Bernie Sanders was in Indiana over the weekend to accept an award named for the Terre Haute-born labor leader Eugene V. Debs.
The U.S. senator from Vermont has long credited the writings and speeches of the union leader, who died in 1926, with influencing his political worldview.
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"In my opinion, Eugene Victor Debs is one of the great figures in American history,” Sanders said before receiving the award.
Debs led the Pullman rail car strike of 1894, which began with workers walking off the job at a factory in Chicago in protest of wage reductions. Company officials refused to negotiate. The American Railroad Union responded with a boycott of all rail cars owned by the Pullman company, effectively shutting down rail travel nationwide. Authorities violently subdued the strike and jailed its leaders, including Debs.
But the demonstration of what the ARU was capable of doing left an impression, and Debs exited prison six months as a committed socialist. He ran for president five times — his final campaign while imprisoned for anti-war statements.
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Debs’ union organizing and advocacy helped shape Great Depression-era demands for economic protections and programs, many of which were formalized in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to rebuild the economy.
“If anybody here thinks that Roosevelt's agenda was not impacted by Debs, you would be sorely mistaken,” Sanders said.
But he said Debs’ most important accomplishment was to expand people's imaginations: “He not only educated and explained to the American working class the nature of American capitalism. But he provided an alternative vision to a society based on lies, greed, war, bigotry and exploitation.”
Since 1965, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation has awarded the prize to a person or group for making significant contributions to labor rights or public service.
Previous recipients include Coretta Scott King, civil rights organizer and widow to Martin Luther King, Jr.; environmentalist and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, historian Howard Zinn, and Kurt Vonnegut, the Indiana novelist.
Before receiving the award, Sanders was introduced by New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She heaped praise on her fellow democratic socialist, recalling his back-to-back terms as mayor of Burlington, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and now as a senator representing Vermont.
“ Even in recognizing the enormity of these achievements, it is still easy to take for granted how challenging and lonely that path could be at times,” she said.
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“Fighting for a minimum wage alone, demanding expanded labor rights in this country alone, standing up for marriage equality alone. Civil rights—alone, racial equality—alone,” she said to loud applause. “He did it for all of us, for decades.”
And then, she said, Sanders ran for the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, forcing many of his longstanding positions into the mainstream.
Bernie visits the Eugene V. Debs museum in Terre Haute, Indiana pic.twitter.com/vQsBpciFU0
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“Many of us who had resigned ourselves to the idea that our future was already predetermined, that the book was already written for us, decided and realized by hearing the voice of this man right here, that the future is not already predetermined — that we can change it,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“It was the first time that many people had heard something like that. And it was the first time that I had heard something like that,” she said.
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Ocasio-Cortez became an organizer with Sanders' 2016 campaign and a year later, launched a successful bid to unseat a 10-term congressman and win the general election, taking office as the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress. She's been re-elected three times since.
Before the dinner, Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders in a tour of the Eugene V. Debs Museum, inside the house that Debs and his wive called home.
“I just had chills down down my spine,” she said.
The pilgrimage to Terre Haute wasn’t the first for Sanders, however.
Decades ago, long before winning national office, Sanders visited the museum to collect media for an educational project on Debs.
The final product was a documentary film, released in 1979, in which Sanders served as narrator for many of Debs’ speeches.
“So, there are a number of people who think Debs had a very strong Brooklyn accent. And I apologize to the people of Indiana for that,” Sanders joked.
Another core memory from the trip is of a Debs staffer taking him to a sports facility at Indiana State University and mentioning an up-and-coming Terre Haute athlete.
“He said, ‘We’ve got a young ball player named Larry Bird. I hadn’t heard of any Bird. That was my introduction to Bird,” he recalled.
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Sanders later repeated a warning that Debs had shared with his own supporters more than 100 years earlier.
“He said, 'I am not a labor leader. I do not want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you'll stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You, the American people, must use your heads as well as your hands and get yourselves out,'“ he read. "It is not only about the leader. It is ordinary people standing up together demanding a better world."
Sanders concluded by saying that working people shouldn't view Debs simply as a historical figure from the distant past.
“Look at him as somebody who is motivating us today to bring the people of our country together, to bring the people of the world together,“ he said. “Our job is to understand what he tried to do and take his message forward.”
