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| Charles Hope Kerr |
By Robin
McGregor
Charles H Kerr & Co is not a
particularly well-known name on this side of The Pond but it is possible that
some readers will at have a few books from this Chicago publishing company on
their bookshelf from when it was the main labour movement publisher in the days
before the First World War.
Charles
Hope Kerr was born in 1860, the son of a mathematics teacher at a boys’ school
in the American state of Georgia. His parents were abolitionists helping slaves
escape via the underground railway, an activity which forced them to take
advantage of it and flee the state northwards, where his father became
professor of Greek at Madison University.
Originally
a Protestant Congregationalist, after graduating in Romance languages from his
father’s university in 1881 Kerr started working as a clerk at a Chicago
publishing house specialising in producing material for the Unitarian cause.
Here he gained skills on which he built a long, productive, if not financially
rewarding career.
Amongst
his early achievements he dramatically boosted the circulation of the
denominational paper Unity from
1,600 in 1883 to 8,000 by 1891. From 1886 it was published by a company bearing
his name. The contents of Unity
were not to the taste of the more conservative Unitarians, and even the more
liberal ones were not pleased by Kerr penning a favourable review of an anarchist
work in the pages of a Unitarian church journal.
This
hastened his departure from Unitarianism and the company was re-established as
an independent entity in 1893. One-thousand shares costing $10 each were
issued. Of these, $500 was taken up by Kerr, a few wealthy supporters chipped
in, but most went to supporters for whom the chance of discounts on future
publications was the main attraction. A new monthly, first entitled New Occasions and then New Time, dealing with a mixture of
progressive religious and secular views achieved a circulation of 30,000. When
it was sold to its Editor it soon collapsed, suggesting that having Kerr’s hand
at the tiller was vital.
The
timing of the launch was not a good one: soon afterwards a trade depression
struck. He managed to survive by appealing to supporters to invest small sums
in what he described as a co-operative venture.
Although
the company described itself a co-operative, it seems to be something of a
one-man band, indeed not a few follow workers denounced him on this very point.
In 1894 Kerr bravely published The
Pullman Strike by William Carwardine, which was a sympathetic account of
the recent important strike by the Chicago railwaymen that no other local
publisher would dare touch as a result of pressure from George Pullman himself.
This was just one book in an extensive list from a dazzling range of
progressive viewpoints ranging from anarchism, bimetallism, evolutionism,
feminism, and the Single Tax cause.
Kerr
was never a man to adhere to a single cause for long. By the turn of the
century he had abandoned his Populism for Marxism and became an active member
of the most left-wing section of the Socialist Party of America.
This
was the party, founded in 1901, that obtained 900,000 votes in the 1912
presidential election. It was an unsteady and varied coalition of socialists,
trade unionists, municipal reformers, populist farmers, immigrants and a few
Afro-American intellectuals. Despite winning mayoral positions and Congressmen,
participation in elections was frowned upon by members of syndicalist
tendencies. Its opposition to American participation in the First World War saw
a few members leave in protest – but the Bolshevik Revolution presented another
challenge, with many of those supporting it leaving to join the new Communist
Party.
The
Socialist Party had a national newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, that was commercially produced. This was a
positive choice for the party, which feared that an editorial board would
become an unwanted power in its own right. This also had the advantage of
allowing Kerr to publish for the party but was never bound by its more
right-wing leadership, and in turn the leadership was not embarrassed by any of
Kerr’s mix of authors.
Much
of his output took the form of pamphlets and small books in series such as The Pocket Library of Socialism and the Library of Science for the Workers,
in distinctive red, new-fangled cellophane covers. The latter series included
his best seller Shop Talks in Economics, written by his associate Mary Marcy
in 1911. This was a basic introduction to Marxist economics, which sold two
million copies and was translated into languages as diverse as Chinese and
Finnish. These were priced very cheaply at five cents a copy, but $6 could
allow branches to buy 1,000 copies of similar booklets.
On
a much more ambitious scale he supported the massive task of translating the
first complete English translation of the second and third volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital. Their familiar red-covered
volumes were taken up by the London publisher Swan Sonneschein, who reprinted
them frequently for decades. The publication of Socialist Songs with Music, the first such American collection,
was a lighter product of his press.
