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. 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. 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. 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.

Source: New York Times April 20, 2019 15:00 UTC