Julius Augustus Wayland was a Midwestern USsocialist during the Progressive Era. He is most noted for publishing Appeal to Reason, a socialist publication often deemed to be the most important socialist periodical of the time.
Early life
Julius Wayland was born in Versailles, Indiana, on April 26, 1854. As an infant, his father and four of his siblings died in a cholera epidemic. His early years were spent in abject poverty and he was forced to find work after only two years of schooling. He then apprenticed to a printer in his home town.
Career
Wayland became owner of the Versailles Gazette in 1874. As a result of reading books such as Laurence Gronlund's The Cooperative Commonwealth and Edward Bellamy'sLooking Backward, Wayland became a socialist. His writings created tensions with home-town conservatives and he fled Versailles to avoid lynching. Moving to Pueblo, Colorado, in 1893, Wayland started a radical periodical, The Coming Nation, which quickly became the most popular socialist newspaper in America. At this point, he helped found a utopian settlement, the Ruskin Colony in Dickson County, Tennessee. In July 1895, he left Ruskin and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where in August 1895, he started another socialist journal, Appeal to Reason. Then, in 1897, he moved to Girard, Kansas. At first a mixture of articles and extracts from works by well-known socialists and radicals, Appeal to Reason began to publish writings by many of the prominent young socialists and reformers of the era, including Jack London, "Mother" Jones, Upton Sinclair, and Eugene Debs. Circulation soared, reaching 150,000 in 1902. In 1904, Appeal to Reason commissioned Upton Sinclair to write a novel about immigrant workers in the Chicagomeatpacking houses. Sinclair's novel, titled The Jungle, appeared in 1905 as a serial in Appeal to Reason.
With his wife Etta Bevan, Wayland resided in a historic house in Girard. Despite being a socialist, he became a millionaire. Wayland committed suicide by shooting himself with a gun on November 10, 1912 in his Girard home. He had been depressed by the recent death of his wife, his failure to convince a majority of Americans of the merits of socialism, and the smear campaign mounted against him by the conservative press. Afterward, his children and the Appeal to Reason editor Fred Warren successfully sued for damages from newspapers that had published libelous material about Wayland.
