Appeal to Reason

APPEAL TO REASON. No newspaper was as much identified with the early-twentieth-century socialist movement in America as the Appeal to Reason. Published from 1895 to 1922, the Appeal preceded the formation of the Socialist Party in 1901 and, more than any socialist institution, the weekly Appeal gave ongoing life, power, and sense of community to insurgent native-born radicals. Headquartered after 1896 in Girard, Kansas, the Appeal reached a paid circulation of over 760,000 in 1913, a figure that remains greater than any US Left publication has reached since then. During political campaigns and crises, copies of single issues reached 4.1 million—a world record, the paper’s staff liked to comment, that broke totals the Appeal itself had earlier set. The Appeal succeeded at a time when millions of people spoke of the “cooperative commonwealth” with hope, expectation, and meaning.

The Appeal’s primary purpose was to convert readers to socialism. If “common sense” and “an appeal to reason” had propelled an earlier American revolution, their reapplication, it was thought, would hasten the transition from capitalism to socialism. The Appeal’s founder and publisher was J. A. Wayland. Born in Indiana, successively a printer, publisher, land speculator and capitalist, communitarian militant Socialist and propagandist, Wayland was harassed into suicide in 1912. Wayland had been converted to socialism by reading, and he and the Appeal staff explained socialism in a plain, passionate idiom that swelled the socialist ranks. The Appeal publicized all manner of social and economic injustice: if working conditions or a stike needed to be publicized in West Virginia or Colorado, the Appeal was there; if Milwaukee, Schenectady, and Butte were voting Socialist, Appeal correspondents reported the victories and the strategies that could be used elsewhere; and if states were without socialist papers, the Appeal made up and printed individual state and regional editions. A vital political advocate and radical institution rather than simply a newspaper, the Appeal community included an “Appeal Army” of men and women, 80,000 at its highest point, who sold subscriptions and dropped extra copies at hotels and union halls—wherever the paper could be read. The Appeal published Marx, Engels, and Kautsky; Dickens, Ruskin, and William Morris; Upton Sinclair, Jack London, W. D. Howells, Kate Richards O’Hare, and Eugene Debs; as well as scores of American political and literary writers now little known or unknown to history.

Although never an official vehicle for the Socialist Party, the Appeal was nevertheless dependent on its fate. After Wayland’s death and editor Fred Warren’s departure, the paper was edited by Louis Kopelin and sold to Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, neither of whom had the editorial capacity, writing skills, or commitment to socialism of Wayland and Warren. When Socialists opposed World War I, American capitalism and its political institutions crushed domestic radicalism. The Appeal initially opposed World War I and America’s participation in it, temporarily supported it in the form of the New Appeal, and then, with hostilities concluded, reverted back to its condemnation of World War I as a grim battle for economic supremacy between competing capitalist nations. The Appeal never regained its prewar vitality and closed in November 1922.

Graham, John, ed. Yours for the Revolution: The Appeal to Reason, 1895–1922. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Shore, Elliott. Talkin’ Socialism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988.

The Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922 (Limited Run). Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/