Socialism is in vogue in America. Radical left politics, embodied by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is gaining traction among millennials who came of age during the Great Recession. And conservatives, in turn, have reverted to using decades-old Red Scare tactics in response.

With the hype around a resurgent American left, it might feel like socialism is a newcomer to political discourse in the United States. But only if you don’t know your US history. Long before Bernie Sanders came along, there was Eugene Debs. It is impossible to understand the appeal of socialism in America today without looking at its past. And that inevitably leads to Debs.

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An activist and trade unionist, he was jailed for his role in the 1894 Pullman strike – the nationwide railroad strike that changed the face of US labour laws. His storied life as a socialist was marked by his opposition to large corporations and his role in helping to unionise labour. later, as a member of the Socialist party of America, Debs ran for president five times between 1900 and 1920. A charismatic orator he was jailed, again, in 1918 on grounds of sedition for his speeches denouncing US participation in the first world war. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Long before the Brooklyn-to-Vermont idealist launched a senatorial career, Bernie Sanders had declared Debs to be his idol. Sanders even made a spoken-word album about the vanished giant. A portrait of Debs, to this day, hangs on Sanders’ office wall.

Like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, his platform focused on social inequalities, including income inequality. He also fought for better transportation systems; health and safety regulations; unemployment compensation; the minimum wage; the limiting of so-called military budgets; and women’s reproductive rights, including access to birth control. Debs also envisioned what he called a “cooperative commonwealth,” in which people would share their work and community life in new ways they would discover for themselves.

His radicalism was a product of both his upbringing but also his time. Debs was born in 1855, the son of Alsatian (that is, French-speaking) immigrants who operated a small grocery store in the thriving railroad town of Terre Haute, Indiana. He was named after two radicals: the radical French writer, Eugene Sue and another radical French writer, Victor Hugo.

Debs was born in 1855, the son of Alsatian immigrants who ran a grocery store in the railroad town of Terre Haute, Indiana

“Gene” took a railroad job at 15 and joined a union at the first opportunity. A traveling organizer for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, he quickly became editor of their magazine.The real turning point in Debs’ life came during the 1890s when he came face to face with the widening inequalities in American society.

In 1893, Debs witnessed the worst economic downturn in US history, accompanied by massive suffering and even starvation. The Depression meanwhile hastened the concentration of wealth and privilege that gave the era its lasting nickname, “the Gilded Age”. Unions including Debs’s own locomotive firemen were broken or badly weakened. For these reasons, Debs founded the American Railway Union (ARU) to unite all railroad workers, regardless of skill or wage-level.

He would find a clear representative of rising corporate power in the Pullman Palace Car Company. Manufacturer of luxurious railroad sleeping cars with plush carpeting, draperies, upholstered chairs and chandeliers, these cars were built in Pullman, a small community south of Chicago. There, the company operated as lord and master over its workforce.

Debs’s ARU faced its great test when the Pullman Company, determined to increase profits, lowered wages without corresponding cuts in grocery prices or rent. Workers struck, and the company declared them fired. Debs called for solidarity. At least a quarter million railroad men responded to the ARU’s appeal by laying down their tools, across 27 states.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. To understand the appeal of socialism we must look to the past. Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Within weeks, Debs learned the largest political lesson of his life: the power of the State. As business leaders demanded dramatic action, Democratic president Grover Cleveland called out federal troops to break the strike – something that had never before been done.

Debs was arrested and sent to prison in Woodstock, Illinois. Here, he was said to have first read Karl Marx and pondered socialist ideas. He emerged a hero in the eyes of a public who saw in him a promise of something that might break the power of rich. The Pullman strike had taught him that working people needed not only unions but their own political party.

The Socialist party, founded in 1901, came together around Debs. Among his most dogged followers were “Abe’s Boys,” surviving Union army veterans of the civil war, invoking Debs as successor to martyred President Lincoln. Among others, socialists numbered thousands of tenant farmers in parts of Oklahoma where red flags stood in windows of small towns and their party won dozens of public offices. Still others were recent immigrants. Eastern European Jews, Finns, Hungarians, Lithuanians and Slovenians counted heavily among them, joining the cadre of aging German Americans, since the 1860s the backbone of an earlier, insular socialist movement. The message of socialism spread dramatically through the Appeal to Reason, published in Girard, Kansas, with a weekly circulation of more than a half million, Debs its favorite contributor.

Sanders has returned repeatedly to Debs’ central message: the need to combat the catastrophically increasing inequality

For a while, the optimism seemed on target. Hundreds of local socialist newspapers flourished in many languages, vote totals grew, and the number of elected local officials advanced election after election. By 1912, when Debs received nearly a million votes for president, a downside became apparent.

Mainstream reformers began to undercut the socialist appeal by adopting much of the Socialist party platform, minus the promise of a cooperative society. Voter suppression and ballot-stuffing also limited socialist success. Worst of all, for the promise of socialism, was the outbreak of war in Europe. Ironically, armed conflict also spawned an economic boom in the US. Strikes spread as the labor markets tightened, and new unions formed.

The US entry into the war prompted the nation’s most famous or notorious “Red Scare.” Soon, socialist meetings were forbidden, socialist newspapers closed, their immigrant supporters threatened with deportation. As his friends and followers went off to prison, Debs determined to make a stand.

Debs delivered a thundering antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, in 1918, knowing he was about to fall into the legal trap prepared for him. After two years in federal prison, his health broken, he was released to return home. Debs died in 1926, the symbol of a brave American’s dedication to social justice but also a reminder of the ruthless persecution of dissenters by the powers of the state.

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The rest of the story of the American socialist movement, until recent years, is not nearly as inspiring. Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, each of them designated “Mr Socialism” by the press, kept the faith for diminishing audiences. Old time socialists surviving into the 1960s believed they found Debs’s message again in the life and work of Martin Luther King.

The grand social movements of the 1960s and 70s – civil rights, anti-war, environmentalism and women’s and gay liberation – sought dramatic social change. But not in the framework of “socialism,” considered out of date or discredited by the Soviet Union.

Debs had not, of course, ever quite disappeared as a symbol of democratic socialism. Although Sanders had referenced him in the past we did not hear much about Debs from Bernie during his historic run for the 2016 Democratic nomination. But Sanders returned repeatedly to Debs’s central message: the need to combat the catastrophically increasing inequality, created by the power of the corporations and their control over the state.

Is there a rendezvous with destiny between the story of Debs and the uncertainty of Americans over long-held ideological claims to individualism, personal success and freedom from restraints? Could the visions of a man dead almost a century contain our own unfinished business? As Debs was fond of saying, “I am for socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough.”