Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Workers of the World, Read!’
- 1 ‘The Workingman's Bible’ and the Making of American Socialism
- 2 Charles H. Kerr & Company and the Americanization of Marxian Socialism
- 3 Activist Readers and American Socialists' Print Culture of Dissent
- 4 How the Socialist Party Created a Print Culture of Dissent without a Party-Owned Press
- 5 Information Management and the Socialist Party's Information Department and Research Bureau
- 6 Annotations on the Failure of Socialism in America
- 7 Conclusion: What a Book Cannot Do
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - Charles H. Kerr & Company and the Americanization of Marxian Socialism
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Workers of the World, Read!’
- 1 ‘The Workingman's Bible’ and the Making of American Socialism
- 2 Charles H. Kerr & Company and the Americanization of Marxian Socialism
- 3 Activist Readers and American Socialists' Print Culture of Dissent
- 4 How the Socialist Party Created a Print Culture of Dissent without a Party-Owned Press
- 5 Information Management and the Socialist Party's Information Department and Research Bureau
- 6 Annotations on the Failure of Socialism in America
- 7 Conclusion: What a Book Cannot Do
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
He marked the bindings of his publishing company's hard-cover books with his monogram – CHK. In the Progressive Era, these letters meant one thing to American socialists, ‘Charles H. Kerr’, whose eponymous company served as the de facto publisher of the Socialist Party. The embossed image of a hand holding a torch on many of the hard-cover volumes symbolized Kerr's central purpose, which was to lead readers from darkness to light. He truly believed that reading was revolutionary, just as it had been in his case. Time and time again, he made this message clear. As he put it in 1907, ‘[R]evolutionists will not evolve without study. They cannot study without books.’ Of his forty years in the publishing industry, Kerr spent thirty of them providing radical books and pamphlets to grow the socialist movement, hoping to lead readers into the light of the Cooperative Commonwealth. More than anything, he wanted to Americanize socialism and help make Marx a household name in the United States. This chapter tells the story of Kerr and his efforts to develop a literature of dissent that articulated socialist ideas through a distinctly American idiom. In the process the socialist movement became an instrument of Americanization itself, albeit Americanization from the ‘bottom up’.
The term ‘Americanization’ is most commonly used to refer to the process of acculturating the more than 25 million immigrants who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Socialism and Print Culture in America, 1897–1920 , pp. 33 - 58Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014