.

Position on eugenics

In the edition of November 18, 1915 of The Washington Post, Darrow stated: “Chloroform unfit children. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.” However, Darrow was also critical of some eugenics advocates. By the 1920s, the eugenics movement was very powerful and Darrow was a pointed critic of that movement. In the years immediately before the Supreme Court of the United States would endorse eugenics through Buck v. Bell (1927), Darrow wrote multiple essays criticizing the illogic of the eugenicists, especially the confirmation bias in eugenicist arguments. In a 1925 essay, “The Edwardses and the Jukeses,” he imitated the eugenicists’ tracking of pedigrees as a way to demonstrate that their retrospective centuries-long family tree studies were omitting literally thousands of relatives whose lives did not support the researchers’ preconceptions. Eugenicist arguments about the eminent Edwards family (of the theologian Jonathan Edwards) ignored that family’s mediocre relatives, and even ignored some immediately related murderers. Eugenicist arguments about the Jukes family did just the opposite, leaving ignored or untraced many functional and law-abiding relatives. In Darrow’s subsequent essay, “The Eugenics Cult” (1926), he attacked the reasoning of eugenicists. “On the basis of what biological principles, and by what psychological hocus-pocus [Dr. William McDougall] reaches the conclusion that the ability to read intelligently denotes a good germ-plasm and desirable citizens I cannot say,” he wrote. Darrow also criticized the idea that humanity even knows what qualities it would take to make humanity “better,” and compared humanity’s biology experiments unfavorably to those of Nature.

Death

Darrow died on March 13, 1938, of pulmonary heart disease.

Legacy

Today, Clarence Darrow is remembered for his reputation as a fierce litigator who, in many cases, championed the cause of the underdog; because of this, he is generally regarded as one of the greatest criminal defense lawyers in American history. 

Henry Drummond (left), a fictionalized version of Clarence Darrow, as portrayed by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind.

According to legend, before he died, Darrow declared that if there was an afterlife, he would return on the small bridge (now known as the Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge) located just south of the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park, Chicago on the date of his death. Darrow was skeptical of a belief in life after death (he is reported to have said: "Every man knows when his life began... If I did not exist in the past, why should I, or could I, exist in the future?") but he made this promise to dissuade mediums from charging people money to "talk" to his spirit. People still gather on the bridge in the hopes of seeing his ghost.

Plays

• Darrow, a full-length one-man play created after his death, featuring Darrow's reminiscences about his career. Originated by Henry Fonda, many actors (including Leslie Nielsen and David Canary) have since taken on the role of Darrow in this play, which was adapted as Darrow, a film starring Kevin Spacey and released by American Playhouse in 1991.
• Inherit the Wind, a play (later adapted to the screen) which is a broadly fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial. Though the authors note that the 1925 trial was "clearly the genesis" of their play, they insist that the characters had "life and language of their own." They also mention that the issues raised in the play "have acquired new dimension and meaning", a possible reference to the political controversies of the 1950s. Still, they finish their foreword by inviting a more universal reading of the play: "It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow." Spencer Tracy played the Darrow character ("Henry Drummond") in the film, and Jason Robards plays him in a TV remake in 1988.
• Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials is a play written by Arthur Beer, based on the trials of Ossian and Henry Sweet, and derived from Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice.^[42]
• My Name is Ossian Sweet, a docudrama written by Gordon C. Bennett, based on the Sweet trials in which the black family was defended by Darrow against a charge of murder in Detroit 1925. Published (2011) at HeartlandPlays.com.
• Clarence Darrow by David W. Rintels, where Kevin Spacey again portrayed Darrow in this one-man performance in 2014 and 2015.
• Clarence Darrow Tonight! written and performed by Laurence Luckinbill, debuted at The Ensemble Theater in NYC and performed throughout the country, including at President Bill Clinton's second inaugural in 1996. Winner of the 1996 Silver Gavel Award for Theater, given by the American Bar Association.
• During a police interrogation at the police station in the 1949 movie Holiday Affair, the character, Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) said to the lieutenant (Harry Morgan), "Your honor, I think I can clear this all up." The lieutenant said, "Go ahead, if Clarence Darrow here doesn't have any objections." He was referring to her fiancé in the movie Carl Davis, played by Wendell Corey.

Film and television

• Compulsion, 1959 film. Fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb trial. Orson Welles played the role of the defense attorney, based on Darrow.
• Alleged, starring Brian Dennehy and Fred Thompson
• The episode, "Defendant: Clarence Darrow" (January 13, 1963), with Tol Avery playing Darrow, in the CBS anthology series, GE True, hosted by Jack Webb. In the storyline, Darrow is charged in 1912 with attempted bribery of a juror. He is defended by Earl Rogers, played by Robert Vaughn. Darrow and Rogers argue passionately over legal procedures.^[45]
• Darrow is mentioned in the sixth season of Mad Men (episode 11: "Favors")
• Darrow is mentioned in the third season of Better Call Saul (episode 6: "Off Brand")
• Darrow is mentioned by Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) in Collateral, 2004 film.

Publications

Non-fiction

• Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell, published by Doubleday in June 2011; includes new material opened to the public in June 2010 by the University of Minnesota Law Library through the Clarence Darrow Digital Collection
• The Angel of Darkness, with Darrow as a main character in the fictional Caleb Carr novel
• Arc of Justice (Owl Books, 2004) by Kevin Boyle; in-depth look at the Ossian Sweet trial
• Clarence Darrow for the Defense, a biography by historical novelist Irving Stone
• Compulsion (1956), Darrow was the inspiration for the character of Jonathan Wilk in the novel, a thinly fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb case. In 1959, the novel was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Orson Welles as Wilk. Welles, whose 3.day closing Address to the Judge on a guilty plea for mercy is abbreviated to the longest monologue ever committed to film at that time, shared the Best Actor award with co-stars Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell at that year's Cannes Film Festival.
• The People v. Clarence Darrow (ISBN 978-0-8129-2179-3) by Geoffrey Cowan; the history of the California criminal case against Darrow for attempting to bribe a juror while defending the McNamara brothers, two labor organizers accused of planting a bomb which destroyed the printing plant of the Los Angeles Times and killed 21 workers.
• "Is Religion Necessary" (Haldeman-Julius Publications); a transcript of the debate between Clarence Darrow and Rev. Robert MacGovern, 1931.

Fiction

• Damned In Paradise, a Nate Heller novel by Max Allan Collins features a fictionalized account of the Massie Trial.

Other

• The Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge is located in Chicago, just south of the Museum of Science & Industry. The Clarence Darrow Commemorative Committee holds an annual event to honor Darrow's life and work.
• The complete collection of Clarence Darrow's personal papers is housed at the University of Minnesota Libraries.
• Darrow is mentioned in "The Gift", a 1967 song by Lou Reed as performed by The Velvet Underground on their 1968 album White Light/White Heat.
• The chapter of Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity, International located at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law is named the Clarence Darrow Chapter.
• A statue of Darrow stands outside the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton Tennessee, site of the 1925 Scopes Trial. The statue was erected in July 14, 2017, and stands just a few feet away from a statue of Darrow's Scopes Trial opponent, William Jennings Bryan, erected in 2005. 
• Darrow was reported to have distracted juries during the closing arguments of his opponents with a cigar trick. He allegedly inserted a thin piano wire into his cigar, which he lit up in the courtroom, to prevent the cigar ash from falling. The jury was reportedly distracted by the fact that the ashes, held together by the wire, never fell from Darrow's cigar.

Books by Darrow

A volume of Darrow's boyhood reminiscences, entitled Farmington, was published in Chicago in 1903 by McClurg and Company.

Darrow shared offices with Edgar Lee Masters, who achieved more fame for his poetry, in particular, the Spoon River Anthology, than for his advocacy.

The papers of Clarence Darrow are located at the Library of Congress and the University of Minnesota Libraries. The Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center of the University of Minnesota Law School has the largest collection of Clarence Darrow material including personal letters to and from Darrow. Many of these letters and other material are available on the U of M's Clarence Darrow Digital Collection website.

List of books

• An Eye for an Eye
• Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
• Persian Pearl
• The Story of My Life
• Farmington
• Resist Not Evil
• Marx vs Tolstoy
• Closing Arguments on Religion, Law and Society
• The Myth of the Soul

Eugene V. Debs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Eugene Debs
Member of the Indiana Senate from the 8th district
In office 1885–1889
Personal details
Born	Eugene Victor Debs November 5, 1855 Terre Haute, Indiana, U.S.
Died	October 20, 1926 (aged 70) Elmhurst, Illinois, U.S.
Political party	Democratic (before 1894) Social Democracy (1897–1898) Social Democratic (1898–1901) Socialist (1901–1926)
Spouse(s)	Kate Metzel (m. 1885; his death 1926)
Signature

Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 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, and lost. Debs was instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), 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. Purportedly to keep the mail running, President Grover Cleveland used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was convicted of federal charges for defying a court injunction against the strike and served six months in prison.

In prison, Debs read various works of socialist theory and emerged six months later as a committed adherent of the international socialist movement. Debs was a founding member of the Social Democracy of America (1897), the Social Democratic Party of America (1898) and the Socialist Party of America (1901). Debs ran as a Socialist candidate for President of the United States five times, including 1900 (earning 0.6% of the popular vote), 1904 (3.0%), 1908 (2.8%), 1912 (6.0%) and 1920 (3.4%), the last time from a prison cell. He was also a candidate for United States Congress from his native state Indiana in 1916.

Debs was noted for his oratory, and his speech denouncing American participation in World War I led to his second arrest in 1918. He was convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918 and sentenced to a term of 10 years. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921. Debs died in 1926, not long after being admitted to a sanatorium due to cardiovascular problems that developed during his time in prison. He has since been cited as the inspiration for numerous politicians.

Biography

Early life

Debs was born on November 5, 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana to Jean Daniel and Marguerite Mari Bettrich Debs, who immigrated to the United States from Colmar, Alsace, France. His father, who came from a prosperous family, owned a textile mill and meat market. Debs was named after the French authors Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo.

Debs attended public school, dropping out of high school at age 14. He took a job with the Vandalia Railroad cleaning grease from the trucks of freight engines for fifty cents a day. He later became a painter and car cleaner in the railroad shops. In December 1871, when a drunken locomotive fireman failed to report for work, Debs was pressed into service as a night fireman. He decided to remain a fireman on the run between Terre Haute and Indianapolis, earning more than a dollar a night for the next three and half years.

In July 1875, Debs left to work at a wholesale grocery house, where he remained for four years while attending a local business school at night.

Debs had joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF) in February 1875 and became active in the organization. In 1877 he served as a delegate of the Terre Haute lodge to the organization's national convention. Debs was elected associate editor of the BLF's monthly organ, Firemen's Magazine, in 1878. Two years later, he was appointed Grand Secretary and Treasurer of the BLF and editor of the magazine in July 1880. He worked as a BLF functionary until January 1893 and as the magazine's editor until September 1894.

At the same time, he became a prominent figure in the community. He served two terms as Terre Haute's city clerk from September 1879 to September 1883. In the fall of 1884, he was elected to the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat, serving for one term.

Marriage and family

Debs married Kate Metzel on June 9, 1885. Their home still stands in Terre Haute, preserved amidst the campus of Indiana State University.

Labor activism

The railroad brotherhoods were comparatively conservative organizations, focused on providing fellowship and services rather than on collective bargaining. Their motto was "Benevolence, Sobriety, and Industry". As editor of the official journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs initially concentrated on improving the Brotherhood's death and disability insurance programs. During the early 1880s, Debs' writing stressed themes of self-upliftment: temperance, hard work and honesty. Debs also held the view that "labor and capital are friends" and opposed strikes as a means of settling differences. The Brotherhood had never authorized a strike from its founding in 1873 to 1887, a record which Debs was proud of. Railroad companies cultivated the Brotherhood and granted them perks like free transportation to their conventions for the delegates. Debs also invited railroad president Henry C. Lord to write for the magazine. Summarizing Debs's thought in this period, historian David A. Shannon wrote: "Debs's desideratum was one of peace and co-operation between labor and capital, but he expected management to treat labor with respect, honor and social equality".

