Source: http://haldeman-julius.org/historical-notes/the-appeal-to-reason.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 11:03:52+00:00

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This outstanding overview of The Appeal to Reason , written by Tim Davenport, was originally published in Big Blue Newsletter No. 3 (2004 Q-III). It has been republished here with the kind permission of the author. All credit, rights and copyright belong to him.
The American socialist movement as an organized political force dates to the years immediately following the American Civil War. The emergence of modern industry and a tidal wave of economic growth associated with rapid expansion of the nation's railways quickly altered the American economy from one based in small-scale agriculture to one revolving around large-scale factory production. As mining, steel production, railway construction, and the manufacture of textiles expanded, so too did the pool of industrial workers needed for those enterprises to function. America was a land not only of open spaces, but of labor shortage as well, and it was new immigrants to the country from overpopulated and impoverished sections of Europe who filled the gap.
Many of these laborers and factory hands came to the new world with few financial resources. These new arrivals found themselves forced to take whatever pittance was offered for long hours of toil in unpleasant factories and workshops. The problems of early American industrialism were obvious and onerous: a working day running to twelve hours or more, grueling employment of very young children in mines and factories without protection or supervision, dismal wage rates and no job security, overcrowded and poorly ventilated housing clustered in dismal urban slums with poor sanitation and rampant disease.
Amidst this great suffering of the urban poor, the owners of the mines, mills, and railways began to amass enormous fortunes. Industries rocketed forward and strong firms swallowed their weaker competitors, forming mighty enterprises. These giant survivors aligned with one another as industrial trusts, fixing prices and forcing up profits. This festival of avarice would be interrupted every few years by a financial "panic" - banks would close, factories would be shuttered, unemployment would skyrocket, and the already miserable lot of the working poor would become still worse. The idea that there was a fundamental deficiency in the structure of the American economy sprouted in this fertile soil. A left-wing labor movement emerged, dedicated to exposing the glaring evils of the system and proposing solutions.
Socialism - the notion of state ownership and public control of productive capital - came to be one of the most powerful political ideas by the last quarter of the 19th Century. The socialist reorganization of society was viewed in an almost millennial light, a simple and universal solution to poverty, inequity, and injustice of all sorts. This prescription for fundamental change spawned a socialist political movement and a closely associated socialist press. The most successful of these socialist periodicals was a newspaper published in Girard, Kansas, a small town in the eastern part of the state, called The Appeal to Reason .
Following another brief publishing interlude allowing him to bankroll several thousand dollars more dollars, the enterprising J.A. Wayland and his family again moved west, this time landing in Pueblo, Colorado, their home for the next decade. The Wayland family arrived in the Spring of 1882, just in time to capitalize on the town's explosive growth, with the town growing from 3500 to 35,000 over the next ten years. Wayland worked as a job printer in this rapidly expanding mining community, gaining renown (and paying customers) as the populist proprietor of the "one-hoss print shop."6 Despite this plebeian moniker for his printing business, J.A. Wayland - a man controlling a relatively healthy stack of chips in a town in which money was in short supply - was a major real estate speculator during this time, amassing a small fortune buying and selling property in booming downtown Pueblo.
During this period there was a great difference of opinion within the socialist movement whether the socialist system should be initiated through the electoral process - by an explicitly socialist political party organizing itself, building support among the industrial working class, agitating for its program and winning the votes needed to gain control of the state - or through the power of direct example. Those favoring the latter approach sought to establish model socialist communities, to prove through actual practice that common ownership, cooperative production, and egalitarian distribution was a superior system to capitalist competition. These socialist communities would then serve as models and beacons, it was believed, winning mass political support from the laboring classes and spurring on the transformation of society as a whole. J.A. Wayland firmly believed in the power of practical example.
Income from The Coming Nation was to be placed in a common fund for use of the community, and all employees of the firm would draw their pay from it. Wayland wanted to rapidly expand this printing operation and to use its growth to attract other industrial establishments, run upon similar economic principles, to the colony. In July of 1894 Wayland once again pulled up stakes in Indiana and moved his Coming Nation to the new communal property in Tennessee - named the Ruskin Colony in honor of a radical writer revered by Wayland, John Ruskin.
One of the greatest supporters of The Appeal to Reason and its mission was the emotional leader of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene V. Debs. Debs, one of the greatest orators of his generation, was an admirer of Robert Ingersoll. Like Ingersoll, he crisscrossed the country delivering hundreds of speeches on themes of importance to him. Debs even went so far as to make Girard a home away from home, leaving his wife behind in Terre Haute and living in the town from the spring of 1907 through the fall campaign of 1908.22 Debs used his time in Girard to work on the editorial content of The Appeal and never missed an opportunity to promote the newspaper during the course of his travels.
