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The Socialist Party. Eugene V. Debs for President 1904 For Vice President Ben Hanford.

Chicago: Eagle Lithographing Co., 1904. Copyright by William Mailly, Sec’y. Tinted lithograph, 21” x 30.75” plus margins. Recently backed with Japanese tissue. CONDITION: Very good, a few expertly- repaired short tears at edges.

Exceptionally rare original campaign poster for 1904 candidates for President and Vice President, Eugene V. Debs and Ben Hanford, on the ticket of the newly founded Socialist Party.

Featuring large jugate portraits of Debs and Hanford in the foreground, this richly detailed poster shows two workers casting their votes into a ballot box, which rests on a column bearing Marx’s famous conclusion to the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the World Unite.” Surrounding the candidates, and reflecting Debs’s belief in the necessity of organizing unions by industry rather than by craft or skill level, are an array of urban and rural industries: railway and shipping appear on the left, mining and farming in the center, and on the right are a printers’ shop, a foundry, a glass factory, and a shoe factory. Debs founded the Socialist Party of America in 1901 by merging the Social Democratic Party (which he had helped to found in 1896) with the reformist wing of the Socialist Labor Party, and in 1904 won some 400,000 votes, more than four times the number he received in his 1900 campaign.

Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926) was born in Indiana, where his early work on the railroad spurred his lifelong labor organizing. He was a founding member of the American Railway Union, and as its president was instrumental in organizing the Pullman Strike. Debs spent six months in jail for defying federal injunctions to break the strike, during which time he studied the socialist theory that would orient the rest of his labor efforts. In 1905, along with other prominent organizers, including Mother Jones, Debs helped organize the Industrial Workers of the World, which remains active today. He made five bids for the presidency between 1900 and 1920, running his last and most successful campaign from prison, where he was serving a ten year term for violating the Sedition Act of 1918 when he criticized the U.S. Government for entering World War I. He was released in 1921 by President Warren Harding. After his death, many of the programs and policies upon which he had run were enacted as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. A powerful orator, Debs described his life’s work “of organizing my fellow-workingmen” as motivated by the hope that “by the power of united effort they might do something to improve their condition as workers, promote their interests as citizens and advance their general welfare as men.” He is remembered as “one of the greatest and most articulate advocates of workers’ power” in U.S. history (“Eugene V. Debs”).

Ben Hanford (1861–1910) ran alongside Debs in both the 1904 and 1908 presidential elections. He was born in Ohio and became a printer in Chicago, but spent much of his political career in New York, where he ran for mayor three times as a socialist. Hanford was a gifted speaker and writer, and the titular character from his short story “Jimmie Higgins” was made famous by Upton Sinclair’s novel of the same name, published after Hanford’s early death.

Eagle Lithographing Co., run by M. C. Cooney, was active in Chicago between 1891 and 1907. According to Last, the firm primarily printed sheet music covers. OCLC locates only one other work by them: a theater poster for The Burgomaster, printed in 1899.

Two versions of this poster were printed. One in full color,with the text on the column reading “Workers of all countries unite,” and the present tinted version.

OCLC records just one copy of this poster, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (the full color version).

A beautiful example of one of the great American political posters.

REFERENCES: Eugene V. Debs, “Class Unionism” (1905), Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive online; “Eugene V. Debs,” Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive; Last, Jay. The Color Explosion, p. 182.

Item #7884

Price: $17,500.00