During his victory speech on Nov. 4, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani quoted a five-time presidential candidate: “The sun may have set over our city this evening,” he declared to an exuberant crowd of supporters in Brooklyn, “but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”
Though many people in attendance might have been unsure who Debs was, the reference made perfect sense. After all, Debs was a transformative figure in the history of U.S. socialism. While many commentators treat socialism as something foreign to the nation’s soil—an import from abroad—there has been a long U.S. socialist tradition, one that has fused a vision of government with a defense of working Americans and a respect for values of individualism, liberty, and civic republicanism.
And given the history of socialism in U.S. politics, Mamdani’s rise to power is less surprising than some might believe.
Debs was made in the USA. Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, he was the son of immigrants . He dropped out of public high school to take a job on the railroad. But his true 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 dramatic speech following the 1877 railroad strike: “Strikes are the last means which are resorted to by men driven to desperation after peaceful efforts to obtain justice have failed.”
As he rose through the ranks of the BLF, Debs also became active in local politics, first in municipal government, and then statewide, when voters elected him to serve in the Indiana state legislature in 1884.
His focus was always on the economic and physical security of working-class Americans as well as their rights as citizens. Beginning his career at a time when existing unions organized around specific crafts, 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 establish the American Railway Union in Chicago. Under this industrial model, anyone who worked on the railroad could join. The union staged a successful 18-day strike against the Great Northern Railway in the summer of 1894.
After the American Railway Union mounted a strike against the Pullman Company to demand recognition, Debs participated in a national boycott of any train that carrying Pullman cars. The boycott caused major disruptions across the railroad industry until President Grover Cleveland secured 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 incarceration, Debs read extensively about socialism. In 1897, a year after working on Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s presidential campaign, Debs shifted his allegiance and helped found the Socialist Party of America in 1901. He also was one of the labor leaders who created the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905.
Although socialist organizations such the Workingmen’s 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 prominence. Debs was renowned for his charisma on the stump, shaking his fist and leaning over the platform as he spoke with fiery conviction. In 1904, he ran for president as the candidate for the Socialist Democratic Party and won 400,000 votes. (He’d first run in 1900 and received fewer than 90,000 votes.) He would go on to run three more times. In 1912, facing Republican President William Howard Taft, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, Debs won over 900,000 votes—about 6 percent. “I may be a theorist and a dreamer,” he said in one speech, “but I think I can see the handwriting on the wall. The world is in the midst of a wave of discontent, and a change is at hand.”
The kind of socialism that Debs practiced differed from the socialism taking hold in Europe. He envisioned a robust government committed to protecting working Americans yet firmly rooted in republican values stressing the rights and obligations of individual citizenship. As historian Nick Salvatore noted in his classic biographyDebs saw socialism as the fulfillment of traditional American ideals, not their rejection. His beliefs drew from republicanism, evangelical Protestantism, and the principle of equality of opportunity. His radicalism echoed the words of Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln much more than Karl Marx. Debs, Salvatore wrote, “took the republican tradition seriously and stressed the individual dignity and power inherent in the concept of citizenship.” Many of his core issues—unemployment and old age insurance for workers, civil rights and women’s suffrage, free education, and collective ownership or stronger regulation of utilities—would gain broad support among 20th century liberals. His ultimate goal was a democratic form of corporate capitalism that respected and protected the rights of workers.
Christianity consistently informed his understanding of the public good. “What is socialism?” Debs asked an audience in New Jersey. “Merely Christianity in action. It recognizes the equality in men.” At a 1912 campaign rally, Debs spoke before the U.S. flag, framed by one red banner that declared, “Socialism, the Hope of the World,” and another that read, “We Are Many, They Are Few.”
There were tensions within the socialist movement, particularly over how much attention to devote to women’s suffrage and racial justice. Debs made his stance clear by refusing to address segregated audiences.
