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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.
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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.
HE first evening meeting after the crimson flyer left Salt Lake City was held at San Bernardino, California, September 8. For the purpose a large park pavilion had been secured and the largest attendance at any political gathering in the history of the city greeted the speakers from the train and the veteran Comrade N. A. Richardson, well known wherever the Appeal is read as the author of that mighty little pamphlet, “The Introduction to Socialism.”