"A new biography of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, one of the twentieth century's greatest book publishers and socialist writers"--

His admirers called him the “Barnum of Books” and the “Voltaire of Kansas” because of his ability to bring culture and education to the people. R. Alton Lee brings to life Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889–1951), a writer-publisher-entrepreneur who was one of America’s most significant publishers and editorialists of the twentieth century. His company published a record 500,000,000 copies of 2,580 titles and was second only to the U.S. Government Printing Office in the quantity of publications it produced. Lee details Haldeman-Julius’s family origins in Russia and his formative years in Philadelphia, where he learned the book trade. As a writer and editor for the Social Democrat, Sunday Call, and Western Comrade, Haldeman-Julius was already well known by the time he launched his own publishing company. Haldeman-Julius knew, was nurtured by, and published writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Carl Sandburg, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, Job Harriman, Will Durant, and Bertrand Russell, among others. Based in Girard, Kansas, his company, Haldeman-Julius Publications, covered socialist politics, the philosophy of free thought, and both new and classic books marketed to ordinary Americans, including the Little Blue Book series of classics in Western thought and literature. This biography of the enigmatic and energetic Haldeman-Julius opens a window into the fascinating world of early twentieth-century radical politics and publishing.

'Dust' is a romance-drama novel written by the husband-and-wife Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and Marcet Haldeman-Julius. The story revolves around the married life of Martin Wade and his wife, Rose. It is assumed that the story is a semi-fictional depiction of the Haldeman-Juliuses own lives, since Martin's personality is similar to that of Emanuel's—an atheist and hard-working man.

"Between 1919 and 1951, the United States was bombarded with published and written content by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Based out of the small rural town of Girard, Kansas, Haldeman-Julius helped to reshape the publishing world with his methods and philosophically driven content. In the process he created the largest mail-order publishing house in the world, sold over 500 million copies of his Little Blue Book seris that contained over 2,500 titles, and skirted controversy nearly every step of the way. His goals were lofty -- 1) bring knowledge to the masses one five cent pamphlet at a time and through his many other publications 2) increase awareness of the philosophy of freethought to as many people as possible by creating a platform for freethought publications written by authors who were freethinkers 3) and to alter the path of popular culture by focusing on the individual as an agent of change, which over time would potentially lead to a mass socail movement led by a freethinking public that made decisions based on science and rationality, free of superstition and public pressure that is attached to a population where religious belief is found in the majority"--from Abstract.

"From the end of the Civil War until the early twentieth century, Anglo, immigrant, and African American settlers were moving north and west faster than ministers within the major denominations could follow them with churches. In 1890, Northern Methodists, the largest Protestant denomination, only claimed 3.5 percent of the American population. Roman Catholics claimed 9.9 percent, and African American Baptists, the largest Black denomination, claimed only 18 percent of the African American population. In total, under 30 percent of Americans went to church on a weekly basis. While African American churches served a relatively larger role within their communities, the major white denominations played a minor role in the lives of the working poor. Clergymen like Dwight Moody reflected, "The gulf between the churches and the mases is growing deeper, wider and darker every hour." Home missionaries like Josiah Strong warned, "Few appreciate how we have become a non-churchgoing-people." Strong was right. In large fractions of the country, especially mining and industrial centers in the West, a simple lack of church edifices and long-term ministers to fundraise for them gave way to a vacuum of Protestant, denominational authority. In part, this disconnect between the number of churches and the size of the population was a result of culturally dislocated migrants. In 1890, more than 9 million Americans were foreign-born, and only a small fraction of those Americans had any familiarity with Anglo-Protestant traditions. They were joined by another 1 million African Americans migrants from the South to northern industrial centers. But this was only one of many reasons the poor did not go to church with the wealthy. While middle-class families paid lip service to the importance of building capacious churches, their own policies and practices reinforced the class system. As one minister reflected in 1887, "The working men are largely estranged from the Protestant religion. Old churches standing in the midst of crowded districts are continually abandoned because they do not reach the workingmen." Meanwhile, he continued, "Go into an ordinary church on Sunday morning and you see lawyers, physicians, merchants and business men with their families [-]you see teachers, salesmen, and clerks, and a certain proportion of educated mechanics, but the workingman and his household are not there." As the working-classes swelled with the expansion of American factories, ordained Protestant ministers served an ever-dwindling proportion of the country"--