Little Blue Books

 

     The paperback books of the 1950s and the earlier Everyman’s Library and Modern Library made literary classics available at a modest price.  The access to great writing thus given the general public has a value rivaling that  of everyone’s favorite socialist institution, the public library.  Yet an even more accessible series – the Little Blue Books – had brought provocative ideas and beautiful poetry within the reach of everyone who could afford a cover price of ten cents.  I used to see stacks of these with their plain and numbered covers, not all, in fact, blue  – they were published until 1978 – in Chicago’s used book stores and they are traded yet today online, forming an odd niche for collectors.

    These little stapled booklets, three by five inches and never over a hundred pages, were published by the Haldeman-Julius Company of Girard, Kansas which may seem an unlikely location for a popular literary publisher.  The explanation is more unlikely yet.  Girard remains today a small town with a population of two and half thousand, a figure that has varied little since 1890.  Apart from farming, the area once included some mines, a few small mills, an iron-smelter, a tannery, and a brick-yard.  Immigrants, especially from the Balkans, were recruited to serve these industries in the middle of the American plains.  The radicalism some brought from Europe combined in Girard with the populist program of the Farmers’ Alliance and the growing power of American socialist parties.  By far the most successful of these, the Socialist Party of America (founded in 1901), had strong support in the trans-Mississippi West.

     In this context Percy Daniels, an activist in the rurally-based People’s Party (elected lieutenant governor of Kansas from 1892-94), purchased the town’s newspaper, the Girard Herald.  In 1895 Julius Wayland, who had been obliged to flee his hometown of Versailles, Indiana to avoid lynching for his radical views and who later participated in the utopian socialist Ruskin Colony in Tennessee, established the weekly newspaper, the Appeal to Reason which came to have more readers than any other socialist journal in American history, reaching 550,000 around 1910.  [1]

     The editor during the early twentieth century was Fred D. Warren.  The danger he posed to capitalism is evident from his legal challenges.   He was arrested and convicted for offering a reward for the arrest of former Kentucky governor William S.  Taylor who was on the run after being implicated in the murder of his gubernatorial rival William Goebel.  In  this case President Taft commuted Warren’s sentence, saying he did not wish for the editor to be a martyr. To Taft the paper’s views were “wild and perverted” but “for all persons of average commonsense a reading of his articles is the best antidote for the poison he seeks to instill.” [2]  At one point in 1901 the Postal Service  forbade his paper’s distribution system (sending bundles to individuals who would then resell the papers).  Before the charge was dismissed Warren had a glimpse of Leavenworth the published description of which led to a new charge, this time for obscenity (also dismissed).  The Post Office continued to seek any pretext for banning the Appeal. [3]

     In 1912 Wayland, the Appeal’s founder, committed suicide and ownership passed to his sons who sold the company to Emanuel Haldeman-Julius who had been an editor and his wife Marcet.  Persecution continued, particularly with the paper’s initial principled opposition to WWI and the new Red Scare laws.  After a few life support maneuvers, including backing the war effort and emphasizing a kind of patriotic display that anticipated the popular front strategy of the American Communist Party several decades later,  [4]  the paper ceased publication in 1922, replaced by the Haldeman-Julius Weekly which emphasized literature, art, and culture.  That same year the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company began the Little Blue Book series, sometimes called the Peoples Pocket Series or the Ten-Cent Pocket Series.  (The name persisted, though the booklets were not always blue.)

     The political partisanship of the Appeal remained in the new venture.  The first series of Little Blue Books included Rhymes of the Revolution, with an introduction by Debs, as well as editions of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Common Sense.  Works at once political and literary included William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.  Radical critiques of Christianity were represented by Robert Ingersoll, the Lamarckian evolutionist William Henry Hudson, and Carroll Lane Fenton, a prominent opponent of creationism, while progressive social views were contained in volumes from Margaret Sanger (What Every Girl Should Know) and Marriage and Divorce by Horace Greeley and Robert Dale Owen (whose father had founded the New Harmony Community).  Literature was available in the form of stories by Poe and Chekhov and poetry by Shelley.  FitzGerald’s  “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” an extremely popular poem at the time, was accompanied by an essay by leftist attorney Clarence Darrow (who lived in Girard for a time).  Introductory philosophical texts included Will Durant on Aristotle and on Nietzsche. There was also a rhyming dictionary, for those who wished to compose lyrics themselves. 

     Later series included other self-help title, including How to Become a Writer of Little Blue Books.  These practical guides ranged from How to Cook Fish and Meats, How to Play Golf, How to Save Money, How to Improve Your Conversation, and How to Psycho-Analyze Yourself to How to Write Love Letters, Perhaps the most ambitious publication was called How We Can Live Happily. 

     Some of the literary titles were altered in time in the effort to sell more copies.  For instance, Essays on de Gourmont and Byron was reissued as Masters of Erotic Love, and Essays on Joseph Conrad and Oscar Wilde became A Sailor and a Homosexual.  Gautier’s The Fleece of Gold was retitled The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, Hugo’s The King Enjoys Himself became The Lustful King Enjoys Himself, and George Moore’s Euphorian in Texas gained the subtitle An Unconventional Amour.

     In spite of such concessions to marketing, though, the day of the Little Blue Books was passing.  While paperback competitors gained sales, government repression continued.  Hoover’s aggressive FBI investigation of the company after WWII resulted in the refusal of many stores to carry their publications and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius himself was convicted of income tax offenses before he drowned in his backyard swimming pool in 1951.  His son Henry then kept the business afloat for a twilight period until 1978 when a fire destroyed the printing plant, bringing an end to the long experiment in providing the best literature to the masses. 

     Throughout its run, the literary emphasis had remained dominant, with works by Marcus Aurelius, Washington Irving, Boccaccio, Emerson, Whitman, Carlyle, Emerson, Montaigne, De Quincy, Schopenhauer, “Michael Angelo,” Lamb, Lord Chesterfield, Goethe, George Sand, Gorky, Rousseau, Longfellow, Ibsen, Thackery, Machiavelli, Dante, and Alexander Pope.  Little Blue Books offered a liberal education in manageably brief and mercifully inexpensive increments.  They can now remind us of the fact that not so long ago, many ordinary working people not only sought to understand their place in American capitalism, but also aspired to consume the best writing with the confidence that the taste for beauty and for truth need not be confined to the ruling class.   

     I like to imagine the Little Blue Books in the pockets of factory workers, itinerant farm laborers, hobos riding the rails, and new immigrants working on their English, passed perhaps from one hand to another until they were torn and ragged.  Little Blue Books allowed those whose daily lives may have included few luxuries to form independent opinions on the issues of the day and to taste some of the finest thought and art ever produced.  The history of the Haldeman-Julius company may remind the twenty-first century that the sublime is accessible to all who reach for it, that culture belongs to everyone, and that at one time, in the very heart of America, the radical transformation of society was a genuinely popular cause.

 

 

 

1.  By comparison the Communist Daily Worker had a top circulation of 35,000. 

2.  New York Times, February 2, 1911.

3.  The legal history is detailed in Harold A. Trout, The History of the Appeal to Reason: A study of the Radical Press available at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217268777.pdf.

4.  One slogan in the late ‘thirties and early ‘forties was “Communism is the new Americanism.”