Zohran Mamdani, Eugene Debs and the American Socialist Tradition

During his victory speech on November 4, New York City Mayor-elect Zahran Mamdani quoted the five-time presidential candidate: “The sun may have set on our city this evening,” he declared to a large crowd of supporters in Brooklyn, “but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”

Although many in attendance may not have been sure of Debs’ identity, the reference made perfect sense. After all, Debs was a transformative figure in the history of American socialism. While many commentators treat socialism as something alien to the nation’s soil—an import from abroad—there has been a long American socialist tradition, one that combined a vision of government with defense of working Americans and respect for the values ​​of individualism, liberty, and civic republicanism.

Given the history of socialism in American politics, Mamdani’s rise to power is not as surprising as some might think.

Molasses was made In the United States of America. He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, the son of immigrants. He dropped out of public high school to get a job on the railway. But his real passion was organizing working Americans. In 1875, he joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and two years later gained national attention when he delivered a rousing speech in the wake of the 1877 railroad strike: “Strikes are the last resort of men driven to despair after the failure of peaceful efforts to obtain justice.”

As he rose through the ranks of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Debs also became active in local politics, first in municipal government, then at the state level, when voters elected him to serve in the Indiana state legislature in 1884.

His focus was always on the economic and material security of working-class Americans as well as their rights as citizens. Debs began his career at a time when existing unions were organized around specific trades, and Debs belonged to a new generation that believed in the necessity of organizing workers along industrial lines, as corporations began to dominate the national landscape. In 1893, he left the BLF to found the American Railroad Association in Chicago. Under this industrial model, anyone who works on railways can join. The union organized a successful 18-day strike against the Great Northern Railway in the summer of 1894.

After the American Railroad Union went on strike against the Pullman Company demanding recognition, Debs participated in a national boycott of any train carrying Pullman cars. The boycott caused major disruptions in the railroad industry until President Grover Cleveland obtained an injunction and sent federal troops to break the strike. When Debs refused to comply with the court order, he was arrested and spent six months in prison for contempt of court. During his imprisonment, Debs read extensively about socialism. In 1897, after a year working on the presidential campaign of Democrat William Jennings Bryan, Debs switched sides and helped found the Socialist Party of America in 1901. He was also one of the labor leaders who created the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905.

Although socialist organizations such as the Labor Party and the Socialist Labor Party had long existed in the United States, none had a figure like Debs who could give the movement national importance. Known for his charisma on the stump, Debs shook his fist and leaned on the podium as he spoke with fiery conviction. In 1904, he ran for president as a candidate of the Social Democratic Party and received 400,000 votes. (He first ran in 1900 and received fewer than 90,000 votes.) He continued to be nominated three more times. In 1912, facing Republican President William Howard Taft, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, Debs won by more than 900,000 votes, about 6 percent. “I may be a theorist and a dreamer, but I think I can see the handwriting on the wall,” he said in one of his speeches. “The world is going through a wave of discontent, and change is at hand.”

The type of socialism Debs practiced was different from the socialism that had taken hold in Europe. He envisioned a strong government committed to protecting working Americans but firmly rooted in republican values ​​that emphasized the rights and obligations of individual citizenship. As historian Nick Salvatore noted in his classic biography, Debs saw socialism as the fulfillment of traditional American ideals, not their rejection. His beliefs are derived from republicanism, evangelical Protestantism, and the principle of equal opportunity. His radicalism echoed the words of Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln far more than it did Karl Marx. Salvatore wrote that Debs “took the republican tradition seriously and emphasized the individual dignity and strength inherent in the concept of citizenship.” Many of its core issues—unemployment and old-age insurance for workers, civil rights and women’s suffrage, free education, and collective ownership or stronger regulation of public utilities—would enjoy widespread support among twentieth-century liberals. His ultimate goal was to create a democratic form of corporate capitalism that respected and protected workers’ rights.

Christianity has continually informed his understanding of the common good. “What is socialism?” Debs asked the audience in New Jersey. “It’s just Christianity in action. It recognizes the equality of men.” At a 1912 campaign rally, Debs spoke in front of an American flag, flanked by a red banner reading “Socialism, Hope of the World” and another reading “We Are Many, They Are Few.”

There were tensions within the socialist movement, particularly over how much attention should be devoted to women’s suffrage and racial justice. Debs made his position clear by refusing to address the segregated masses.

