Shawn Fain wins Eugene Debs award: Desecrating the memory of America’s great socialist leader

29 September 2026facebook iconThe Debs Foundation announced on September 1 that United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has been named the 2026 recipient of the Eugene V. Debs Award, named after the founding figure of socialism in America. Fain will receive the award in November at the organization’s annual banquet in Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs’ hometown, weeks after the centenary of his October 20, 1926 death.

Readers may reasonably wonder if the award was intended as satire. It was not. But the irony, apparently, was lost on those who bestowed it. For there is a vast chasm between the tradition Debs embodied and the one Shawn Fain stands for today. Indeed, Fain represents everything Debs spent his life opposing.

To appreciate the absurdity, one need recall who Debs was. Born in 1855, six years before the beginning of the Civil War, Eugene Victor Debs went to work on the railroads as a boy and rose to become one of the foremost labor leaders in the United States, only to reject the comfortable career of a trade-union official and devote his life to building the socialist movement. “I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks,” Debs explained. “When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.”

Debs founded the first great industrial union in the US, the American Railway Union and led the 1894 Pullman strike in defiance of the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland, which answered the railroad workers’ struggle with federal troops and imprisoned Debs. His lesson from this first jailing was the need to fight not only for industrial action, but for socialist politics.

Thereafter he never wavered in his fight to break the American working class free of the capitalist political parties. “[W]hat you want to do is quit every capitalist party of every name whatsoever,” Debs exhorted. “What you want to do is to organize your class and assert your class interests as capitalists do the interests of the class that is robbing you.”

A quarter-century later, Debs again defied a Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, denouncing American entry into the First World War and going to federal prison under the Espionage Act, a jailing which hastened the elderly man’s death. But Debs met his sentence with his characteristic moral courage. “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 told the court.

Like other socialist leaders of the Second International, Debs struggled to balance the conflicting class elements of the party he led. The middle class layers in the Socialist Party gravitated to figures Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit—“A Babbitt of Babbitts is Hillquit, the ideal Socialist leader for successful dentists,” Trotsky caustically remarked. Debs bitterly opposed Berger’s and Hillquit’s reformist “sewer socialism.” But he set aside his class anger against these figures��often expressed in private letters to his brother, Theodore—and withdrew from public fights in his beloved party.

But the old Socialist Party also gained the allegiance of millions of industrial workers, poor farmers, and immigrants. Debs won their ardor, and he earnestly sought to represent them. His personal devotion and solidarity with the most oppressed cannot be doubted.

Touring the Deep South at the height of Jim Crow, Debs refused to address segregated meetings. His portrait often hung prominently in the tenement apartments of Jewish workers. “Deps, Deps, they called him,” one informant recalled of the Yiddish-speaking socialists. In industrial cities and coal patches, he reached immigrant workers who often knew little English but grasped his message nonetheless. After witnessing one such speech, an incredulous reporter asked how Polish workers could understand the speaker. An immigrant worker replied: “Debs talks to us with his hands, out of his heart, and we all understood everything he said.”

Lenin, not known for exaggeration, called Debs “one of the most beloved leaders of the American proletariat.” Trotsky, who, when he lived in New York in the first half of 1917, met and embraced Debs, called the older man a “sincere revolutionary” and wrote of the “quenchless inner flame of his socialist idealism.”

Which brings us, improbably as it may seem, to Shawn Fain. The jarring shift of subjects conjures the images of a vast balloon suddenly losing its air—an involuntary descent from something lofty and noble, whatever its limitations, to the flatulence and squalor of the union apparatus.

To invoke Debs in honoring the UAW president is to invite a comparison that the award’s sponsors would have done better to avoid. It’s a good chance for a history lesson.

One hardly knows where to begin, but a few “trifling” differences spring to mind:

This last point is perhaps the most damning exposure of Fain’s “award.” Because there is, in fact, a candidate standing for UAW president who embodies the best of what Debs stood for. Like Debs, Will Lehman is fighting for socialist politics in the working class. Like Debs, Lehman has declared he will not rise from the ranks, but with them. Like Debs, Lehman is calling for rank-and-file power and the fighting unity of workers everywhere. Like Debs, Lehman opposes imperialist war.

The choice of Fain over everything Debs represented, therefore, cannot be chalked up to historical ignorance or bad judgment. It is a political decision enacted by definite interests. What is involved is the appropriation of Debs’ name and moral authority by a privileged layer organically hostile to the independent industrial and political action of the working class.

The Debs Foundation is run by a volunteer board drawn heavily from the trade union officialdom, labor academia, and Democratic Party-aligned liberalism. Its president, Mark Dimondstein, retired last year after 12 years at the head of the American Postal Workers Union, during which time he himself collected more than $2.1 million in salary, allowances and other disbursements from the union which he led to the precipice of destruction.

It is this social layer—not the rank-and-file workers to whom Debs devoted his life—that dares to determine who may inherit his name.

The fact that Fain has been handed a prize named after Debs becomes still less mysterious when one considers who else has won it over the years. The very first recipient, in 1965, was longtime United Mine Workers president and consummate union bureaucrat John L. Lewis, who knew Debs and who hated all that he stood for. There was not a more ferocious opponent of socialism in the labor movement, though it must be admitted, as opposed to Fain, that the old UMW head was compelled under rank-and-file pressure, on occasion, to lead a national strike and even oppose an American president, as when the coal miners went on strike in 1943 against the Roosevelt administration and at the height of World War II.

In fact, since its inception the Debs Award has gone overwhelmingly to figures drawn from the official trade union bureaucracy and the liberal-Democratic Party milieu. At least 26 of its 59 recipients have been senior union officials or union-affiliated organizations, including UAW presidents Walter Reuther and Ron Gettelfinger, AFL-CIO presidents John Sweeney and Richard Trumka, and the heads of the mine workers, machinists, steelworkers, communications workers, clothing workers and SEIU. The prize has also been bestowed on such representatives of Democratic Party liberalism as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Michael Harrington, Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond and Bernie Sanders.

It reads less like an honor roll of Debs’ heirs than a roll call of just the sorts of figures he spent his life fighting.

Some monuments honor the dead. Others are meant to keep them down. The Debs Award aims for the latter. Each year another union official or Democrat is heaped on Debs’ grave. Fain is the latest stone.

Debs’ legacy does not belong to the union officialdom or its Democratic Party allies. It belongs to the workers who, like Debs, will fight to free themselves from capitalist politics, reject imperialist war and establish their independent power over industry and society. They will find their way to Debs, and to considerably more.