"We Called Each Other Comrade": Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers

A few years ago in a bookstall in Chicago’s south Loop district, I found a dusty and battered pamphlet entitled Socialist Dialogues and Recitations, published in 1913 and sold for a modest 25 cents. Alongside contributions by figures largely forgotten now, like Mary E. Marcy, W. E. French, and Morris Rosenfeld, the pamphlet featured Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Workingman’s Answer to the Capitalist Class,” a dramatized scene from Jack London’s The Iron Heel, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s poem, “The Wolf at the Door,” addressing the inequities of industrial capital.

There is a kind of optimism to this collection of poems, dialogues and brief dramas, and the pamphlet’s title suggests a pedagogical function for them as “recitations.” One finds, for instance, a dialogue about shoe company employees voting Socialist and the didactic “Exercises for Twelve Children” about wage labor. It takes a little imagination to think one’s way back to a time when American socialists could have been so optimistic as to believe that the cooperative commonwealth was just around the corner, and that poetry and drama could have a role in such a transformation. Turning to the back cover of the pamphlet, though, one sees that the publisher, Charles H. Kerr and Company of Chicago, was also bringing out a magazine entitled The International Socialist Review that could claim for itself “450,000 Sold last year.” Socialism was not just a utopian dream in this prewar era: in 1912, Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate for U.S. President, received around 900,000 votes, representing almost six percent of the American electorate. And the impetus for such a mass movement in America was often provided by print. Publications like Kerr’s monthly International Socialist Review, at its height, sold around 40,000 copies a month; the weekly Appeal to Reason had a circulation of 761,747; the New York Call was read by 20,000 people daily. ¹ One of the chief players in this print-driven movement was Charles H. Kerr and Company, which Allen Ruff calls “a unique experiment in book publishing” (xiv).

The company that Charles H. Kerr began in Chicago in 1886 continues to this day on a small scale, but its glory days were during the prewar rise of the Socialist Party, and Ruff explores it and its primary magazine, the International Socialist Review, as “an oppositional voice in the Progressive Era” against the meliorist and reforming impulses of the day (163). The company printed numerous pamphlets and books meant to educate the masses, like Mary Marcy’s Shop Talks on Economics (“an attempt to say, in the language of working men and women, the things Marx says in his own books”), which sold more than two million copies in eight languages by her death in 1922 (130). Kerr’s lists, as Ruff puts it, “comprised a who’s who of Debsian-era socialism” (107). The achievement of Ruff’s study is, above all, to explain how the company and its founder were woven into the rich tapestry of American radicalism. The two main threads Ruff follows are the late-nineteenth-century Unitarianism of Kerr’s youth and the fights over the identity of Debs era socialism.

Ruff paints a fascinating portrait of the liberal Midwestern Unitarian milieu of Madison and Chicago that included figures like William Francis Allen, a Unitarian professor at the University of Wisconsin (and frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s mentor) and Jenkin Lloyd Jones, the leader of the “Unity Men,” post-Civil War Unitarians who advocated a non-doctrinal ethical religion and saw salvation in intellectual and moral growth. Jones’s Mutual Improvement Clubs and Unity Clubs deeply influenced Midwestern radicals, and Kerr’s first publishing venture, in fact, was to take over the publication of Unity magazine, in which he carried on Unitarianism’s “dissenting tradition” (25) and emphasis on education.

Just as Ruff meticulously traces...