But his ideas, especially his opposition to the war, proved too much for President Wilson to bear. During the first Red Scare of World War I, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer aggressively cracked down on wartime dissent, trampled on civil liberties and used state power to suppress freedom of expression. Palmer targeted Debs after he gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, denouncing the war in Europe led by Wall Street financiers that poor Americans were forced to fight. Soon after, the government charged Debs under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. In September 1918, he was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

“[Y]Long ago, I realized my kinship with all living things and decided that I was not even the slightest bit better than the meanest people on Earth. I said then, and I say now, as long as there is a lower class, I am in it, as long as there is a criminal element, I am in it, and as long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” he declared defiantly upon his conviction.

Even from his federal prison cell in Atlanta, Debs refused to back down. In 1920, the Socialist Party nominated him for president, his fifth and final campaign. He ran from behind bars and received more than 900,000 votes. On Christmas 1921, President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence and released him from prison. Debs died five years later in Illinois.

Debs was not the only socialist to achieve electoral success in this era. Socialists also won seats in the House of Representatives, including Victor Berger of Milwaukee, one of Debs’s inspirations, who was elected in 1910. Mayer London, a socialist and former attorney for the Ladies’ International Garment Workers Union, served two non-consecutive terms beginning in 1915.

Many socialists have achieved success at the municipal level, where they effectively link ideas about the collective good to practical issues such as utility rates and public services.

As a result of the crackdowns of World War I and the divisions that followed the Russian Revolution, socialism weakened as a political force in the 1920s. Debs’ death curtailed the movement that had grown dramatically under his leadership.

Socialism regained some of its strength during the Great Depression of the 1930s when the collapse of the economy left workers in desperate need of leadership and relief. Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister from Ohio, emerged as the keeper of the socialist flame. In 1932, he received nearly 900,000 votes in the presidential election. Socialists, as well as communists, were also important allies of the civil rights movement at a time when much of the country was willing to accept the permanence of the Jim Crow South.

But during the Second Red Scare of the 1950s, American socialism once again receded to the margins, even as many of the movement’s ideas were absorbed into mainstream politics under Franklin Roosevelt. American socialists such as the writer Michael Harrington continued to organize and publish influential works (Harrington’s Works other america, Passed in 1962, it was said to have influenced Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, but it was largely rejected by liberal Democrats and remained a marginal force.

During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement into the halls of power, and it seemed that socialism in the United States might finally be coming to an end. At a conference at Princeton University New York Times He recounted that a group of historians gathered in late 1984 to honor the legacy of Norman Thomas. A few in attendance saw a big future for what they were celebrating, especially after Reagan’s landslide victory over Democrat Walter Mondale. Many attendees were members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The concerns expressed at that conference turned out to be misplaced, even though it took decades for socialism to regain momentum. While some individuals who were democratic socialists came to power, such as New York Mayor David Dinkins (1990-1993), their number remained small.

Over time, widening economic inequality and frustration with a Democratic Party that had shifted to the center attracted a new generation to the movement. The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 became a pivotal moment, as protesters filled the streets of New York to challenge the power of the top one percent. Although he was never a member of the DSA, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who identifies as a Democratic socialist, has energized a new generation of activists — including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) and Mamdani — through his campaigns for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020. His message has brought ideas from that tradition, such as national health insurance and stronger union rights, to the forefront of his message. Membership in the Social Democrats has increased steadily, reaching more than 80,000 by 2025. Despite disagreements within the Social Democrats on issues such as Israel, the Social Democrats are now back in the mainstream.

Although liberals and centrists still constitute a powerful force within the Democratic Party, especially among its leaders, they have for years been engaged in dialogue with the social democrats. The push and pull between these factions has broadened the party’s agenda and sparked serious debates about policies that were off the agenda during the height of neoliberalism in the 1990s.

Tradition that Debs helped build in the early 1900s and is still going strong. As historian Michael Kazin has said, socialism still has great appeal. “They, like most of their predecessors, dream of a far more equal society but struggle for realistic goals like Medicare for All and an economy based on renewable energy sources,” Kazin noted.

New York’s mayor-elect may lean left-of-center, but his basic idea of ​​domestic policy – ​​the need to make life affordable and secure for hard-working Americans through government aid – is as American as apple pie. His proposals, such as universal child care, may be bolder than those of other Democrats, but it is clear that his arguments resonate widely. Democratic socialist ideas have been so deeply rooted in mainstream politics since the early twentieth century that his message will find widespread support.