History /

When Crain's Chicago Business, of all publications, recently  profiled the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, it quoted the historian  Paul Avrich, who enthused, "A few people at Kerr do a lot of very hard,  very fine work, which meets a real need for radical, socialist and  labor history."

The company's story begins improbably enough with the birth of  Charles Hope Kerr to abolitionist parents living in LaGrange, Georgia  just before the start of the Civil War. According to some accounts, the  Kerrs used the Underground Railroad, designed to transport fugitive  slaves, to beat a hasty retreat from the South. By 1881, Charles Hope  Kerr had graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where his father  chaired the Department of Classics. The younger Kerr's undergraduate  training in Romance Languages would later serve him well as he was to  translate into English such works as Antonio Labriola's Essays on the Materialist Conception of History and Paul Lafargue's brilliant The Right to Be Lazy.

When the Haymarket bomb exploded at a Chicago labor demonstration in  1886, Charles Hope Kerr was a resident of that city, an experienced  editor of Unitarian periodicals and the founder of his own Charles H.  Kerr Publishing Company. He later recalled learning much from the left  Unitarians, though he noted that the radicalism of many of them dimmed  quickly when the property question came to the fore.

In the wake of Haymarket and of the 1894 Pullman strike, the property  question was to become an increasingly sharp concern for Kerr and for  his wife, the feminist temperance advocate, May Walden. After first  embracing the monetary reform ideas of the Populist movement, the couple  accepted socialism at the century's turn. A 1900 Kerr Company catalog  suggests the expansive range of interests which the publishing house  brought with it in joining forces with the organized left, promising  books "on socialism, free thought, economics, history, hygiene, American  fiction, etc."

A year later music would join the list, with the publication of Socialist Songs With Music, the first such collection printed in the U.S. Kerr edited Socialist Songs  himself and provided a translation of the "Internationale," one  destined to become the standard English text. In subsequent years,  socialist playing cards, post cards and even board games found places in  Kerr catalogs alongside works of theory.

In the early twentieth century, the Kerr Company became the world's  leading English-language radical publisher. It issued, between 1906 and  1909, Ernest Untermann's translation of the three volumes of Marx's Capital, the first full such text, and published the initial popular edition of the anthropological classic Ancient Society, by Lewis Henry Morgan. The works of Clarence Darrow, Peter Kropotkin, Carl Sandburg and Jack London also graced Kerr's lists.

The International Socialist Review (ISR), published by Kerr  and affiliated with the Second International, began in 1900 as a rather  staid and academic journal edited by the socialist intellectual A. M.  Simons. But, after 1908, under Kerr's and later Mary Marcy's editorship,  it became a lively mass circulation magazine featuring radical theory,  culture (including exclusive publications of London's short stories) and  reportage. Contributors included virtually every well-known figure in  the radical labor movement, here and abroad.

During the critical World War One years, the Kerr Company represented  not only a publishing house, but also a current in the American  socialist movement. Openly and uncompromisingly revolutionary,  sympathetic to the proletarian socialism of the Industrial Workers of  the World and intractably opposed to militarism, the Kerr Company  vigorously opposed the war, both before and after U.S. entry. The U.S.  government as vigorously opposed the Kerr Company, seeing to it that ISR  was banned from the mails under the infamous Espionage Act. Repression,  splits in the Socialist Party and the decimation of the IWW all took  their toll and, by 1928, an exhausted Charles H. Kerr retired from the  company which he had directed for 42 years.

Kerr left the company which bore his name a rich heritage, especially  as the American publisher of works representing the viewpoints of the  libertarian far left and of revolutionary industrial unionism. Out of  the IWW experiences came Kerr's publication of Austin Lewis' The Militant Proletariat, one of the most important theoretical works written in the U.S. Especially during the war, ISR  opened its pages to the best of the European far left, including Rosa  Luxemburg, Otto Ruble, Hermann Gorter and S. J. Rutgers. Not only did  Anton Pannekoek's articles appear, but his Marxism and Darwinism,  translated into English, became a Kerr pamphlet. Perhaps most  remarkably, in 1913, shortly after being investigated by the Socialist  Party leadership for its heterodoxy, the Kerr Company published a  translation of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  done by the SP's sternest left critic, Daniel DeLeon. Kerr himself,  though still an SP member, also included DeLeon's 1897 introduction and  to top off a noteworthy adventure in nonsectarianism, added a  "Publisher's Note" stressing that the "events of sixteen years have in  many ways confirmed [the introduction's] forecast" on political matters.

