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.” 

Socialist Parties of the United States

 

     In spite of the obvious advantages of a popular front against exploitation the left has always been a fractious place.  What some participants and historians might see as the struggle to develop a correct “line” that will most effectively advance the people’s cause will seem to others internecine infighting. At times, activists were perhaps influenced by the temptation to defeat one’s comrades when capitalism seemed too big a bully to challenge.  Nonetheless, the history of American revolutionary groups is a rich one, full of heroism and critical to the reforms that have made our economic system more livable for more people over the last hundred and fifty years.  This survey is meant to pay tribute to the generations of activists who have moved the country forward, and socialists have been at the forefront of nearly every campaign for social progress from abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and labor rights, but it may also remind progressives of the energy lost to factionalism.

     I have sought to include in this list all parties explicitly calling for revolutionary change while excluding reformist or mixed groups like the Progressive Parties associated with Robert LaFollette and with Henry Wallace, or the Working Families or New York Liberal Party.  I have concentrated on groups that meant to initiate a mass electoral movement, however limited their success.  The Industrial Workers of the World is included due to its outsize role in American history though it was a union and not a political party.

     Though my arrangement is primarily chronological, some broad general groupings exist.  The early groups contributed to the formation of the Socialist Party which has been the top socialist vote-getter by far, having achieved totals little short of a million in 1912 and 1920 with Debs as candidate and in 1932 with Norman Thomas at the head of the ticket.  The formation of what came to be called the Old Left was inspired by the Bolshevik victory in Russia and the formation of the Comintern.  Though the Communist Party was America’s most organized and active left-wing group, its members were obliged to adopt the Soviet line and to suppress internal discussion.  Later, with the arrival of the New Left in the ‘sixties, others imitated the Maoist program while some sought to follow models from Cuba or Vietnam.   Since the collapse of the mass movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, many groups of the New Communist Movement, none very large, argued over correct policy while many other leftists worked in single-issue groups.

     The overwhelming positive implication of this simple listing is the evidence it provides of a grand tradition of workers, both native-born and immigrant, continuously agitating for a better society, thus illuminating a history often ignored.  It suggests as well several negative factors that have contributed to the relative weakness of socialist ideas in the American political forum. 

     First is factionalism itself.  Apart from dividing workers and thus diluting their interests, this tends to encourage the suppression of open discussion essential for a vigorous movement.  In politics, as in science and other arenas, the enforcement of orthodoxy deaden progress.  There can be no certainty that a given analysis or strategy is effective; a healthy organization will be always ready to consider opposing conclusions from the facts and to take new information into account.  For political purposes numbers are far more useful than a theoretically perfect program.

     The development of antidemocratic tendencies was further encouraged by the emulation of foreign regimes whether Soviet, Chinese, or Third World.  Just as the people’s victory in Russia was largekly subverted by the Leninist idea of a dictatorship euphemistically labeled “democratic centralism” and Stalin’s dictatorship.  Communist parties were until recent times intolerant of internal discussion.  The unfortunate effects of Americans “tailing” after other regimes rather than seeking appropriate American solutions include agitation against comrades such as Trotskyites and the artificial linking of the priorities of socialists in the United States with the practices in countries abroad with claims to be socialist.

     The hard fact is that the most disciplined parties, typified by the Communists of the ‘thirties, have been the most effective.   The same pattern emerged again in the ‘sixties as activists from Socialist Workers and Progressive Labor in gained outsize influence in contrast to the more casually organized members of SDS.  An openness to the free discussion of new ideas seems contrary to the unanimity useful for collective action.   This dialectic is evident today on the right wing as the Trumpite fascists have proven far more successful than the more reasonable traditional Republicans.

     Most Americans have a shallow involvement in politics and, unfortunately, little grasp of their own interests.  They have often been distracted and misled by racism, sexism, and xenophobia, but some in every generation have recognized that socialism offers the solution of social and economic problems.  The following list is a reminder of this ongoing struggle.  I am sure it is far from complete.

 

 

1876 The Socialist Labor Party (originally the Workingmen's Party of the United States) was the first socialist party in the United States.  Some elements broke to help form the Socialist Party.  

1898 the Social Democratic Party of America was founded which merged into the Socialist Party in 1901.

1901 the Socialist Party organized including elements of the Socialist Labor Party.  In 1971 the party changed its name to Social Democrats, USA which split in 1973 into two factions, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the Socialist Party USA.

1905 Industrial Workers of the World as a union did not run candidates but included people from the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party.

1919 Communist Party of the USA from a split in the Socialist Party.  Another splinter, the Communist Labor Party of America merged with the CPUSA in 1921.

1928 Communist League of America formed by Trotskyites after their expulsion from the CPUSA which in 1934 joined with the American Workers Party to establish the Workers Party of the United States which lasted until 1936 when its members joined the Socialist Party.

1934 Workers Party of the United States formed by the merger of the Trotskyist Communist League of America and A. J. Muste's American Workers Party.

