The eighth child of William and Martha Hankins Browder, William Russell Browder was born 20 May 1891 in Wichita, Kansas, an area historically influenced by political radicals, particularly the Populists, or People's Party, to which his father belonged before its collapse in the mid 1890s. After a failed attempt at earning a living as a farmer, Browder's father became a country schoolteacher, until ill health forced him to resign his position in 1900. In an effort to help support the family, Browder left school at the age of nine and took a job as an errand boy in a department store. Browder's biographer James G. Ryan opines that Browder's lack of formal education resulted in his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and an inner craving for public recognition of his intellect that later influenced many of his decisions and actions as head of the CPUSA.
Although Browder never again set foot in a classroom, his mother tutored him and his siblings from Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason (1794), shared with them her love of literature, and urged them to publish their own books someday.
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