His
publications were generally small and cheap booklets, so they had little appeal
for general booksellers who could not make a profit on them unless they could
be sure of large sales. Instead, most of the business was by mail-order, with
the books and pamphlets being advertised in his International Socialist Review (ISR) and other left wing periodicals, or sold via sympathetic
unions and meetings of branches of the Socialist Party.
Kerr’s
output was not limited to books and pamphlets. It produced educational playing
cards, postcards and board games, but it is likely that the ISR was Kerr’s most important
publication. Established in July 1900, it was originally a worthy intellectual
publication with 800 subscribers. A revamp in 1908 with better paper and
illustrations took circulation from 4,000 to a peak of 45,000 copies by 1911,
boosted by such techniques as offering cheap copies of his books and pamphlets
to new subscribers.
Regular
subscription income from periodicals are often a mainstay for publishers
because, being paid in advance, it gives a cushion for the more unpredictable
income from book sales which, even if successful, only comes in after they are
sold. It is reasonable to assume that a successful periodical allowed the
company to produce low-margin books. A more unusual promotional offer made by Kerr
was giving a phonograph to subscribers taking out a 25-year subscription.
Sadly,
anyone taking up this offer would not have received a quarter-of-a-century
worth of magazines. It closed in 1918 when the Federal authorities, armed with
draconian war-time censorship powers, banned the ISR from the mailing system because it opposed American
involvement in the First World War. Violent attacks on the Socialist Party by
police and vigilantes had an indirect effect on Kerr as well as a direct one.
In
1917 a War Department spy visited Kerr’s shop hoping to buy anti-war literature
to incriminate him but was told he could not because the book in question was
banned. Instead he sent some other books published by Kerr to his bosses in
Washington. They were not impressed to be sent older works by Marx and Kautsky
and other 19th century works that were not banned, and the
translation of Plato’s Republic by
Kerr’s father. In 1918 the Canadian government made it illegal for any Canadian
to possess any literature published by Charles H Kerr & Co, under penalty
of a $5,000 fine or five years' imprisonment, a worthy if back-handed tribute
to his work.
Rising
paper costs and disruption of the transatlantic trade in the early war years
hit the company and the circulation of the
ISR declined.
Apart from this, Kerr was badly hit
financially when the union leader Bill Haywood unexpectedly fled to the Soviet
Union whilst out on bail when appealing against a 20-year sentence. Kerr had
contributed substantially towards the bail fund, which was, of course, lost.
This
and the subsequent violent and legal repression of the Left in the Red Scare
after the war ensured that the later history of the Company was at best one of
only marginal significance.
Exhausted
from his tireless and financially ill-rewarded labours Kerr finally retired at
the age of 68 in 1928, but not before handing over the firm to the Proletarian
Party of America (PPA), which had emerged from the left-wing part of the
Michigan section of the Socialist Party of America. Kerr himself spent the last
16 years of his life in retirement living in Los Angeles with the sister of
Mary Marcy before dying in 1944.
The
PPA was the sort of regional party that found Communist Party discipline
irksome. In the 1930s Kerr’s company published only a few new books, mostly by
the PPA’s leader, but its backlist of classics kept it in business.
The
Communist Party’s own International Publishers was founded in 1924 and soon
took over the task of publishing the works of Marx and Lenin, aided by the
Party’s contacts with the Soviet Union. With his background, it is unlikely
that Kerr would have taken well to Bolshevik discipline.
The
PPA finally closed in 1971 but the publishing firm remained in the hands of
some Chicago radicals attached to the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW). Instead of being wound up as expected, it found a new niche market
of publishing works of labour history that included several chronicling the
battles it took part in. Its looks as though its last book was published in
2015 because the page on the publisher’s website for forthcoming books is
blank.
Readers
interested in seeking more details should consult Allen Ruff’s We Called each Other Comrade: Charles H Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1997 and 2011, which is the
standard history of the firm but is a bit weak on the relatively unimportant
post-First World War period.