1935 the Revolutionary Workers League split from the Workers Party of the United States, disbanded in 1946

1936 American Labor Party formed by members of the Socialist Party.

1937 Socialist Workers Party of Trotskyites expelled from the Socialist Party.

1938 the Leninist League broke from Trotsky and the Socialist Workers Party, In 1946 it was renamed the Workers League for a Revolutionary Party.

1959 Workers World Party split from SWP.

1962 Progressive Labor Movement formed by Maoists within the CPUSA renamed Progressive Labor Party in 1965.

1964 Spartacist League split from the Socialist Workers.

1966 Black Panther Party disbanded in 1982.

1966 Freedom Socialist Party feminist split from Socialist Workers, spawned the Radical Women activist group.

1967 Marxist-Leninist Party (USA), dissolved in 1973.

1967 Peace and Freedom Party.

1967 Youth International Party formed by hip radicals

1968 Young Lords, a Chicago gang, reformed as a political group.

1968 Young Patriots formed by white Southerners in Chicago along the model of the Black Panthers.

1968 White Panthers formed by hip white radicals along the model of the Black Panthers.

1970 Gray Panthers, old persons group along the model of the Black Panthers.

1971 People’s Party, a national grouping including the Peace and Freedom Party that functioned only in the 1972 election, reformed in 2017 by supporters of Bernie Sanders

1971 New American Movement, formed by SDS members, merged with DSOC in 1983 to establish the Democratic Socialists of America

1971 Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) was formed from the October League (Marxist–Leninist), many of whose members had been SDS activists who followed a Maoist line.

1972 The African People's Socialist Party.

1973 Communist Workers' Party split from Progressive Labor, dissolved to join New Democratic Movement in 1985.

1975 Revolutionary Communist Party (originally the Revolutionary Union)  split from Progressive Labor.

1986 Labor Militant founded by Trotskyites, changed to Socialist Alternative (United States) in 1998.

1990 Green Party evolved from environmentally concerned Committees of Correspondence

1995 Socialist Equality Party (United States) formed by the Workers League, the US supporters of the ICFI. The Workers League had been founded in 1966 by the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI), which emerged out of a split with the Socialist Workers Party

2004 Party for Socialism and Liberation, split from Workers World

In Memory of my Generation’s People’s Heroes

     In every town are war memorials: statues, parks, shrines, and solemn ceremonies recalling those who donned uniforms and obeyed their officers, and indeed the travails of such people (on all sides and in all wars) can be considerable. Their suffering touches many, and their commemoration is accordingly social and official. Politicians and relatives alike glibly say that their sacrifice maintained American freedom, though what there is of American freedom has not been threatened from without since the War of 1812, most certainly not by Kaiser Bill, Ho Chi Minh, or Saddam Hussein.
     Those who died for the people’s cause are fewer, and sparks of their memory (such as this) are obscure and idiosyncratic. Yet it is this group that has, by the purest voluntarism in most cases, sought to advance humanity as a whole in work that has laid the foundation of the comparative comfort enjoyed by many today. The grasping hands of the powerful will make no concession voluntarily; even the mildest of reforms come only when forced. Frederick Douglass was correct in his celebrated analysis and deserves quoting yet one more time.

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [1]

     In other countries and in the USA in days gone by, the killing of political rebels was wholesale and unashamed. The first verse of the old song “The Red Flag” spoke no more than sober reality for all its clothing of sentimental rhetoric.

The People's Flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold. [2]

