A pamphlet addressed to farmers and agricultural workers from Socialist Party farm organizer William Garver.

Abolish Rent by Will L. Garver. Published by Appeal to Reason, Girard, Kansas. 1912.

‘In order to protect you, as well as all others like you, from this legalized robbery, called exploitation, we have bought your land, but we, as a working-class state, have bought it, not in order to exclude you from it, but simply to hold as trustee to prevent such as you from being excluded by an idle landlord. We have bought to hold for the use of bona fide workers, and as you are a real worker, you stay on the farm you have sold to us. Go to work and till the soil, and plant seeds, and produce wealth, and all the wealth you produce will be your own private property; and so long as you occupy and use this land in a bona fide manner we will guarantee you possession against all comers. And if, while you occupy this land, you add additional value thereto-permanent improvements that are inseparably attached to it-and then in time you desire to vacate and surrender the use of the land to someone else, why we will compensate you for all the real values you have placed upon our land, for we seek to protect the worker in the ownership of the wealth his labor has produced.’

The Appeal to Reason was among the most important and widely read left papers in the United States. With a weekly run of over 550,000 copies by 1910, it remains the largest socialist paper in US history. Founded by utopian socialist and Ruskin Colony leader Julius Wayland it was published privately in Girard, Kansas from 1895 until 1922. The paper came from the Midwestern populist tradition to become the leading national voice in support of the Socialist Party of America in 1901. A ‘popular’ paper, the Appeal was Eugene Debs main literary outlet and saw writings by Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Mary “Mother” Jones, Helen Keller and many others.

PDF of full issue: http://cfss.indstate.edu/debspams/g2445a2_1900.pdf