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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday May 15, 1912
Girard, Kansas – Eugene Debs on Shipping Special Edition of the Appeal
From The Coming Nation of May 11, 1912
-April 22nd, Shipping the Special Judiciary Edition of April 27th:
A view of part of the great record-breaking edition of the Appeal to Reason, at the railroad station, Girard, Kansas
The photographer’s lens was not wide enough to catch all of the piles of the special Judiciary Edition of the Appeal to Reason which were delivered to one single train. The total edition was over 3,000,000.
From the Appeal to Reason of May 4, 1912:
April 22, 1912, at Girard
BY EUGENE V. DEBS.
SITTING at my desk at the APPEAL office, I hear the whirl and roar of the mammoth press. The Judicial Edition is racing through it-20,000 copies an hour. “Old Chap,” the veteran pressman, is pitted against his own record.
At the rate of a quarter of a million a day it will take twelve days to turn out this marvelous edition the greatest ever issued by any paper, in any nation, since the printing art was born.
“Old Chap” and the boys are standing by the racing, roaring old leviathan to win the wager that “she will not make it” and she does not miss a throb of her swift-beating heart in all the twenty-four hours of the day and night.
All about the APPEAL today the boys and girls are tense with trial-“drinking in the breath of their own swiftness”-making the record that is to stand against the world.
There is no night in Girard this week-there is but one long day-the day of Wayland, Warren and Phifer’s defiance to Pollock, Hook and Bone-the day of the APPEAL triumphant over the criminal courts of capitalist America.
* * *
IT is now ten-thirty in the morning. I am near the depot platform and I gaze upon a mountain raised by human hands and human hearts and human brains-in sweet and sympathetic social alliance-the like of which the eyes of man never saw before.
Piled high enough to hide the depot and extending far enough to tower like a range of mountain peaks, the APPEAL,-a thousand pouches and a million copies-is awaiting transportation. And this is but the first installment of the fabulous edition.
I look but I am dumb and speechless. My imagination has spread its wings and plumed its flight to follow in the wake of these three million gleaming bayonets of the advancing hosts of emancipation.
And still I look. I see but I can not speak. I am thrilled and full of rapture-but words would break the spell of the wondrous silence that inspires one.
Warren is standing at my side. His eyes are moist. “The Army!” are the whispered words that tremble on his lips. He is thinking of the Army of the APPEAL, the faithful workers, deep down in the mines, in the fetid factories, the gloomy shops, and way out in the cabins on the mountain side, waiting, watching and working for the break-‘o-day.
The people are there-everybody-to see the towering mountain peaks of the APPEAL, soon to dissolve and melt away and spread over all the land on their mission of arousing the people and lighting the way to the beautiful new world.
It is a day dream and a vision!
In my mental gallery the picture I saw this day will remain forever.
* * *
I SAW the extra mail cars on the siding-and I saw them loaded to the roof. An hour later I heard the mail and express train thundering along and come to a halt at the station platform. With all the extra loading which had been done in advance the train had yet to be held thirty minutes to stow away the million anti-judicial war cries. The train crew and the depot crew were all at work and oh, with what joy to the Socialists that were among them!
The colored porter broadly grinned as he remarked: “Fo’ de Lord’s sake, is dis what dey call de APPEAL’s spenshel!”
A fat rich man with a closely cropped gray beard, florid features, and eye glasses, stood on the steps of the Pullman, annoyed at the train’s delay. Some one was explaining to him, “Well, by God,” was all I caught of his capitalistic comment.
And then the train slowly moved out and away from the little town. It was loaded with light. Mail cars, express cars, baggage cars, all were packed to the rafters with the deadliest dynamite that ever blew a rotten system into froth and tatters.
The train has faded away and yet I see it more vividly than before. In my reverie it has flamed into a living, burning meteor sweeping across the sky-a miracle of light and glory-and where it passed beyond my vision I now behold a new sun rising: and all about me I hear myriads of eager voices saying, “We are coming, we are comrades, we are brothers!”
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[Emphasis added.]
Number 856, April 27, 1912
-The Special Judiciary Edition of the Appeal to Reason:
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote EVD, Law ag Working Class, AtR p1, Apr 29, 1911
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/110429-appealtoreason-w804.pdf
The Coming Nation
(Girard, Kansas)
-May 11, 1912, page 14
https://www.newspapers.com/image/488967434/
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-May 4, 1912, page 4
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/120504-appealtoreason-w857.pdf
-Apr 27, 1912
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/120427-appealtoreason-w856-judiciaryspecial.pdf
See also:
The Appeal to Reason
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/
https://spartacus-educational.com/USAappealR.htm
“Yours for the Revolution”
The Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922
-ed by John Graham
University of Nebraska Press, 1990
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3130137-yours-for-the-revolution
“The Federal Government v. The Appeal to Reason”
-by David L. Sterling
From: Kansas History of Spring 1986
https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1986spring_sterling.pdf
The story of the Appeal,”unbeaten and unbeatable”; being the epic of the life and work of the greatest political newspaper in the world.
By George Allan England. With a Forward Look (afterword) by Lincoln Phifer.
Fort Scott, Kan., 1915
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006607645
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Which Side Are You On? – Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman