Emanuel Haldeman-Julius

• Emanuel Haldeman-Julius
• Born: July 30, 1889
• Died: July 31, 1951

Reform journalist and publisher of the Little Blue Books, was born in Philadelphia, the son of Davis Julius and Elizabeth (Zamost) Julius, working-class Jews whose family name had been Zolajefsky, and who came to America from Odessa, the Ukraine, Russia, in 1887. The son of a rabbi and bookbinder, David Julius was described by his son as a “good Jew” although “not religious” and as having a “wry, sarcastic wit.” The daughter of a farmer, Elizabeth Julius talked in a “torrent of words” and was a realist who “hated persecution, prejudice and oppression.”

As a youngster Emanuel Julius read the writings of Tom Paine and Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, which became his favorite book. While perusing the Rubáiyát one day on a park bench in Philadelphia, he conceived the idea of inexpensive editions of good books. But because of the need to make money, he had ended his formal schooling in the seventh grade (except for a brief stay in 1918 at the State Manual Training School in Pittsburg, Kansas, now the Pittsburg State University). He was a theater usher, a copy editor on a Philadelphia newspaper, and a bellhop in a private school for girls. Here, in “Miss Mason’s School of400 pretty and rich virgins,” he prepared his first article, “Mark Twain—Radical,” which was published in The International Socialist Review.

Soon Julius became a reporter in New York City for The Call, the leading socialist paper of its day; at the age of twenty, he went to Milwaukee at the suggestion of Victor L. Berger, the Socialist congressman, who had been impressed by his work. There he became a feature writer and city hall reporter for the daily Leader; then he worked for the Chicago World, a socialist paper whose circulation had skyrocketed to 200,000 because of a strike on other newspapers. After working briefly in Los Angeles for another socialist paper, he returned to New York City to become a drama critic and Sunday editor of The Call.

In 1915 Julius followed Louis Kopelin to Girard, Kansas, where Kopelin, his senior editor, had gone to help edit the prominent socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, the Appeal’s circulation had reached a figure over 500,000 in 1901, when President Theodore Roosevelt, who denounced it, had taken office. After the death in 1912 of J. A. Wayland, the Appeal’s editor, and partly because of socialist discord at the beginning of World War I, the paper’s circulation and influence had declined.

In Girard, Julius met and married (Anna) Marcet Haldeman, the niece of Jane Addams of Hull House and the daughter of an affluent banker and physician. They had two children. Because of Marcet Haldeman’s feminist convictions, the couple joined their names and both referred to themselves thereafter as Haldeman-Julius.

Emanual Haldeman-Julius purchased the Appeal to Reason in 1919, using a down payment of $25,000 borrowed from his wife, in addition to a $50,000 note payable in one year. Soon he capitalized on the Appeal’s printing plant to realize his youthful project of cheap book editions and began to publish the 3½-by-5-inch paperback books that, because of the color of their covers, became known as Little Blue Books. He set the books in eight-point type, sixteen ems wide (the average newspaper column is twelve ems) and used newsprint. For his first two titles, he chose the Rubáiyát and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he priced at twenty-five cents apiece, using the subscription list of the. Appeal to market the books. Although he continued to publish the Appeal, changing its name to the Haldeman-Julius Weekly in 1923 and to the American Freeman in 1929, it became less of a Socialist organ and more of a voice for his own iconoclasm.

The FitzGerald and Wilde titles were successful, prompting Haldeman-Julius to publish a series of fifty classics, including novels by Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Charles Dickens. Within a year he paid his debts and was on his way to becoming known as “the Henry Ford of publishing”—the predecessor of the giant paperback industry of later years. In the next thirty years thousands of titles and more than 500,000,000 copies of Little Blue Books appeared. With the increase in his business, Haldeman-Julius was able to lower the price of his books to ten and then to five cents. He printed books on sex and free thought, books critical of the Catholic church and books on a wide variety of other subjects. He commissioned many authors to write original books and introduced many Americans to such authors as Margaret Sanger, Clarence Darrow, Will Durant, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, Havelock Ellis, Morris Hillquit, and Bertrand Russell. His social and political iconoclasm was matched by his editorial independence—he judged a manuscript, he said, by only one standard: “Do I like it myself?”