Prior to leaving, Charles H. Kerr took steps to ensure that the  company would continue. Well before he departed, he turned over much of  the operation to John Keracher and other members of the Proletarian  Party. The PP, which originally adhered to the Communist International,  dissented from any analyses which hinted that the time of triumph of  American Bolshevism was at hand. It proved to be a small party, but an  apt caretaker for the Kerr Company. The Proletarians' roots in the  Michigan Socialist Party imparted a deep respect for Kerr's past.  Perhaps for that reason, the PP never sought to transform Kerr into a  narrow party press. The PP also enjoyed a substantial following among  self-educated skilled workers. It often conducted workers' schools and,  at times, seemed as interested in spreading knowledge of the natural  sciences as in propagating Marxism. This love of knowledge, along with  the long-range perspectives of the PP, fit Keracher and his associates  well for radical publishing work.

Through 1971, the Proletarians ran Kerr, a company much diminished in  size from its early twentieth century heyday, but one still able to  keep Marxist classics in print and even to add an occasional new title,  such as Keracher's own witty and biting critique of advertising and  media, The Head-Fixing Industry.

In 1971, with the PP passing out of existence, its leaders gave  control of the Kerr Company to a new Board of Directors, including  longtime IWW leader Fred Thompson, labor defense activist and radical  economist Joseph Giganti, socialist historian and expert on American  Indians Virgil Vogel, and Burt Rosen, a Korean War draft resistance  activist and veteran socialist. Cooperating with the Illinois Labor  History Society, the revived Kerr Company far exceeded the original  expectations of its new Board of Directors, which, as Thompson recalls,  at first hoped to give a "decent burial" to a historic institution by  distributing its existing stock. Instead, and largely through the hard  work of Burt Rosen, the company rebounded and published new biographies  of Eugene Debs and of Lucy Parsons, as well as Daniel Fusfeld's  masterful short history, Rise and Repression of Radical Labor. Old Kerr titles by Engels, Marx and Lafargue were reprinted, along with The Autobiography of Mother Jones,  a labor classic first published in the twenties, reissued in time to  sell thousands of copies in mining towns during the coal strikes of the  seventies.

The past couple of decades have seen further growth of the Kerr  Company. Organized as a worker-owned co-operative not-for-profit  educational association, its rapidly expanding list features beautifully  printed but reasonably priced books which bring back into print some of  the best of C.L.R. James, Mary Marcy, Edward Bellamy, Eugene V. Debs,  Clarence Darrow, Isadora Duncan, Vachel Lindsay, Mary MacLane, C. H.  George, and Voltairine de Cleyre, as well as heretofore unpublished  writings by T-Bone Slim, Claude McKay, Slim Brundage, and Covington  Hall, and new books by H. L. Mitchell, Staughton Lynd,, Warren Leming,  and Carlos Cortez. Several books on Haymarket, a "Sixties Series"  (inaugurated by the first textually accurate edition ever published of  the celebrated 1962 Port Huron Statement), a "Lost Utopias Series," a  "Bughouse Square Series" and a large and steadily growing number of  books on the IWW: These are just a few of the important books brought  out by Charles H. Kerr in recent years.

Now (in 2003) in its 118th year, the Kerr Company is not only a  living link with the most vital radical traditions of the past, but also  an organic part of today's struggles for peace and justice in an  ecologically balanced world.

Dave Roediger & Franklin Rosemont

(Originally published in the journal Workers' Democracy in 1986 the above article appears here slightly abridged and updated.)