Cotright, Van

Biography

Emanuel Julius was born in Philadelphia on July 30, 1889, the son of a Jewish bookbinder who had emigrated with his family from Russia. Harassed as a child for being Jewish, Julius developed a distain for all religion. After leaving school at age 15, Julius worked at a variety of menial jobs. He also read voraciously, in particular literature and pamphlets published by socialists, which was inexpensive and readily available. Convinced of their truth, Julius joined the Socialist Party before World War I. He became a journalist and in 1915 moved to Girard, Kansas, as editor of Appeal to Reason, an influential socialist newspaper with a large national circulation. The following year he married Anna Marcet Haldeman (whose name he added to his own in hyphenate), daughter of a wealthy local banker and niece of the social worker Jane Addams.

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