Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926) was a union organizer, founder of the International Workers of the World, Socialist Party leader, and five-time presidential candidate. He was jailed on sedition charges during World War One and conducted his final presidential campaign from prison, peaking at 913,664 votes in 1920, which may be considered the high water mark of American Socialism.
Debs wrote the present letters over a thirty-year period to a favorite nephew, Robert Debs Heinl (1880-1950), a newspaper columnist and editor in New York and later Washington. The letters are a mix of personal and political news, written from all across the country as Debs attended rallies and meetings for a variety of causes. One 1905 letter was written during the first months of the Industrial Workers of the World, and boasts: "When you see Gaden, tell him I'm holding tremendous, packed full and running over meetings in his old Buckeye state and that the prospects are finer than a silk factory." A 1912 letter was written in a moment of optimism, explaining that his magazine article was rejected: "In nearly every instance they wrote me a polite explanation instead of declining it in the usual printed and perfunctory form. A little later and they will not decline." Debs often commented on mainstream politics, such as this 1914 assessment of William Jennings Bryan: "Strange how many people here seem to think of him almost as a god. In the final searching analysis of history he will almost if not entirely disappear from view."
The most important of the letters was written just two weeks after Debs was found guilty of sedition during the final months of World War One: "The verdict was inevitable. It had to come. If my position is right nothing else matters, and I am absolutely sure that it is, as sure as I am of my own soul. What the world in its present madness says or thinks or does is nothing to me. If you had seen the wonderful demonstration at Cleveland last Sunday where I spoke to thousands of all kinds of people and if you could read the hundreds of letters and telegrams pouring in here from everywhere, you would realize better than you can just how little I am alone, and how little I need solace in my present situation."
with--Cabinet photograph of Eugene Debs and Letter Signed from Theodore Debs (brother of Eugene) concerning Eugene's imprisonment: "The Boss is still animated with the old spirit and you can gamble your last dollar that he will not allow these p---ants to humiliate him or put anything over without a vigorous come-back, even if he is in prison. Wilson can testify to that." Terre Haute, IN, 13 March 1921.
Consigned by a descendant of Robert Debs Heinl.