Charles H. Kerr Company

CHARLES H. KERR COMPANY. Founded in 1886 and operating into the 2020s, the Chicago-based Charles H. Kerr Company is the oldest socialist-oriented publishing house in the world. A vital part of the national and international socialist movement during its heyday in the 1900s and 1910s, it was largely responsible for introducing Marxism to a wide US public. A target of government repression during World War I, it nevertheless survived across a century through the commitment of a diverse range of dedicated radicals.

The company’s founder, Charles Hope Kerr was born in LaGrange, Georgia in 1860 to Congregationalist liberal educators active in the anti-slavery movement. Coming of age in Madison, Wisconsin, he graduated in 1881 from the-then State University of Wisconsin. In 1883, he moved to Chicago, then the center of the US publishing industry, where he apprenticed with James Colegrove, publisher for the liberal “Unity men” of the Western Unitarian Conference before founding the Company in 1886.

Attracted during the depression-ridden 1890s to the populist movement and its utopian hope for a “Cooperative Commonwealth,” Kerr took to publishing an array of books and pamphlets on monetary reform and railroad and banking regulation in addition to the monthly New Occasions, “a magazine of social and industrial progress.” During that decade, the firm also issued an extended list of titles by utopian socialists, radical woman’s rights advocates, anarchists, single-taxers, bimetallists, freethinkers, and evolutionists in addition to a number of panacea novels.

In 1897, Kerr launched The New Time: A Magazine of Social Progress, which he later described as a “semi-populist, semi-socialist magazine.” Along with pieces from a who's who of American reform, its pages carried occasional communications from socialist champion Eugene Debs as well as a regular “Scientific Socialism” column chronicling the progress of social democracy at home and abroad.

Never operating the company for personal gain and increasingly committed to advancing the era’s reform movements, Kerr through the decade adopted a number of innovative strategies to keep the company viable. Mid-decade, he took to offering the public ten-dollar shares of company stock that offered investors little more than deep discounts on publications and an opportunity to further the “cooperative commonwealth.”

Kerr’s formal connection with Marxian socialism and the Socialist International had roots in 1899. The Chicago branch of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) launched the weekly Worker's Call in March, and Kerr soon cultivated fraternal relations with the paper's editor, Algernon M. Simons.

Simons had been radicalized through his experience as a settlement house researcher in Chicago’s working-class stock-yard warren, “Back of the Yards.” Moving leftward, he joined the SLP in 1897. His vigorous socialist arguments won Charles and his spouse, May Walden Kerr, to the cause and the two men, determined to expand the audience for socialist thought, embarked on a number of projects.
Kerr announced the company’s commitment to the publication of “scientific socialism” in June 1899, and Simons became vice president of the company in January 1900. He became editor of the monthly International Socialist Review (ISR), the company’s “magazine of scientific socialism” launched in July.
Under Simon’s editorship until 1908, the monthly aired socialist perspectives on a broad range of topics from numerous national and international contributors and became the most important socialist theoretical journal in the United States. It also served as the primary promotional vehicle for the company as Kerr utilized its pages to offer large discounts on company titles to the monthly’s subscribers, investors in “cooperative publishing bonds,” and Socialist Party locals or individual “socialist sales agents” purchasing bundled quantities of the magazine and an ever-expanding list of socialist pamphlets and books. Initially hundreds, then thousands of such shareholder investors would help provide a baseline source of company support.

The company began offering a list of thirty-two-page five-cent pamphlets, The Pocket Library of Socialism, starting in March, 1899 with Woman and the Social Problem by Simons’s spouse, May Wood Simons. Priced as low priced six dollars per 1,000 copies to company shareholders, the series contained thirty-five titles by 1902 and sixty plus by 1908 including Marx’s Wage-Labour and Capital and Marx on Cheapness. The collection by that time reached a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.

Kerr meanwhile expanded the company’s catalogue by purchasing imprints, plates and copyrights from other radical firms. In such fashion, he obtained rights to titles such as Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Civil War in France, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

In 1901, the company issued Socialist Songs With Music, the first such collection printed in the United States. Edited by Kerr, the booklet included his translation from the French of Eugene Pottier’s socialist anthem, “The Internationale.” Regularly attuned to the movement’s working-class culture, the company in subsequent years also would issue socialist playing cards, post cards and a “Class Struggle” board game alongside its political works. In late 1899, the Simonses traveled to Europe where they met a number of European socialist notables including Parti Ouvrier founder Jules Guesde and Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue in France, Keir Hardie and H. M. Hyndman in England, and Belgium’s movement leader, Emile Vandervelde. They returned to Chicago with numerous publications, a list of newfound correspondents, and various ideas for new publishing projects.