Debs gradually became convinced of the need for a more unified and confrontational approach as railroads were powerful companies in the economy. One influence was his involvement in the Burlington Railroad Strike of 1888, a defeat for labor that convinced Debs of the necessity of organizing along craft lines. After stepping down as Brotherhood Grand Secretary in 1893, Debs organized one of the first industrial unions in the United States, the American Railway Union (ARU), for unskilled workers. He was elected president of the ARU upon its founding, with fellow railway labor organizer George W. Howard as first vice president. The Union successfully struck the Great Northern Railway in April 1894, winning most of its demands.

Pullman Strike

Striking American Railway Union (ARU) members confront Illinois National Guard troops in Chicago during Debs' rebellion in 1894

 

In 1894, Debs became involved in the Pullman Strike, which grew out of a compensation dispute started by the workers who constructed the train cars made by the Pullman Palace Car Company. The Pullman Company, citing falling revenue after the economic Panic of 1893, had cut the wages of its employees by 28%. The workers, many of whom were already members of the ARU, appealed for support to the union at its convention in Chicago, Illinois. Debs tried to persuade the Union members who worked on the railways that the boycott was too risky, given the hostility of both the railways and the federal government, the weakness of the union, and the possibility that other unions would break the strike. The membership ignored his warnings and refused to handle Pullman cars or any other railroad cars attached to them, including cars containing U.S. Mail. After ARU Board Director Martin J. Elliott extended the strike to St. Louis, doubling its size to 80,000 workers, Debs relented and decided to take part in the strike, which was now endorsed by almost all members of the ARU in the immediate area of Chicago. On July 9, 1894, a New York Times editorial called Debs "a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race". Strikers fought by establishing boycotts of Pullman train cars and with Debs' eventual leadership the strike came to be known as "Debs' Rebellion".

The federal government intervened, obtaining an injunction against the strike on the theory that the strikers had obstructed the US Mail, carried on Pullman cars, by refusing to show up for work. President Grover Cleveland, whom Debs had supported in all three of his presidential campaigns, sent the United States Army to enforce the injunction. The entrance of the Army was enough to break the strike. Overall, 30 strikers were killed in the strike, 13 of them in Chicago, and thousands were blacklisted. An estimated $80 million worth of property was damaged and Debs was found guilty of contempt of court for violating the injunction and sent to federal prison.

Debs was represented by Clarence Darrow, later a leading American lawyer and civil libertarian, who had previously been a corporate lawyer for the railroad company. While it is commonly thought that Darrow "switched sides" to represent Debs, a myth repeated by Irving Stone's biography, Clarence Darrow For the Defense, he had in fact resigned from the railroad earlier, after the death of his mentor William Goudy. A Supreme Court case decision, In re Debs, later upheld the right of the federal government to issue the injunction.

Socialist leader

Rogers, Elliott, Keliher, Hogan, Burns, Goodwin and Debs, the seven ARU officers jailed following the loss of the 1894 Pullman Strike

 

At the time of his arrest for mail obstruction, Debs was not yet a socialist. While serving his six-month term in the jail at Woodstock, Illinois, Debs and his ARU comrades received a steady stream of letters, books and pamphlets in the mail from socialists around the country. Debs recalled several years later:

I began to read and think and dissect the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke. The writings of Bellamy and Blatchford early appealed to me. The Cooperative Commonwealth of Gronlund also impressed me, but the writings of Kautsky were so clear and conclusive that I readily grasped, not merely his argument, but also caught the spirit of his socialist utterance – and I thank him and all who helped me out of darkness into light.

Additionally, Debs was visited in jail by Milwaukee socialist newspaper editor Victor L. Berger, who in Debs' words "came to Woodstock, as if a providential instrument, and delivered the first impassioned message of Socialism I had ever heard". In his 1926 obituary in Time, it was said that Berger left him a copy of Das Kapital and "prisoner Debs read it slowly, eagerly, ravenously". Debs emerged from jail at the end of his sentence a changed man. He would spend the final three decades of his life proselytizing for the socialist cause.

After Debs and Martin Elliott were released from prison in 1895, Debs started his socialist political career. Debs persuaded ARU membership to join with the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth to found the Social Democracy of America. 