Each morning the mail was received and postcards separated from letters, which were then divided by state-of-origin. The envelopes were then opened and money orders, checks, and cash removed. The monetary content of each letter was marked on the face of the letter in red ink and the letters placed in a letter file. The amount of funds received simultaneously entered on a tally sheet, which was used to cross-check and confirm the total amount received for that day. The letters were then turned over to "carders," who wrote the name and address and total sent on a small card, as well as a list of the items ordered - subscriptions, books, or additional copies of the paper. Each card and letter were assigned a unique number in case future reference needed to be made to the original correspondence, which was filed by number.
There is joy in seeing The Appeal family, for such it is, at their task.
They work with their heads, hands, and hearts.
The most beautiful concord prevails in every department and the several departments are bound up in a system that seems perfection.
There is no 'boss' in The Appeal . Not a harsh word is spoken. There is a smile on every face, kindness in every voice, joy in every heart.
The work is done as all work should be done - with eagerness and enthusiasm.
But all was not bliss.
Warren continued to serve as editor of The Appeal until 1915, when he was succeeded as Managing Editor by veteran socialist journalist Louis Kopelin. Kopelin had known Emanuel Julius from their time together on the staff of the Socialist Party daily The New York Call and he lost no time in inviting his compatriot to Kansas to take over the task as the paper's editorial writer and to assist with the writing of news stories. Julius showed up in Girard in October 1915, the start of a residency in that town that would last until the end of his life in 1951.
While Graham is perhaps overly harsh with Emanuel Haldeman-Julius' politics when he characterized him "a political dilettante, a man who toyed with socialism and had no convictions that seriously challenged his own self-interest,"42 an account does need to be rendered of one stunning piece of opportunism during the last days of The Appeal to Reason - the "flip" of the paper on the issue of militarism and the European War.
Prior to America's intervention in the European War early in 1917, antimilitarism and international solidarity were regarded as axiomatic by the American left. Throughout 1916 the conservatives' slogan of "Preparedness" was fought tooth and nail by all factions of the American socialist movement - ranging from gradualist reformers like John Spargo to died-in-the-wool "impossiblists" like Socialist Party of Ohio leader C.E. Ruthenberg. The European War was an abhorrent manifestation of capitalist imperialism, American socialists of all stripes believed, and those European socialists who had rallied to their country's flag and participated in the mass slaughter of millions were flatly regarded as traitors to the socialist cause.
Following his re-election in 1916 under the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson clearly began moving the United States towards intervention in the European conflict on the side of the British and French. While formally proclaiming American neutrality, Wilson believed that American corporations should have the right to sell raw materials and military materiel to the belligerents. England's superiority of surface vessels effectively blockaded Germany from receiving American shipping; only submarine warfare made it possible for the Germans to approach an equivalent status for shipping bound to British ports. As the sinking of ships by submarine entailed the loss of civilian life on torpedoed surface ships, American passion was stirred and ultimatums delivered to Germany by the Wilson regime.
The aggressive "St. Louis Resolution" was passed by the convention by a vote of 140 to 36, with the decision subsequently ratified by a mail vote of the SPA's rank-and-file, 21,639 to 2,752.44 Amidst rampant patriotic hysteria, American socialists had voted to stay the course.
This position did not sit well with the sundry intellectuals who comprised the Socialist Party's "Right." Many of the party's biggest "names" resigned in protest - including such famous individuals as Upton Sinclair, W.J. Ghent, John Spargo, Charles Edward Russell, Robert Hunter, and W.E. Walling. Louis Kopelin and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and their Appeal to Reason were part of this parade of defectors from the Socialist Party of America, spurred in this direction by the Wilson administration's draconian use of postal regulations and imprisonments to silence radical opposition to its policies.
The armistice of November 11, 1918, gave The New Appeal a chance to again move leftward in hope of rewinning its old constituency. The federal government's prosecution of Debs, Kate Richards O'Hare, and thousands of radical trade unionists and military objectors gave the publication an issue with which it could run. Wilson's failure to enact the vaunted peace "without annexations or indemnities" similarly discredited the administration and enabled Haldeman- Julius to move his newspaper perceptibly to the left. On March 1, 1919, the name The Appeal to Reason once again appeared on the masthead of the newspaper signaling an end to the flag-waving pro-war line of The New Appeal .49 Nevertheless, the restored publication failed to regain its momentum - its "Appeal Army" had dispersed and the mood of the country ever more hostile to the socialist movement amidst bombings, bomb scares, and a series of revolutions in several of the decimated nations of postwar Europe.
1 Elliott Shore, Talkin' Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890- 1912 . (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 9-10.