A resulting stream of adaptations and translations began to appear soon afterward as Kerr translated French and Italian titles and the Simonses worked from the German. May Wood had already translated Karl Kautsky's Frederick Engels His Life, His Work and His Writings and Simons assisted in the translation of Wilhelm Liebknecht’s No Compromise-No Political Trading. Kerr meanwhile translated Vandervelde's Collectivism and Industrial Development as well as Lafarge’s Socialism and the Intellectuals and The Right to Be Lazy. The Simonses also translated Kautsky's The Social Revolution (The Erfurt Program). The company additionally issued works from the Italian, most notably Kerr’s translation of Antonio Labriola’s Essays on the Materialist Conception of History.

Kerr had established trade connections prior to 1900 with the London book house Swan, Sonnenschein, publisher of the first authorized English edition of Marx’s Capital, Volume I (1887). Through Sonnenschein, in 1900, Kerr issued an edition of Frederich Engels's Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, advertised as the company's “first cloth bound socialist book.” The Company’s lists soon included other Marxist standards such as the Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and titles from Wilhelm Liebknecht and Joseph Dietzgen. Most notably, the Company became the first publisher of an English edition of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital (1906–1909), translated by Kerr associate Ernest Untermann.

The Company’s catalogues by 1905 also included various titles by notables in Britain’s broader socialist movement including William Morris, Robert Blatchford, H.M. Hyndman, Edward Carpenter, and E. Belfort Bax. Socialism Made Easy by the famed Irish revolutionary James Connolly appeared in 1909.

Kerr’s list of US authors meanwhile expanded through the decade to include titles by the famed attorney Clarence Darrrow, Jack London and Eugene Debs as well as titles such as Gustavus Myers’s muckraking History of the Great American Fortunes, Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological study Ancient Society and the widely distributed Marxist primer Shop Talks on Economics by the company’s Mary Marcy. Committed to broader working-class education, Kerr in 1905 introduced the multivolume “Library of Science for the Workers,” a foray into Darwinian Marxism with Wilhelm Boelsche’s The Evolution of Man. Appearing in 1907, The Theoretical System of Karl Marx, a critique of Marx’s major bourgeois detractors by left socialist Louis Boudin, were recognized as one of Kerr’s most significant titles.

The company’s emphasis evolved as the broader socialist movement and its political expression, the Socialist Party of America (SP), developed contending “revolutionist” and “reformist” or “gradualist” wings. The company’s inner circle — Kerr, Mary Marcy, her husband Leslie, Wobbly poet and illustrator Ralph Chaplin, and the former SLPer, Frank Bohn — increasingly sided with the radicals — the industrial unionist, direct-action left centered in the Industrial Workers of the World.

That move leftward first became evident with the transformation of the ISR following Simons’ 1908 exit as editor. Until then a dry theoretical journal, the monthly under Kerr's and then Mary Marcy's editorship became a lively mass circulation magazine rebranded as the “Fighting Magazine of Socialism,” “Of, By, and For the Working Class.” Reflecting the change, the company’s lists by 1910-1911 included such titles as the left pamphlet manifesto Industrial Socialism by Bohn and Wobbly champion “Big Bill” Haywood and The Militant Proletariat by the left theoretician Austin Lewis.
That leftward shift actually attracted increasing support from below and improved the company’s fortunes while it raised concerns among the SP’s “gradualists.” So much so that in 1912-1913, during a major SP faction fight resulting in the ouster of Haywood from the SP’s executive committee, party conservatives attempted to censure the independent company by charging it had established a “socialist publishing trust.”

