Born in Terre Haute, Ind., in 1855 and raised by freethinking French immigrant parents, Debs belonged to no church, and espoused no formal religious convictions. But he was intimately familiar with Scripture, and comfortable speaking in the idiom of Midwestern American Protestantism. “The man of Galilee,” he told the crowd in Canton, as frowning federal agents on the scene scribbled down his words, “the carpenter, the working man who became the revolutionary agitator of his day, soon found himself to be an undesirable citizen in the eyes of the ruling knaves and they had him crucified.”

Debs devoted just one paragraph of his lengthy Canton address to expressing the Socialist Party’s traditional opposition to war: “The master class has always declared the wars,” he noted, while “the subject class has always fought the battles.” But that was enough under the Espionage Act to bring his swift indictment and conviction. (The Espionage Act remains on the books a century later.)

Few of Debs’s acquaintances from his early days in Terre Haute could have predicted that he would someday face the grim prospect of spending his last years as a political prisoner. Before he turned 15, eager to contribute to his family’s uncertain finances, Debs dropped out of school and went to work in the local railroad yards. But he did not remain a manual laborer long. By the time he was 25, he was editor of the national magazine of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, then an important union of skilled railroad workers. By 30 he had won election as a Democrat to the Indiana Legislature. Given his intelligence and eloquence, his future seemed unbounded.

Debs’s views in those early Indiana days were those of a fairly conservative craft unionist, anchored in a vision of promoting social harmony between labor and capital. But by the early 1890s he had come to feel that craft unionism, which focused exclusively on the organization of skilled workers like the locomotive firemen (almost entirely white, native-born and male) was a dead end for the labor movement.