This article is about the American radical newspaper. For the album by the band Rise Against, see Appeal to Reason (album)

Appeal to Reason (album)

Appeal to Reason is the fifth studio album by American punk rock band Rise Against. After touring in support of their previous album, The Sufferer & the Witness, Rise Against began recording Appeal to Reason in January 2008 at the Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado...

.

The Appeal to Reason was a weekly political newspaper published in the American Midwest

Midwestern United States

The Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....

 from 1895 until 1922. The paper was known for its radical politics, lending support over the years to the Farmers' Alliance

Farmers' Alliance

The Farmers Alliance was an organized agrarian economic movement amongst U.S. farmers that flourished in the 1880s. One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers after the American Civil War...

 and Populist movement (People's Party) before becoming a mainstay of the Socialist Party of America

Socialist Party of America

The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...

 following that organization's establishment in 1901. Making use of a network of highly motivated volunteers known as the "Appeal Army" to spur subscription sales, paid circulation of the Appeal climbed to more than a quarter million copies by 1906 and half a million by 1910, making it the largest circulation Socialist newspaper in American history.

Forerunner

The most direct ancestor of the Appeal was the The Coming Nation a socialist communalist paper established by Julius Augustus Wayland

Julius Wayland

Julius Wayland was a Mid-Western US socialist during the Progressive Era. He is most noted for publishing Appeal to Reason, a socialist publication often deemed to be the most important socialist periodical of the time....

  in Greensburg, Indiana

Greensburg, Indiana

Greensburg is a city in Decatur County, Indiana, United States. The population was counted at 11,492 at the 2010 census. The city is the county seat of Decatur County....

. It was moved to the utopian socialist

Utopian socialism

Utopian socialism is a term used to define the first currents of modern socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen which inspired Karl Marx and other early socialists and were looked on favorably...

 Ruskin Colony

Ruskin Colony

The Ruskin Colony was a utopian socialist colony which existed near Tennessee City in Dickson County, Tennessee from 1894 to 1896...

 in Tennessee as part of an effort to form a socialist colony there.

When Wayland tired of the colony he left his newspaper behind with the colonists, moving to Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...

 to publish his own independently weekly, Appeal to Reason, established on on August 31, 1895.

Establishment

In 1897 Wayland left Kansas City for the small farming town of Girard

Girard, Kansas

Girard is a city in and the county seat of Crawford County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 2,789.- History :...

, Kansas

Kansas

Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...

., located in the Southeastern corner of the state.

Following the collapse of Ruskin Colony, a second Coming Nation was published by Wayland at Girard, but folded two years later. The run of the first two incarnations, which followed a continuous whole number scheme, was #1 April 29, 1893 to #512 December 26, 1903.

Growth

By 1910, the newspaper employed approximately 60 workers and boasted a "three-deck, straight-line Goss machine that prints four hundred twelve-page papers, in colors, folded, per minute, when desired." The Appeal was based out of a building with the dimensions "...eighty by one hundred feet, two stories and basement." In 1910, it had a weekly circulation of 550,000 and a subscription base of 450,000.

The paper's popularity was powered by a folksy style of writing and the participation of many leading literary luminaries of the Socialist movement, including Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...

, Jack London

Jack London

John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...

, Mary "Mother" Jones, Eugene Debs, and Helen Keller

Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree....

.

Decline

After founder Wayland committed suicide in 1912, the Appeal slowly lost its vitality. Wayland's surviving sons were not temperamentally suited to the newspaper business and after a short time the paper was sold to Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius

E. Haldeman-Julius

E. Haldeman-Julius was a Jewish-American socialist writer, atheist thinker, social reformer and publisher. He is best remembered as the head of Haldeman-Julius Publications, the creator of a series of pamphlets known as "Little Blue Books," total sales of which ran into the hundreds of millions...

, the latter an editor of the paper.

Divisions within the Socialist movement and wartime repression of radicalism further damaged the paper, with publisher Haldeman-Julius alienating a good part of his anti-militarist Socialist readership by endorsing the American war effort. From issue #1151, dated December 22, 1917, to issue #1212 of February 22, 1919, the paper carried the title New Appeal to denote its new patriotic

Nationalism

Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

 orientation.

Building on the subscriber list of the Appeal, from 1919 Haldeman-Julius developed a very successful business selling inexpensive paperback booklets known as the Little Blue Books.

Successors and demise

The Appeal to Reason name was terminated in November 1922, to be replaced by the Haldeman-Julius Weekly. This new incarnation rapidly lost its socialist character to became a "house organ" for Haldeman-Julius's lucrative publishing business.

This publication saw its name changed again to The American Freeman, effective with issue #1741 of April 13, 1929. This publication continued until Haldeman-Julius' death by drowning in November 1951.

Legacy

Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...

's novel The Jungle

The Jungle

The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking...

was first published as a serial in the Appeal to Reason.

Circulation

Year	Circulation	Notes and references
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905	162,755	"A Record of Four Years," Appeal #684 (Jan. 9, 1909), pg. 4.
1906	266,512	"A Record of Four Years," Appeal #684 (Jan. 9, 1909), pg. 4.
1907	312,329	"A Record of Four Years," Appeal #684 (Jan. 9, 1909), pg. 4.
1908	293,747	"A Record of Four Years," Appeal #684 (Jan. 9, 1909), pg. 4.
1909
1910
1911
1912	694,065	Front page banner of 1912 circulation, Appeal #892 (Jan. 4, 1913).
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922

External links

• Tim Davenport, "The Appeal to Reason: Forerunner of Haldeman-Julius Publications", Big Blue Newsletter No. 3 (2004). Retrieved November 16, 2009.
• Appeal to Reason Spartacus Educational