Julius Augustus Wayland

• Julius Augustus Wayland
• Born: April 26, 1854
• Died: November 11, 1912

Founder and publisher of the independent socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, was born in Versailles, Indiana, the youngest surviving son of John Wayland, a grocer, and Micha Wayland, both of Virginia. His father and four younger brothers and sisters died in the Indiana cholera epidemic of August 1854, leaving Wayland, his mother, and a brother and sister.

In April 1870 Wayland, with only two years of formal schooling, obtained a job in a printing office. Through various business deals, he made enough money to buy an interest in the Register, the leading Democratic paper of Harrisonville, Missouri. He married Etta L. Bevan in 1877 and moved to Harrisonville.

Then a Republican, Wayland was encouraged by local party officials to begin his own newspaper. He sold his interest in the Register and began publication of the Cass News. For his loyalty to the Republican cause, he was appointed county postmaster under the Rutherford B. Hayes administration but remained in that position only a few months. He sold the Cass News and in 1882 moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where he opened the One-Hoss Print Shop.

An astute businessman, Wayland began to speculate in real estate; taking advantage of rising land values in the western states, he made a small fortune. He became a supporter of the Populist movement and contributed to the People’s party victory in the 1892 Colorado gubernatorial election. Heeding the warnings of the Populists concerning the instability of the American banking system, he converted his land holdings into gold and cash, thus escaping the economic crash of 1893.

Wayland came into contact with socialism through William Bradford, a Pueblo shoemaker who introduced him to the works of Edward Bellamy, John Ruskin, and other social reformers and socialists. In 1893 Wayland committed himself to becoming a propagandist for socialism. He closed his real-estate business and moved to Greensboro, Indiana, where he launched a newspaper called the Coming Nation. The financial panic of that year, the strength of the Populist movement, and the low subscription charge (twenty-five cents per year) stimulated the rapid growth of the paper’s readership. Its circulation reached 14,000 within a month.

Early on, Wayland unveiled a plan to form a colony based on socialist principles. In July 1894 he and twelve of his followers and their families established the Ruskin Cooperative Colony near Tennessee City, Tennessee, on what he called “1000 acres of barren, rocky hills which had neither fertile soil nor living water.” The colony’s main source of income came from the Coming Nation and Wayland’s printing plant, both of which he had moved to Ruskin. Disagreements soon broke out, and in early 1895 Wayland left Ruskin, disillusioned with communitarian living. The colony continued until 1899.

Wayland then began a new paper, Appeal to Reason, in Kansas City, moving it in 1897 to Girard, Kansas. The Appeal, a lively, informative four-page sheet that used large headlines to attract attention, sold for fifty cents per year, the subscription price occasionally being reduced to twenty-five cents. The paper did not receive much attention until the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, when circulation began to increase steadily, helped in part by Wayland’s energetic promotion policy. Eventually the Appeal became the most widely read socialist newspaper of its time. Wayland wrote most of each weekly issue (he had originally intended to call the paper Wayland’s Weekly). In addition, the Appeal printed material by Edward Bellamy, Eugene V. Debs, Upton Sinclair, and other American socialists, though little by Karl Marx, who was being translated into English.

Wayland supported state ownership of the means of production and distribution and direct popular control over legislation, but failed to demonstrate clearly how these could be achieved. He referred to the U. S. Post Office as the model of a state-run institution of the socialist future—an especially ironic view in light of the constant battle the Appeal waged to retain its second-class mailing privileges. Wayland regarded himself as a member of the laboring classes, yet found himself at loggerheads with the unions over wage scales at the Appeal’s printing plant. On questions of race relations, his approach to socialism did not go beyond Populist direct democracy, accepting separate but equal facilities for the races if the majority so willed.

After 1902 Wayland turned over the day-to-day running of the Appeal and the companion Wayland’s Monthly (a series of pamphlets reprinting important socialist statements published from 1899 to 1915) to Fred Warren. Etta Wayland died in 1898, and in April 1901 Way-land married Pearl Hunt of Girard, who had worked at the Appeal office and who had taken care of Wayland’s two sons and three daughters after he was widowed. In June 1911 Pearl Wayland was killed in an automobile accident. Wayland, still depressed over her death and in the midst of defending the Appeal against a government lawsuit, committed suicide seventeen months later, at the age of fifty-eight. He left a note that read, “The struggle under the competitive system is not worth the effort. Let it pass.” Appeal to Reason became the most important propaganda organ of the Left before World War I, reaching a peak circulation of 750,000 in 1913, and continued publication with some changes of title until 1951.

The best source for Wayland’s writings are his articles in The Coming Nation and Appeal to Reason and his autobiography, Leaves of Life (1912). For other material see H. Quint, “Julius Augustus Wayland, Pioneer Socialist Propagandist,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, March 1949, and The Forging of American Socialism (1953). A more recent evaluation of Wayland and his work by P. Buhle, “The Appeal to Reason,” appeared in J. R. Conlin, ed., The American Radical Press (1974). Also of interest are G. A. England, The Story of the Appeal (1917); H. Vincent, The Editor with a Punch: Wayland (1912); and C. H. Kegel, “Ruskin’s St. George in America,” American Quarterly, Winter 1957. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, November 12, 1912.