University in Print

by BRIAN GRIBBEN photos from THE PITTSBURG STATE UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

What does Forsyth Library’s Special Collections house that aligns with this issue’s theme: “Beyond the Classroom?” After all, most of our collections are oriented toward scholarly endeavors. What about materials that were created to bypass the academy, connect underserved and oft-ignored populations with literature, and offer an escape (both figuratively and literally) from the confines of proletarian drudgery and exploitation. Hyperbolic? Perhaps but hyperbole was undoubtedly the currency of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (EHJ).

His mass-marketed Little Blue Books were advertised to a workingclass audience as a “university in print;” symbolizing both the democratization of literature and the popularization of knowledge inherent to the radical movements of the early 20th Century.

Co-founded in 1919 by Emanuel Julius (a Philadelphia-born journalist who relocated to Girard, Kansas to write for the country’s largest socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason) and his wife Marcet Haldeman, HaldemanJulius Publications was best known for printing the pocket-sized Little Blue Books, a name descriptive of their 3-1/2 by 5-inch dimensions and the coloring of the cheap pulp paper used in their production. These booklets covered a myriad of subjects such as freethought, birth control, and leftist politics. They also offered courses in self-improvement and reprinted philosophical tracts, the Classics, biographies and popular literature in the public domain.

Haldeman-Julius, having adopted his wife’s maiden name in a show of solidarity (as well as recognizing that the well-regarded Haldeman name offered some protection against Girard’s reactionary element), initially published the booklets in order to fund Appeal to Reason. He soon discovered not only a sizable readership among the labor and agrarian classes toiling in the strip pits and farmlands of southeastern Kansas, but across the country and internationally as the Little Blue Books would be sold through the mail, in vending machines, and at localized “Little Blue Book” shops and railway kiosks.

From its offices in Girard, Haldeman-Julius Publications could print 40,000 volumes of its “Ten Cent Pocket” series every eight hours, earning its owner the nickname “the Henry Ford of Literature.” By 1923, Publisher’s Weekly, while deriding EHJ as a shameless self-promoter, conceded that based on the volumes sold the company was “the greatest publishing business ever in existence.” Though Haldeman-Julius’s primary motives were commercial rather than philanthropic, marketing of the collections took on decidedly autodidactic tones. Promotional materials for the “Ten Cent Pocket” series such as 1922’s Catalog List of 239 Books at 10 cents each promised “To have the entire set is to have a University in Print.” By the late twenties, Haldeman-Julius had repackaged sixty “Little Blue Book” volumes on topics ranging from rhetoric to economics as a “High School Educational Course.” Retailing at $2.98 per set, the series was an instant success with 300,000 sets sold in the first ten months. From this point on, book series dedicated to self-education and self-improvement became staples of the Haldeman-Julius catalog.

Ubiquitous in working-class and agrarian households, the almost halfbillion “Little Blue Book” volumes sold during the interwar period revealed a proletarian demand for knowledge that challenged conventional opinions of literati who regarded the working class as semiliterates interested only in the crudest of reading materials. Cultural critics scoffed at the cheaply produced, carelessly edited volumes and the underclass’s ability to appreciate the texts. Meanwhile, farmers, machinists, homemakers, and others authored glowing endorsements of the Little Blue Books in their local newspapers, celebrating their first exposure to works by Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, Shakespeare, and George Bernard Shaw.

Commenting on the state of proletarian literary preferences during the interwar years, Louis Adamic proclaimed in the December 1934 edition of the Saturday Review of Literature “the overwhelming majority of the American workingclass does not read books and serious, purposeful magazines.” However, Adamic’s conclusion belied the reality of a vibrant working-class readership evident both by public library statistics from the period and that HaldemanJulius’s company had recently celebrated the printing and sale of its two hundred millionth “Little Blue Book.”

That Haldeman-Julius found an audience during an era of social turmoil was no coincidence. Against the backdrop of the first Red Scare, a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and the Scopes’ Trial, EHJ assumed the role of an iconoclast, swearing enmity against ignorance, and adopting a style akin to H.L. Mencken. EHJ assailed his targets with both withering criticism and humor, noting in his prophetic 1928 pamphlet America: The Greatest Show on Earth that “debunking is both a serious and amusing job. It is serious, because a world run by bunk suffers inevitably from bad management; it is amusing, because one can scarcely help laughing at the ridiculous nature of bunk.”

As many titles in the HaldemanJulius catalog contained frank discussions of sex, socialist critiques, and decidedly irreligious positions, the publishing company quickly earned a reputation as a radical press. The company’s publication of “subversive” titles and HaldemanJulius’s unsuccessful 1932 campaign as a Socialist Party of America’s senatorial candidate soon attracted the FBI’s attention, resulting in nearly two decades of periodic surveillance. In 1950, a federal grand jury indicted Haldeman-Julius for income tax evasion shortly after he had authored a series of scathing critiques targeting J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Convicted, Haldeman-Julius drowned while his sentence was under appeal. Following Haldeman-Julius’s death, his son Henry assumed ownership of the company. He continued publishing the “Little Blue Book” series until 1978, when a fire destroyed the Girard printing plant.

The 150+ volumes of assorted Little Blue Books, issues of the Haldeman-Julius Quarterly, and other miscellaneous work held in the Forsyth Library Special Collections represent a fraction of the 2000 titles issued by Haldeman-Julius Publications. The stamp “Kansas State Teachers College” found on roughly two-thirds of the items in the collection indicate they were acquired before 1931. A review of the materials suggests that the original collector eschewed the more controversial titles offered by Haldeman-Julius Publications in favor of more banal subjects. However, the occasional works by Ingersoll, Shaw, or Eugene Debs are found within the collection.

As part of Forsyth Library Special Collections Great Plains Research content, the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books remain an important resource as the collection offers a window into the literary tastes of working-class Americans during the interwar period. They document the products and distribution methods of Haldeman-Julius Publications and represent both a personal figure and company central to Kansas’s radical past.