The legacy of the Midwest’s forgotten socialist newspapers
More than 120 years ago, in Greensburg, Indiana, a socialist publisher named Julius Augustus Wayland founded a journal called The Coming Nation. Wayland moved to Girard, Kansas in 1895 and started another socialist weekly called Appeal to Reason. These long-forgotten publications became the mouthpiece for the socialist movement in the early 20th century Midwest; a movement which could have changed America forever. But it didn’t.
At its height, Appeal to Reason had a total circulation of up to 4.1 million copies. By 1912, the Socialist Party of America had 118,000 official members, including high-profile celebrities like Jack London and Helen Keller. They were particularly strong in the Midwest, where Hoosier powerhouse Eugene Debs tirelessly organized worker strikes for decades. Debs, who frequently wrote for Appeal to Reason, ran for President four times, and in 1912 managed to get 6% of the popular vote. The socialists helped shove the major parties to the left; both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson made anti-big-business rhetoric a defining feature of their presidential campaigns.
The anticorporatist talk of Roosevelt and Wilson did America little good in the long run. Just a few election cycles later, Calvin Coolidge proclaimed that “the chief business of the American people is business.” A hundred years later…