2 During the last half of the 19th Century the anti-slavery Republican Party, with its base of support in the industrial north, was significantly more radical than the rural-and-southern Democratic Party. The two major parties "flipped" in ideological position around the turn of the century.
3 Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pg. 12.
4 Cass County Courier , Jan. 4, 1878, pg. 16, cited in Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pg. 15.
5 Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pp. 17-18.
6 Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pp. 19-20.
7 Wayland seems to have told the story of his radicalization in several variants, one of which includes a particular 1891 railroad strike and the print job he did on the strikers' behalf. See Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pp. 22-24.
8 J.A. Wayland, Leaves of My Life: A Story of Twenty Years of Socialist Agitation . (Girard, KS: The Appeal to Reason, 1912), pg. 27. Quoted in Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pp. 23-24.
9 Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pg. 26.
10 Quoted in Eugene V. Debs, 14th Anniversary of The Coming Nation at Greensburg, Decatur County, Indiana, April 1893 . (Girard, KS: The Appeal to Reason, 1907), pg. 3.
11 John Graham, " Yours for the Revolution": The Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922 . (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pg. 3.
12 J.A. Wayland in The Coming Nation, Feb. 10, 1894, cited in Howard Quint, The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the American Movement . (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), pg. 190.
13 Quint, The Forging of American Socialism , pp. 191-192.
14 George Allen England, The Story of the Appeal: "Unbeaten and Unbeatable": Being the Epic of the Life and Work of the Greatest Newspaper in the World . (Girard, KS: The Appeal to Reason, ), pg. 26.
15 Quint, The Forging of American Socialism , pg. 194.
16 Quint, The Forging of American Socialism , pg. 195.
17 England, The Story of the Appeal , pp. 26-27.
18 Quint, The Forging of American Socialism , pg. 196.
19 Quint, The Forging of American Socialism , pg. 197.
20 John Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pg. X.
21 Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pp. 138-144 passim.
23 E. Haldeman-Julius, My Second 25 Years: Instead of a Footnote: An Autobiography . (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1949), pg. 60.
24 Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pp. X-XI.
25 Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pg. XI.
26 Eugene V. Debs, An Inside View of The Appeal to Reason . ([Girard, KS]: [The Appeal to Reason], n.d. ), pp. 1-2.
27 England, The Story of the Appeal , pg. 270.
28 A 1915 edition of the Appeal Book Catalog runs to 144 closely-packed pages in cardstock covers. No more than 25% of the titles available related directly to socialism or economics, a quantity dwarfed by the amount of available poetry and fiction - generally apolitical. The list even included eleven titles under the heading "Anti-Socialism"!
29 A Trip Through the Appeal Office , reprinted in England, The Story of the Appeal , pg. 274.
30 England, The Story of the Appeal , pp. 275-276.
31 England, The Story of the Appeal , pp. 278.
32 Eugene V. Debs, An Inside View of The Appeal to Reason , pp. 2-3.
33 Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pg. 202.
34 Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pp. 202-203.
35 Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pp. 216-217.
36 Henry Vincent, Wayland: The Editor with a Punch, An Appreciation . (Massilon, OH: Henry Vincent, 1912), pg. 5. Cited in Shore, Talkin' Socialism , pp. 217-218.
37 Eugene V. Debs to Fred D. Warren, Nov. 19, 1912, in J. Robert Constantine (ed.), Letters of Eugene V. Debs [in 3 volumes]. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), v. 1, pg. 555.
38 Fred D. Warren to Eugene V. Debs, Nov. 14, 1912, in Letters of Eugene V. Debs , v. 1, pp. 553-554.
39 Eugene V. Debs to Fred D. Warren, Nov. 19, 1912 in Letters of Eugene V. Debs , v. 1, pp. 555-556.
40 E. Haldeman-Julius, My Second 25 Years: Instead of a Footnote: An Autobiography . (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1949), pg. 60.
41 John Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pg. 15.
42 John Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pg. 15.
43 James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America , 1912-1925. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), pg. 126.
44 New York Times, July 8, 1917, cited in James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America , 1912-1925, pg. 127.
45 John Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pg. 250.
46 Average monthly dues collections for the Socialist Party of America rose from 80,379 in 1917 to 82,344 in 1918. [See: Alexander Trachtenberg and Benjamin Glassberg (eds.), The American Labor Year Book, 1921-22 . (New York: Rand School of Social Science, n.d. ), pg. 392].
47 John Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pg. 250.
48 Andrew N. Cothran, The Little Blue Book Man and the Big American Parade: A Biography of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. (Ph.D. dissertation: University of Maryland, 1966), pg. 90. Cited in John Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pp. 250-251.
49 John Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pg. 252.
50 John Graham, "Yours for the Revolution," pg. 288.

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