Kansas Freeman

From a dinky town in southeastern Kansas, Girard by name, a rude little newspaper used to yip and snap at President McKinley 35 years ago. As each successive Administration took office, it too was baited by the Kansas weekly. So was Capitalism. In the course of 20 years the paper--called The Appeal to Reason-- piled up subscribers by the million. Girard had to be given a first-class postoffice. For all its viciousness, all its revolutionary effort, The Appeal to Reason left no record of accomplishment. But an incident of its career was to prove more important than the paper itself. To Girard in 1915, from Manhattan where he had been a reporter on the Socialist Call, went an energetic young Jew named Emanuel Julius. He got a job on the Appeal under its Editor Fred D. Warren, revelled in his new work. But with the approach of the War the Appeal began to lose its audience. Interest in Socialism was becoming unfashionable, and the anti-Catholic Menace, somewhat imitative of the Appeal in format, furnished a brand of hate-reading at once more violent and safer politically.

About the time the U. S. entered the War, Publisher Julius A. Wayland of the Appeal committed suicide. Emanuel Julius succeeded him, changed the name of the paper to The National Appeal, endorsed the War, lost most of his remaining Socialist following. The Appeal, appealing to no group, faded out. But Publisher Julius remained in Girard, married Marcet Haldeman, daughter of a local bank president, changed his name to Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. To keep his presses turning he issued twelve little 5-c- books, classics of Socialist literature. Those were to be the nucleus of his famed

Little Blue Books which have made E. Haldeman-Julius rich & famed. In 1923 the Appeal became Haldeman-Julius Weekly; in 1928, The American Freeman. Few knew it existed. Even last autumn when it began flaying Herbert Hoover, it attracted less attention than in McKinley's day. What it needed was publicity. Last week an obliging Post Office Department presented it with nationwide notice by confiscating the July 15 issue as "treasonous matter." Announced reason: an article headlined, WHY DON'T THE WORKERS RAISE HELL? Flaying the Unemployed for cowardice the article demanded: "Can any one . . . visualize a Texan, or a man from Kansas or Kentucky, permitting, 50 years ago, him self to starve, or his family to suffer from lack of food? So long as there was a dollar's worth of food in the country, and his rifle or revolver was in working order, either of these oldtimers would have procured that food if he had to wade through blood to get it! . . ." Whether or not the offending article was sufficiently inflammatory to set off a blaze, its suppression gave Publisher Haldeman-Julius the chance to shout that the Government's real objection was to the paper's series of attacks on President Hoover. These included such thrice-told tales as those about Herbert Hoover "selling Chinese coolies into slavery" in South African mines; Herbert Hoover "swindling" the Chinese out of mining properties.

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