Debs' wife Kate was opposed to socialism. The "tempestuous relationship with a wife who rejects the very values he holds most dear" was the basis of Irving Stone's biographical novel Adversary in the House.

Split to found the Social Democratic Party

The Social Democracy of America (SDA), founded in 1897 by Eugene V. Debs from the remnants of his American Railway Union, was deeply divided between those who favored a tactic of launching a series of colonies to build socialism by practical example and others who favored establishment of a European-style socialist political party with a view to capture of the government apparatus through the ballot box. The June 1898 convention would be the group's last, with the minority political action wing quitting the organization to establish a new organization, the Social Democratic Party of America (SDP), also called the Social Democratic Party of the United States.

Debs was elected chairman of the Executive Board of the National Council, the board which governed the party. Though the party did not have a sole figure that governed its actions, Debs' position as chairman and his notoriety gave him the status of party figurehead.

Campaign poster from his 1912 presidential campaign featuring Debs and vice presidential candidate Emil Seidel

Presidential elections

Along with Elliott, Debs was the first federal office candidates for the fledgling socialist party, running unsuccessfully for president and Congress in 1900. Along with his running mate Job Harriman, Debs received 87,945 votes (0.6% of the popular vote) and no electoral votes.

Both the Social Democratic Party and dissidents who split from the Socialist Labor Party back in 1899 would unify forces at a Socialist Unity Convention held in Indianapolis in the summer of 1901 — a meeting which established the Socialist Party of America (SPA).

Debs was the Socialist Party of America candidate for President in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920 (the final time from prison). In his showing in the 1904 election, Debs received 402,810 votes, which was 3.0% of the popular vote. Debs received no electoral votes and with vice presidential candidate Ben Hanford ultimately finished third overall. In the 1908 election, Debs again ran on the same ticket as Hanford. While receiving a slightly higher number of votes in the popular vote (420,852), he received 2.8% of the popular vote and no electoral votes. Debs received 6.0% of the popular vote (a total of 901,551 votes) in 1912. In the election in Florida, he finished second behind Wilson and ahead of President William Howard Taft and former President Teddy Roosevelt. Running alongside Emil Seidel, Debs again received no electoral votes. His total of 913,693 votes in the 1920 campaign, when women finally had the federal right to vote, remains the all-time high for a Socialist Party candidate.

Although he received some success as a third-party candidate, Debs was largely dismissive of the electoral process as he distrusted the political bargains that Victor Berger and other "Sewer Socialists" had made in winning local offices. He put much more value on organizing workers into unions, favoring unions that brought together all workers in a given industry over those organized by the craft skills workers practiced.

Founding the Industrial Workers of the World

After his work with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and the American Railway Union, Debs' next major work in organizing a labor union came during the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). On June 27, 1905 in Chicago, Illinois, Debs and other influential union leaders including Bill Haywood, leader of the Western Federation of Miners; and Daniel De Leon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party, held what Haywood called the "Continental Congress of the working class". Haywood stated: "We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class". Debs stated: "We are here to perform a task so great that it appeals to our best thought, our united energies, and will enlist our most loyal support; a task in the presence of which weak men might falter and despair, but from which it is impossible to shrink without betraying the working class".

Socialists split with the Industrial Workers of the World

Although the IWW was built on the basis of uniting workers of industry, a rift began between the union and the Socialist Party. It started when the electoral wing of the Socialist Party, led by Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit, became irritated with speeches by Haywood. In December 1911, Haywood told a Lower East Side audience at New York's Cooper Union that parliamentary Socialists were "step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step". It was better, Haywood said, to "elect the superintendent of some branch of industry, than to elect some congressman to the United States Congress". In response, Hillquit attacked the IWW as "purely anarchistic".

The Cooper Union speech was the beginning of a split between Haywood and the Socialist Party, leading to the split between the factions of the IWW, one faction loyal to the Socialist Party and the other to Haywood. The rift presented a problem for Debs, who was influential in both the IWW and the Socialist Party. The final straw between Haywood and the Socialist Party came during the Lawrence Textile Strike, when disgusted with the decision of the elected officials in Lawrence, Massachusetts to send police, who subsequently used their clubs on children, Haywood publicly declared that "I will not vote again" until such a circumstance was rectified. Haywood was purged from the National Executive Committee by passage of an amendment that focused on the direct action and sabotage tactics advocated by the IWW. Debs was probably the only person who could have saved Haywood's seat.

