Although almost forgotten today, Debs was a very prominent political figure a century ago, and he usually received brief mention in my introductory history textbooks, which occasionally noted the five times he had run for the Presidency on the Socialist Party ticket. His high-water mark came in the 1912 election when he pulled a remarkable 6% of the national vote, possibly even influencing the outcome of the bitter three-way race between incumbent President Howard Taft, former President Theodore Roosevelt, and New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson, which was won by the latter. Historian James Chace, former managing editor of Foreign Affairs, told that story in an interesting 2004 book.

The horrific First World War broke out the year after Wilson was inaugurated, and Debs, a strong anti-militarist, sat out the 1916 race as Wilson won a very narrow reelection victory partly on the strength of the campaign slogan "He kept us out of war." But America's industrial giants had sold enormous quantities of munitions to the Allies, much of it on credit, and without an Allied victory, those loans could never be repaid. So once the votes were counted and after a failed attempt to negotiate peace, Wilson soon reversed himself and took America into the stalemated European conflict.

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