Keracher, John

KERACHER, JOHN (1880–1958). Pioneer American Communist, founder/leader of the Proletarian Party, and Marxist pamphleteer, John Keracher was born and raised in Scotland. He came to the United States in 1909 and settled in Detroit, where he operated a shoe store for many years. In April 1910 he joined the Socialist Party.

Discouraged by what he regarded as the party’s low theoretical level, Keracher initiated an ambitious statewide party education program, based on the study of the Marxist classics. Out of this program grew Detroit’s Proletarian University, a notable experiment in independent labor education, in which Keracher was among the most popular instructors.

With Keracher at its head, the Michigan Socialist Party grew to be among the largest and the most radical of the party’s state organizations, and was often at odds with the more conservative national leadership, who in fact expelled the entire Michigan membership in May 1919. The ostensible reason for the expulsion was the Michigan section’s vehement antireligious stance, in violation of party statutes. Keracher and his comrades maintained, however, that the expulsion was motivated by their militant defense of Bolshevism.

A few weeks later, together with others who had been expelled from the party and a few independents, Keracher helped found the Communist Party in Chicago in September 1919. Unlike most of his newfound comrades, however, Keracher did not believe that communist revolution was imminent in the United States, and he stongly opposed the new party’s antielectoral, “underground,” and dual-unionist orientation. Because of these and other disagreements, he and the entire “Michigan group,” as its opponents called it, though it included supporters outside that state, were expelled from the Party in January 1920. In June of that year Keracher and the others founded the Proletarian Party, of which he remained the principal leader for the rest of his life.

As a major Proletarian Party publicist, Keracher wrote countless party leaflets as well as articles and editorials for the Proletarian News and internal polemics for party convention bulletins. His pamphlets, however—How the Gods Were Made (1929), Producers and Parasites (1935), The Head-Fixing Industry, a critique of capitalist media (1935; revised 1955, with a section on television), Crime: Its Causes and Consequences (1937), and Frederick Engels (1946)—are surprisingly free of sectarian rhetoric. Enlivened by flashes of soapbox humor—Keracher was a gifted street-speaker and indefatigable cross-country lecturer—these popularizations of Marxism, several of them still in print, were stocked by other socialist groups as well as by locals of the Industrial Workers of the World and free-thought societies.

Keracher’s work at the Proletarian University in Detroit had brought him into close contact with Charles H. Kerr’s socialist publishing house in Chicago, and it was to Keracher that an aging Charles Kerr, eager to retire after directing the operation for forty-two years, sold the bulk of his controlling shares in the cooperative firm in 1928. Remarkably, during the next forty-two years, when the Kerr Company was run by Keracher and his fellow Proletarians, it was never made into a narrowly “party press.” According to Samuel J. Meyers, himself a member of the Proletarian Party in the late 1920s, “the most important contribution of John Keracher to the labor movement” was to keep the old Kerr Company going during those long, hard times.

Keracher left Detroit for Chicago in the 1920s, remaining there through the early 1950s, after which he retired to Los Angeles. Shortly before his death he completed a history of the Proletarian party, as yet unpublished.

Grimes, Warren W. “The Proletarian Party of America.” Corvallis, OR: 1000 Flowers Publishing, 2006. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/TheProletarianPartyOfAmerica/page/n1/mode/2up

Wysocki, Al. “John Keracher: His Life and Work.” Proletarian News (Chicago), March 1958.