From its start in August 1914, the Kerr group remained ceaseless opponents of World War I. In solidarity with Europe’s anti-war left, Kerr and Marcy early on opened the ISR’s pages to “news and views” from the war’s left opposition including Rosa Luxemburg, Otto Ruhle, Hermann Gorter and S.J. Rutgers. At the same time speaking out against war preparedness and increasing militarism at home, the Kerr group would come to pay a heavy price after the United States entered the fray in April, 1917.
A vital source of revenue through its advertising and the resultant sale of its titles, the ISR was banned from the mails in 1918 under the infamous Espionage Act as the broader socialist movement and institutions that sustained the company — the SP locals, the IWW halls, and myriad rank and filers — bore the brunt of legal and extra-legal repression. The resultant decimation and fracturing of the movement placed a demoralizing financial strain on the firm.

Ongoing post-war repression, splits in the SP including an exodus into the early communist movement, and the further crippling of the IWW all took their toll. The company, diminished in scope from its early twentieth century heyday, nevertheless survived by publishing a number of new titles in the early 1920s including Marcy’s The Right to Strike, former assistant secretary of labor Louis F. Post’s The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty, and The Autobiography of Mother Jones. After directing the company for forty-two years, Charles Kerr retired in 1928 and passed control of the company to the Michigan left-winger John Keracher and his comrades in the communist Proletarian Party (PP). Committed to keeping Marxists classics in print and issuing occasional new titles such as Keracher’s pamphlet critique of the US mass media, The Head-Fixing Industry, the group maintained the operation as a small mail order concern through the late 1960s.

With the passing of Al Wysocki, the last of Kerr’s PP caretakers, a new board of directors took control of the company. The dedicated group of Chicago activists included the longtime IWW member Fred Thompson, labor defense activist and radical economist Joseph Giganti, the socialist historian Virgil Vogel, Korean War draft resister and veteran socialist Burt Rosen, and Packing House union organizer and Illinois Historical Society founder Les Orear.

Beginning with a reissued Autobiography of Mother Jones and largely through the efforts of Burt Rosen, the revived company published new biographies of Eugene Debs and Lucy Parsons, as well as reprints of titles by Engels, Marx and Lafargue. Subsequently under the direction of Chicago Surrealists Franklin and Penelope Rosemont and organized as a worker-owned co-operative not-for-profit, the revitalized venture issued a considerable list of reprinted titles through the 1980s and 1990s into the first decade of the new century, including works by C.L.R. James, Mary Marcy, Eugene V. Debs, and Clarence Darrow, as well as new titles by T-Bone Slim, Claude McKay, Covington Hall, artist Carlos Cortez and a number of books on the IWW. Especially notable was the Haymarket Scrapbook, edited by Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger, marking the centenary of the event in 1986, and a series of titles about Chicago history in its bohemian phases, around unique institutions like the Dil Pickle Club. Other outstanding titles included a reprint of Edward Bellamy stories and an expansion of the classic Wobbly songbook, retitled The Big Red Songbook edited anew by famed folklore scholar Archie Green and others.

The collaboration of the revived Kerr Company and the Illinois Labor History Society also prompted a new surge of energy and a revival of friendships and collaborations across Chicago’s leftish communities. Juice is Stranger than Friction, The Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim, pointed to the idiosyncratic creativity of what seemed a final burst of Kerr energy. With Franklin Rosemont’s death in 2009, the energy of the Kerr Company lapsed, and some of the choice titles were taken over by PM, at the behest of its sympathetic director Ramsey Kanaan. Kerr struggled on to survive, with the help of a new generation of activists, as it approached its 135th birthday in 2021.

Beasley Books, The Pocket Library of Socialism," Chicago: Beasley Books, n.d.

Davenport, Tim, comp., “Publications by Charles H. Kerr & Co. (1885-1940s) Listed Alphabetically By Author” http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/spapubs-kerrlist.html

Martinek, Jason D “Business at the Margins of Capitalism: Charles H. Kerr and Company and the Progressive Era Socialist Movement” Business and Economic History On-Line 8, (2010) 1-8. https://thebhc.org/sites/default/files/martinek.pdf

Ruff, Allen M. "We Called Each Other Comrade": Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers. Oakland: PM Press, 2011/Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Ruff, Allen M. “Capital Comes to America: Charles H. Kerr & Company and the Cross-Atlantic Journey of Marx’s Master Work” Historical Materialism (July 14,1920) https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/capital-comes-to-america-charles-h-kerr-company-and-cross-atlantic-journey-marxs-master-work