J.A. Wayland Photograph Collection

The J. A. Wayland Collection includes personal, family, and professional records, photographs, and files of Socialist newspaperman, Julius A. Wayland (1854-1912). Wayland was the founder and publisher of the Appeal to Reason, America’s largest Socialist newspaper in the first two decades of the 20th century. Wayland had first started up The Coming Nation, also a Socialist newspaper, in the 1890s. Wayland, originally from Indiana, had been successful in real estate before turning to journalism. He moved to Girard, Kansas in 1897, bringing with him the Appeal to Reason, which he started in Kansas City in 1895. Wayland built the newspaper up into a major weekly, with circulation numbers exceeding 150,000. Upon his death in 1912 the Appeal to Reason was continued by his son and staff members for several years before selling it to Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, who turned it into his own publishing empire, most notably his Little Blue Book series.

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