     Though every country produced such people’s martyrs, I mean here to commemorate only Americans. I conceive the group broadly otherwise, accepting as those who labored for a brighter future: community and labor organizers, socialists, anarchists, communists of various stripes, supporters of civil rights, feminists, ecologists and gay activists. I include people outrightly assassinated by law enforcement or military as well as some who ended their own lives as a political statement. [3] No scholar of American history, I simply write about the people whom I recall and a few others whose names I only recently learned. This list is unsystematic and certainly incomplete, but I feel that simply naming these few names is justified by simple respect for those who genuinely sacrificed for us all. Perhaps, as well, the young and others unfamiliar with the people mentioned here might learn. I welcome additions.
     My own roll call includes only my generation and emphasizes the movements of the sixties, though I am aware of massacres such as those during the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania in 1892 (nine killed), at Lattimer -- another Pennsylvania mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania -- in 1897 (nineteen dead), at Ludlow, Colorado in 1914 (twenty-six killed), Everett, Washington in 1916 (twelve victims) and the 1921 Rising of Logan County, West Virginia in which between fifty and a hundred workers fell, the Little Steel Strike of 1937 when ten demonstrators were killed by Chicago police and sixteen more fell in Youngstown, Ohio. I am aware that controversy has muddied the narrative for such victims of the judicial system as Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Whatever the details, like those regularly killed on urban streets by police officers, these people did not receive fair trials or just sentences and thus are victims of political persecution whatever their guilt or innocence.
     Doubtless the greatest number of political killings occurred in the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Fortunately in this case, scholars have documented the deaths of activists, and they are remembered in the only such monument of which I am aware, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Archivists have verified the deaths of forty-one people in the Movement from 1954-1968. [4] They include also a list of seventy-four others who had not yet been killed or for whom the historical research had been in process when the memorial was dedicated. Among those honored there are such well-known names as James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, who died in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi as well as others such as Lamar Smith who had organized voters in his community and was shot on the courthouse lawn in midday in Brookhaven, Mississippi in 1955 and William Lewis Moore, a white postman from Baltimore murdered in Attalla, Alabama during his solitary march against segregation in 1963.
     A late spasm of criminal racist violence occurred in 1979 when Klan and Nazi Party members killed five Communist Workers activists during a protest in Greensboro, North Carolina: Sandi Smith, James Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cauce, and Michael Nathan. The dead included three physicians (one of whom served as president of a textile workers local). The police provided no protection; indeed, there were not present on the scene of the demonstration though it had been announced well in advance, and the assailants were acquitted by all white juries in spite of film documenting the murders.
     The police regularly reacted with fierce disregard for law during demonstrations in those days and were sufficiently reckless that occasionally someone died. Dean Johnson was killed in Chicago in 1968 at the beginning of the historic demonstrations around the Democratic Convention, and in 1969 James Rector died in Berkeley while demonstrating in behalf of People’s Park. Most everyone is at least aware of the 1970 attack at Kent State in Ohio in which National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds at demonstrators, killing Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, and Allison Krause. One hears considerably less about the deaths of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green less than two weeks later at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, or about Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton, and Henry Ezekial Smith who were shot and killed by police in 1968 at South Carolina State in Orangeburg while protesting a segregated bowling alley. The victims in Mississippi and South Carolina, needless to say, were black.
     Many people remember television news reports of the dramatic suicide of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon in 1963. The evening news on the American networks showed the monk maintaining his meditation posture as his body burned. A few might recall the self-immolation of Quaker Norman Morrison in 1965 below Secretary of Defense McNamara’s Pentagon office. The fact is that a bit before Morrison’s act, Alice Herz, an eighty-two year Holocaust survivor, had similarly emulated Thích Quảng Đức in Detroit in 1965. A little later that year Roger Allen LaPorte burned himself in protest in New York City as did Florence Beaumont in Los Angeles in 1967, Bruce Mayrock in New York City in 1969 (protesting Biafran War policies), George Winne, Jr. burned himself in San Diego in 1970, as did Gregory Levey in Amherst in 1991 (protesting the Gulf War), Kathy Change in Philadelphia in 1996 (protesting “the present government and economic system”), and Malachi Ritscher in Chicago in 2006 in reaction to the Iraq War. [5]
     It is difficult to calculate the precise number of wholly unjustified killings of Black Panthers by law enforcement. Their attorney Charles Garry claimed that police had wantonly murdered thirty Panthers between January of 1968 and December of 1969 alone. A hostile journalist challenged the circumstances of many of these killings, conceding only the deaths of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark as altogether unjustified. [6] Considering the state’s interest in lying or obscuring the facts in many of these cases and the unquestioned program by the government to foment violence among black activists, it may never be clear what happened in many of these cases.
     The case of Hampton and Clark is particularly egregious. In one of the clearest examples of political assassination by the state in American history, the Chicago police with the aid of the FBI and an informer in the Black Panther organization drugged Hampton with secobarbitol and then burst into the Panthers’ apartment with guns firing in 1969, killing the two while they lay in bed and wounding four others. No one was ever prosecuted for the violence though the families of the dead and injured won a civil suit years later due to the overwhelming evidence of criminal behavior on the part of the government.
     Throughout history the wealthy have held the power. They have never ceded a penny to others unless they had no choice, while the poor are regularly sent off to the front lines of imperialist wars and other military adventures. Through organization, struggle, strikes, and demonstrations the masses have gained a modicum of comfort in the developed world. If today slavery and child labor have ended, women have the vote, labor unions have won some measure of shorter hours, job safety, and a piece of the economic pie, albeit far smaller than workers deserve, it is only because of those who have championed the people’s causes. If you and I appreciate what we have of leisure, a portion of the fruits of our labor, and a bit of space in which to raise the next protest, it is only right that now and then we devote a moment’s thought to those who have been willing to put their bodies on the line in defense of us all.



1. West India Emancipation speech in Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857.

2. The Irishman Jim Connell’s song has been an anthem of the British Labour Party and the IWW, among other organizations. It was recently sung by those celebrating the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party Leader.

3. I do not include many righteous activists who were themselves wielding deadly force such as the Weather Underground’s Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970 or Americans such as priest James Carney and former Green Beret David Arturo Baez who had joined insurgents and were killed by the Honduran military in 1983. In the case of Black Panthers the record is often obscure though the government’s desire to eliminate the organization is certain. (See note 6 below.)

4. Their list is available at https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs.

5. The New York Times story on Levey’s death in 1991 mentions two other self-immolations protesting the Gulf War and eight in protest to the Vietnam War but provides no further details.

6. See Edward Jay Epstein “The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?” in The New Yorker for February 13, 1971.