But his ideas, particularly his opposition to war, proved too much for President Wilson to tolerate. During the first Red Scare during World War I, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched an aggressive crackdown on wartime dissent, trampling on civil liberties and using the power of the state to suppress free speech. Palmer targeted Debs after he delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio, denouncing a war in Europe being driven by Wall Street financiers that poor Americans were being 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]ears ago, I recognized my kinship with all living beings and made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” he proclaimed defiantly upon his conviction.
Even from his cell in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Debs refused to back down. In 1920, the Socialist Party nominated him for president, his fifth and final campaign. Running from behind bars, he earned more than 900,000 votes. On Christmas in 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 find electoral success in this era. Socialists also won seats in the House of Representatives, including Milwaukee’s Victor Berger, one of the people who had inspired Debs, who was elected in 1910. New Yorker Meyer London, a socialist and former lawyer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, served two nonconsecutive terms beginning in 1915.
Numerous socialists found success at the municipal level, where they effectively connected ideas about the collective good to practical issues such as utility prices and public services.
As a result of the World War I crackdown and divisions that followed the Russian Revolution, socialism weakened as a political force in the 1920s. Debs’ death further diminished a movement that had grown substantially under his leadership.
Socialism regained some strength during the Great Depression in the 1930s when the collapse of the economy left workers desperate for leadership and relief. Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister from Ohio, emerged as the keeper of the socialist flame. In 1932, he won nearly 900,000 votes in the presidential election. Socialists, as well as communists, were also important allies to the civil rights movement 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, U.S. socialism again receded to the margins even as many of the ideas from the movement had been absorbed into mainstream politics under Franklin D. Roosevelt. U.S. socialists such as the writer Michael Harrington continued to organize and publish influential works (Harrington’s The Other America, released in 1962, reportedly influenced Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty), but they were largely dismissed by liberal Democrats and remained a peripheral force.
During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to the halls of power, it seemed that socialism in the United States might finally have reached its end. At a conference at Princeton University, the New York Times recounted, a group of historians gathered in late 1984 to honor the legacy Norman Thomas. Few in attendance saw much a future for what they were commemorating, particularly after Reagan’s landslide victory over Democrat Walter Mondale. Many of those present were members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The fears expressed at that conference turned out to be misplaced, though it took decades for socialism to regain momentum. While some individuals who had been Democratic Socialists gained power, such as New York Mayor David Dinkins (1990-1993), their number remained small.
Over time, rising economic inequality and frustration with a Democratic Party that shifted to the center drew a new generation into the movement. Occupy Wall Street in 2011 became a pivotal moment, as protesters filled New York’s streets to challenge the power of the top 1 percent. Although never a member of the DSA, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent who identifies as a social democrat, energized a new generation of activists—including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) and Mamdani—with his campaigns for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020. His message brought ideas from this tradition, such as national health insurance and stronger union rights, to the forefront of his message. Membership in the DSA increased steadily, reaching over 80,000 by 2025. Despite rifts within the DSA over issues such as Israel, social democrats have now moved back into the mainstream.
Although liberals and centrists remain a powerful force within the Democratic Party, especially among its leadership, they have for years now been engaged in dialogue with social democrats. The push and pull between these factions has broadened the party’s agenda and sparked serious discussions about policies that, during the heyday of neoliberalism in the 1990s, were off the agenda.
The tradition that Debs helped to build in the early 20th century remains strong. As the historian Michael Kazin has arguedsocialism continues to hold considerable appeal. “Like most of their predecessors,” Kazin observed, “they dream of a far more egalitarian society but fight for realistic goals such as Medicare for All and an economy that would run on renewable sources of energy.”
The mayor-elect of New York may lean left of center, but his core idea about domestic politics—the need to make life affordable and secure for hardworking Americans through government assistance—is as American as apple pie. His proposals such as universal child care may be bolder than those of other Democrats, but his arguments evidently resonate widely. Democratic socialist ideas have been so deeply rooted in mainstream politics since the early 20th century that his message will find broad support.
