WHEN 'REASON'

...Politics and temperance were among their most absorbing preoccupations...

...Will Durant first wrote The Story of Philosophy as a series of Little Blue Books...

...Margaret Sanger, Clarence Darrow, W.E.B...

...It spawned several important local industries, including an electric-light company and a coal-belt railway (both community-owned) and an airplane factory...

...The Appeal was a phenomenal success, both as a political instrument and as a business...

...But there was a time, not so many years ago, when this unlikely place was known as the cradle of American social reform...

...A more complete collection is housed in the library at nearby Pittsburg State University...

...More tellingly, two local residents—Julius Augustus Wayland and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius—made such a success of left-wing publishing enterprises in Girard between 1897 and 1951 that subscribers throughout the nation and the world regarded them as the most influential advocates of socialism in the history of the American press...

...Weekly circulation soared to half a million in the first decade of this century...

...The Populist movement of the late Nineteenth Century generated great interest in Girard, and it was partly for that reason that Julius Wayland moved there from Kansas City in 1896, bringing with him his socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, already a popular and rising voice among progressives around the country...

...But Wayland's newspaper continued to flourish, and in 1917 his family sold the attractive property to two of its editors, Emanuel Julius, a twenty-eight-year-old transplanted New Yorker, and his young wife, Marcet Haldeman, the only child of a wealthy Girard banker...

...They were egalitarian partners in a wide range of social, cultural, political, and economic ventures, and their success made them the enyy of friends and enemies alike...

...Girard and most of Crawford County voted Socialist in the election of 1912...

...In the blast-furnace heat, no one was moving...

...From a scattering of frontier towns, they fought a long and bitter battle against railroad builders for control of the land...

...However uneventful life in Crawford County may seem now, the area's history has been filled with tumultuous events...

...REIGNED IN KANSAS BY JOHN EGERTON At a few minutes past seven o'clock on a scorching hot August evening in Girard, Kansas, not a soul could be seen on the four streets surrounding the Crawford County courthouse...

...The section was next designated as "neutral land"—not open to John Egerton, a free-lance writer in Nashville, wrote "Poverty Palace" in the July issue of The Progressive...

...His extraordinary life combined a Russian Jewish family heritage, an urban boyhood in Philadelphia and New York, an adult career in rural Kansas, a booster's enthusiasm for his adopted hometown, a crusader's appetite for causes, and an undying passion for betterment of the human condition...

...The fire stirred anew the old controversies that swirled around the publishing company, but eventually peace and quiet returned to Girard...

...Rights to the Blue Book name were sold that year, but soon thereafter the company was dissolved...

...The publisher's second wife, Sue Haldeman-Julius, published one final issue, a memorial edition, after his death, and then the newspaper enterprise was closed...

...It forcefully advocated such social reforms as wages-and-hours laws, workers' compensation, pure-food-and-drug regulation, and the abolition of child labor...

...DuBois, Ber-trand Russell, Luther Burbank, and Theodore Dreiser were a few of the prominent people who contributed original material to the series...

...He had published more than 2,200 titles in the Little Blue Book series, and the number of copies exceeded 500 million...

...Post Office Department to silence the paper by revoking its second-class mailing privilege served only to increase its circulation and build Wayland's reputation...

...Crusading Mother Jones once delivered a fiery speech from the courthouse steps...

...Girard, a square-mile checkerboard of dusty streets in the southeast corner of Kansas, looked like a deserted movie set of a Midwestern town...

...Emanuel and Marcet made a powerful team...

...For a socialist, he was an extraordinarily successful free-enterpriser...

...Most were priced at a nickel...

...The Little Blue Books were kept alive for a time by one of Emanuel and Marcet's two children, Henry Haldeman (he dropped the Julius), who published occasional titles—mostly reprints—until 1976...

...However, their private lives were anything but tranquil...

...Under Haldeman-Julius, the Appeal to Reason that Julius Wayland had founded in Kansas City in 1895 had become first the Haldeman-Julius Weekly and then a monthly, the American Freeman...

...Parched oaks and maples and golden raintrees threw ineffective shade across the walls and windows of the courthouse...

...Repeated efforts by the U.S...

...White settlers promptly squatted in the area and effectively wrested the land from the Indians before Kansas became a state in 1861...

...There may be a slight difference in the ears, but that's all...

...In 1919, E. Haldeman-Julius, as he liked to call himself, launched a series of small-format booklets—a mixture of literary classics and socialist tracts—as a subsidiary enterprise of the newspaper...

...Girard remembers its years in the vanguard of social reform—but only vaguely, and the memory is fading fast...

...On July 4, 1978, the old Appeal to Reason—Little Blue Books printing plant near the courthouse square was struck by a fireworks rocket and was destroyed in the ensuing blaze...

...Southeast Kansas was rich in minerals—coal, lead, and zinc—and the region was a magnet for European immigrants...

...The paper published Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel, The Jungle, in serial form...

...Socialists as well as capitalists tried to muzzle him by lawsuits and other hostile acts, and in time the harassment took its toll...

...After the Civil War, a wave of whites rushed in...

...They covered an incredible range, from politics and religion to health and sex...

...settlement—and then, in 1839, became a destination point for Cherokees exiled from the Southeast on the infamous "Trail of Tears...

...Haldeman-Julius died in 1951, drowning in the swimming pool at his Girard home shortly before he was to begin serving a six-month prison sentence for tax evasion...

...Eugene V. Debs, five times the Socialist Party's candidate for President of the United States, launched his third campaign there in 1908...

...Wayland maintained unwavering loyalty to Eugene Debs, and Debs reciprocated by writing regularly for the Appeal and spending much time in Girard...

...After Girard was established as the seat of government in 1868, local residents seemed The Appeal forcefully advocated such social reforms as wages-and-hours laws, workers'compensation, pure-food-and-drug regulation, and the abolition of child labor...

...Now, the only remaining local vestiges of Julius Wayland's social vision of the 1890s and the equally visionary contributions of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius in the first half of the Twentieth Century are carefully preserved in the Carnegie Library a few blocks from the square...

...H-J himself wrote dozens of Little Blue Books, most of them tracts debunking phoniness and sham in public life...

...Populism and socialism soon became a united force in the community, and Way-land's Appeal was the catalyst, as his earlier papers had been in Missouri, Tennessee, and Indiana...

...People were jealous of his accomplishments...

...That same year, novelist Jack London praised Girard's most visible socialist enterprise, a newspaper plant, as "The Temple of the Revolution...

...Within four years, a standard one-color cover led to their identity as the Little Blue Books, and for three decades they poured forth like a perpetual fountain...

...A sidewalk thermometer registered ninety-nine degrees...

...Government displaced them in about 1820...

...In 1912, when the combative editor seemed to be at the height of his influence, he took his own life by gunshot, apparently in distress over the death of his second wife in an automobile accident...

...His first wife had died of cancer...

...The pocket-sized books were immediately popular, and as the numbers of titles and copies grew, H-J (the editor's acquired nickname) expanded them into other fields...

...And it was not just visitors who gave the town its reputation as a fountainhead of radicalism...

...determined to carry on their contentious style of public life...

...He saw himself as the American Voltaire, a practical philosopher and champion of liberty...

...The Osage Indians had a 500-year presence there until the U.S...

...Marcet sued for separate maintenance in 1933, though the couple continued to live under the same roof until she died in 1941...