In 1906, when Haywood had been on trial for his life in Idaho, Debs had described him as "the Lincoln of Labor" and called for Haywood to run against Theodore Roosevelt for President, but times had changed and Debs, facing a split in the party, chose to echo Hillquit's words, accusing the IWW of representing anarchy. Debs thereafter stated that he had opposed the amendment, but that once it was adopted it should be obeyed. Debs remained friendly to Haywood and the IWW after the expulsion despite their perceived differences over IWW tactics.

Debs speaking in Canton, Ohio in 1918, being arrested for sedition shortly thereafter

 

Prior to Haywood's dismissal, the Socialist Party membership had reached an all-time high of 135,000. One year later, four months after Haywood was recalled, the membership dropped to 80,000. The reformists in the Socialist Party attributed the decline to the departure of the "Haywood element" and predicted that the party would recover, but it did not. In the election of 1912, many of the Socialists who had been elected to public office lost their seats.

Leadership style

Debs was noted by many to be a charismatic speaker who sometimes called on the vocabulary of Christianity and much of the oratorical style of evangelism, even though he was generally disdainful of organized religion. It has been said that Debs was what every socialist and radical should be, i.e. fierce in his convictions, but kind and compassionate in his personal relations. As Heywood Broun noted in his eulogy for Debs, quoting a fellow Socialist: "That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as he's around I believe it myself".

Although sometimes called "King Debs", Debs himself was not wholly comfortable with his standing as a leader. As he told an audience in Detroit in 1906:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.

Incarceration

Debs with Max Eastman and Rose Pastor Stokes in 1918

 

Debs' speeches against the Wilson administration and the war earned the enmity of President Woodrow Wilson, who later called Debs a "traitor to his country". On June 16, 1918, Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio urging resistance to the military draft of World War I. He was arrested on June 30 and charged with ten counts of sedition.

His trial defense called no witnesses, asking that Debs be allowed to address the court in his defense. That unusual request was granted, and Debs spoke for two hours. He was found guilty on September 12. At his sentencing hearing on September 14, he again addressed the court and his speech has become a classic. Heywood Broun, a liberal journalist and not a Debs partisan, said it was "one of the most beautiful and moving passages in the English language. He was for that one afternoon touched with inspiration. If anyone told me that tongues of fire danced upon his shoulders as he spoke, I would believe it". Debs said in part:

Your honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government; that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means....
I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul....
Your honor, I ask no mercy, I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more fully comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come into their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the Southern Cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches the Southern Cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of Time upon the dial of the universe; and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the look-out knows that the midnight is passing – that relief and rest are close at hand.
Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

Debs was sentenced on November 18, 1918 to ten years in prison and was also disenfranchised for life. Debs presented what has been called his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, 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.

Debs appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the court examined several statements Debs had made regarding World War I and socialism. While Debs had carefully worded his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act, the Court found he had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and military recruitment. Among other things, the Court cited Debs' praise for those imprisoned for obstructing the draft. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. stated in his opinion that little attention was needed since Debs' case was essentially the same as that of Schenck v. United States, in which the Court had upheld a similar conviction. 

Clifford Berryman's cartoon depiction of Debs' 1920 presidential run from prison

 

Debs went to prison on April 13, 1919. In protest of his jailing, Charles Ruthenberg led a parade of unionists, socialists, anarchists and communists to march on May 1 (May Day) in Cleveland, Ohio. The event quickly broke into the violent May Day riots of 1919. 

Debs ran for president in the 1920 election while in prison in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He received 919,799 votes (3.4%), slightly less than he had won in 1912, when he received 6%, the highest number of votes for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the United States. During his time in prison, Debs wrote a series of columns deeply critical of the prison system. They appeared in sanitized form in the Bell Syndicate and were published in his only book, Walls and Bars, with several added chapters. It was published posthumously.