The Little Blue Books had a potent influence between the two world wars. Where access to libraries was difficult, as in many rural areas and small towns, this effect was profound. Students during the depression of the 1930s could buy fifty secondhand books for a dollar and resell them for a profit. The Little Blue Books reached hospitals, penal institutions, charity centers, camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and military barracks, as well as ordinary homes.

In 1928 Haldeman-Julius wrote The First Hundred Million, a description of the operation of his business and an assessment of its results. Books on sexual hygiene had been selling from 50,000 to 100,000 copies a year, proving, he noted, that Americans were not “afraid of sex.” “Great love stories” such as Boccacio’s Decameron and love poetry also sold well, as did humor. Haldeman-Julius was plainly proud of helping to sharpen the awareness that Americans had of themselves. Both he and Marcet Haldeman-Julius wrote books themselves—sometimes in collaboration, the novels Dust (1921) and Violence (1929) being two examples. Haldeman-Julius himself was the author of Miscellaneous Essays (1923) and My First and Second Twenty-Five Years (2 vols., 1949).

An urbane son of immigrants who loved the advance of new, sometimes unpopular ideas, Haldeman-Julius lived a quiet life on his 160-acre farm near Girard, Kansas, tending animals and growing crops. His best friend may have been Clarence Darrow, with whom he championed sex education. When told that he resembled actor Edward G. Robinson, Haldeman-Julius would twist his face and growl, “Now listen here, you guys. ...” H. L. Mencken, a fellow iconoclast, wrote in 1924: “I met him sometime ago with Upton Sinclair. He talks and acts like a Rotary Club go-getter, but he prints many good books.” Haldeman-Julius ventured from his farm frequently to speak at black churches and particularly admired singer Marian Anderson. He was quite familiar with varied forms of music and could quote psychoanalytic theory in an admiring discussion of singer Al Jolson’s extroversion. He loved the New York show-business world, and used his means to entertain artists and writers at his farm. A stocky, aggressive man, he liked big automobiles and champagne.

Marcet Haldeman-Julius died in 1941. A year later he married an officer of his publishing company, Susan Haney. They had no children. He drowned in his swimming pool at the age of sixty-two. Shortly before his death a federal court convicted him of income-tax evasion.

Witty and imaginative in his own writing—although his books were uneven in quality—and innovative as a businessman and public figure, Haldeman-Julius was a literary missionary and social critic viewed by some as a kind of American Encyclopedist. He turned from the socialist transforming of society to the more acceptable, yet equally nonconformist, task of enlarging the American public’s cultural horizons through cheap paperback books. The 1920s and 1930s saw the wide expansion of popular culture; by the mass production of books Haldeman-Julius joined that process, but by introducing the classics and heterodox ideas—sex education, for example—into the process, he gave to it his own stamp.

The Pittsburg State University of Pittsburg, Kansas, has approximately one-third of the Haldemann-Julius papers, the other two-thirds being divided between the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus and the Lilly Library, University of Indiana. Pittsburg State also holds 3,000 Big Blue books and most of the 2,245 Little Blue Books. For autobiographical material see his An Agnostic Looks at Life (1926) and Why I Believe in Freedom of Thought (1930) and A. Mordell, ed., The World of Haldeman-Julius (1960), a compilation of his miscellaneous writings, with an introduction by S. Haldeman-Julius. The Michigan State University Library at East Lansing has a substantial collection of Little Blue Books. Biographical sources include L. Adamic, “Voltaire from Kansas,” Outlook and Independent, June 25, 1930; W. J. Fielding, “Prince of Pamphleteers,” The Nation, May 10, 1952; D. M. Herder, “Haldeman-Julius, the Little Blue Books, and Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture, April 1971; G. W. Johnson, “The Man Behind the Blue Books,” The New Republic, August 15, 1960; B. DeMott, “Boys in the Sub-Basement,” The Nation, December 31, 1960; W. McCann, “Sex-Mad Socialism,” The Progressive, September 1967; P. Butler, “Would You Spend $2.98 for a College Education?” The Saturday Review of Literature, April 12, 1969; Who Was Who in America 1951; See also A. The New York Times, August 13, 1951; and the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 5 (1977).