In March 1919, President Wilson asked Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer for his opinion on clemency, offering his own: "I doubt the wisdom and public effect of such an action". Palmer generally favored releasing people convicted under the wartime security acts, but when he consulted with Debs' prosecutors—even those with records as defenders of civil liberties—they assured him that Debs' conviction was correct and his sentence appropriate. The President and his Attorney General both believed that public opinion opposed clemency and that releasing Debs could strengthen Wilson's opponents in the debate over the ratification of the peace treaty. Palmer proposed clemency in August and October 1920 without success. At one point, Wilson wrote:

While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines sniping, attacking, and denouncing them....This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.

In January 1921, Palmer, citing Debs' deteriorating health, proposed to Wilson that Debs receive a presidential pardon freeing him on February 12, Lincoln's birthday. Wilson returned the paperwork after writing "Denied" across it.

Debs leaving the federal penitentiary in Atlanta on Christmas Day 1921 following commutation of his sentence

 

On December 23, 1921, President Warren G. Harding commuted Debs' sentence to time served, effective Christmas Day. He did not issue a pardon. A White House statement summarized the administration's view of Debs' case:

There is no question of his guilt....He was by no means as rabid and outspoken in his expressions as many others, and but for his prominence and the resulting far-reaching effect of his words, very probably might not have received the sentence he did. He is an old man, not strong physically. He is a man of much personal charm and impressive personality, which qualifications make him a dangerous man calculated to mislead the unthinking and affording excuse for those with criminal intent.

Last years

Debs leaving the White House the day after being released from prison in 1921

 

When Debs was released from the Atlanta Penitentiary, the other prisoners sent him off with "a roar of cheers" and a crowd of 50,000 greeted his return to Terre Haute to the accompaniment of band music. En route home, Debs was warmly received at the White House by Harding, who greeted him by saying: "Well, I've heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally".

In 1924, Debs was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Finnish Socialist Karl H. Wiik on the grounds that "Debs started to work actively for peace during World War I, mainly because he considered the war to be in the interest of capitalism".

He spent his remaining years trying to recover his health, which was severely undermined by prison confinement. In late 1926, he was admitted to Lindlahr Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois. He died there of heart failure on October 20, 1926, at the age of 70. His body was cremated and buried in Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Legacy

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. In 1979, Bernie Sanders produced 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 by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation for $9,500, 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.

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

 

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.

Representation in other media

• John Dos Passos included Debs as a historical figure in his U.S.A. Trilogy. Debs is featured among other figures in the 42nd Parallel (1930). His affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World prompted actions by such fictional characters in the novel as Mac.
• Fifty Years Before Your Eyes (1950) is a documentary including historic footage of Debs, among others, directed by Robert Youngson.
• The narrator of Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut is named Eugene Debs Hartke in honor of Debs (p. 1).
• Debs appears in the Southern Victory Series novels The Great War: Breakthroughs and American Empire: Blood and Iron by Harry Turtledove.
• Self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders voices Debs in a 1979 documentary about his political career.
• The alternate history collection Back in the USSA by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne is set in a world where Debs leads a communist revolution in the United States in 1917.
• A likeness of Eugene holding a beer keg above his head appears on a beer can from Revolution Brewing.

Works

• Locomotive Firemen's Magazine (editor, 1880–1894). Vol. 4 (1880) | Vol. 5 (1881) | Vol. 6 (1882) | Vol. 7 (1883) | Vol. 8 (1884) | Vol. 9 (1885) | Vol. 10 (1886) | Vol. 11 (1887) | Vol. 12 (1888) | Vol. 13 (1889) | Vol. 14 (1890) | Vol. 15 (1891) | Vol. 16 (1892) | Vol. 17 (1893) | Vol. 18 (1894) .
• Debs: His Life, Writings, and Speeches: With a Department of Appreciations (1908). Girard, Kansas: Appeal to Reason.
• Labor and Freedom (1916). St. Louis: Phil Wagner. Audio version.
• "Susan B. Anthony: Pioneer of Freedom" (July 1917). Pearson's Magazine. 38: 1. pp. 5–7.
• Walls and Bars: Prisons and Prison Life In The "Land Of The Free" (1927). Chicago: Socialist Party of America.
• Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs: Volume 1, Building Solidarity on the Tracks, 1877-1892. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.