"We Called Each Other Comrade"

Allen Ruff

Description

This is the history of the most significant translator, publisher, and distributor of left-wing literature in the United States. Based in Chicago and still publishing, Charles H. Kerr & Company began in 1886 as a publisher of Unitarian tracts. The company's focus changed after its founder, the son of abolitionist activists, became a socialist at the turn of the century.

Tracing Kerr's political development and commitment to radical social change, "We Called Each Other Comrade" also tells the story of the difficulties of exercising the First Amendment in an often hostile business and political climate. A fascinating exploration in left-wing culture, this revealing chronicle of Charles H. Kerr and his revolutionary publishing company looks at the remarkable list of books, periodicals, and pamphlets that the firm produced and traces the strands of a rich tradition of dissent in America.

Sujets

• American Left
• First Amendment to the United States Constitution
• Révolution

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781604865721
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Contents
Foreword by Paul Buhle
Bibliography of Kerr titles published since 1983
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Charles H. Kerr: Early Years, Early Influences
2 Kerr’s Early Chicago Years
3 The Kerr Company’s Beginnings
4 Unity Years
5 From Unitarian to Populist and Beyond
6 The First Socialist Phase, 1899–1908
7 The Move Leftward, 1908–11
8 The In-house Battle, 1911–13
9 The International Socialist Review, 1908–18
10 The War Years and After
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
"We Called Each Other Comrade is a classic work in the history of American media and the American left. Allen Ruff has masterfully told this extraordinary story about a book publisher at the heart of our nation’s most important struggles for social justice. This richly nuanced look at the Charles Kerr Company has stood the test of time and deserves your attention."
Robert W. McChesney, coauthor of The Death and Life of American Journalism
"Arrestingly told and meticulously researched, this fine history of the world’s oldest radical publisher uniquely brings to life the great characters, free speech fights, political struggles, and intellectual ferment of the home-grown revolutionary left in the United States."
David Roediger, University of Illinois, author of How Race Survived U.S. History
"Freelance historian Ruff tells the story of Chicago’s Charles H. Kerr & Co. and its importance as the longest-running socialist publisher in the world. Ruff describes Kerr & Co.’s development and its founder’s philosophical journey from Unitarianism through Populism to socialism and the revolutionary wing of the movement. Along the way he presents a rich view of turn-of-the-century American political history. This seemingly narrow corporate history sketches the development of labor unions, the formation of American socialism, and its factional infighting before World War I. We view the rise of Chicago and its publishing industry and look behind the scenes at seminal publications of American socialism. Ruff also includes biographical snapshots of the great figures of the Progressive era: Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and Clarence Darrow, among others. Recommended for academic and public libraries with comprehensive collections in American history."
Library Journal
"Allen Ruff has written a valuable study of the Chicago publishing house that gave voice to the left wing of American socialism in the two decades before World War I. Guided by founder Charles Kerr’s belief that ‘there could be no socialists without socialist books,’ the Kerr company used education and agitation in a struggle to transform American institutions and organize a cooperative commonwealth... This highly readable and well-documented work is a must for labor historians, and would be particularly appropriate for labor history and labor and media classes."
Labor Studies Journal
"Occasionally a historian like Allen Ruff is able to discover a hidden diamond, clean off the accumulated dust of the ages, and make it shine for all. That is what he did with the Charles Kerr publishing house, quite one of the most remarkable cultural achievements, produced by organised workers anywhere in the English speaking world."
Phil Katz, fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers and fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, UK.

This edition © 2011 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-426-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010916486
Cover: John Yates / www.stealworks.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
In memory of Elsie and Teddy Ruff
Foreword The Kerr Company and We Called Each Other Comrade
Reader, you have before you one of the outstanding histories of the American Left and something more: a unique angle of vision into the heroic period of socialism and syndicalism, not only in the U.S. but worldwide.
Allen Ruff’s volume, originally published in 1997, was path-breaking in any number of ways. Histories of Marxism, Marxist ideas even more than Marxist-influenced movements in North America, have been rare until recent decades, and until the 1980s at least, often dominated by themes of anticommunist triumphalism. That is to say: if American society including the American economy had proved itself a grand success, after the doubts of the Depression years, then socialists had, at best, contributed to the welfare state and Communists had mainly served as agents of a foreign power.
Ruff and other scholars coming, more or less, from the New Left generation of campus activists, looked at things quite differently. Not drawn to the myths of the Soviet Union as the "workers’ paradise" but firmly against the war in Vietnam and the "Corporate Liberal" backing of that gory if futile imperial exercise, they had (or the young historians among them had, at any rate) a certain hankering for the pre-1920 moods of American radicalism. Then, armed with optimism ever harder to maintain after 1920, socialists, anarchists, and assorted dissenters had contested the very nature of the American republic, with considerable support in the population.
The Charles H. Kerr Company epitomized the wide-open, generous, but also militantly class-conscious, anti-imperialist character of the day. Ruff captured brilliantly their rejection of mere reform of the system, but also their careful examination, across many books and innumerable essays in the International Socialist Review, of the changing nature of the system itself. Industrialism, introduced several generations earlier, was rapidly modernizing, as American capital extended its sway worldwide, realizing in the war an opportunity to dominate the planet for its own purposes. No such further change, not jet service, nuclear bombs, or the Internet, has fundamentally altered the equation. The intellectuals around the Kerr Company saw it first.
But Ruff also captures the other side of the Kerr enterprise: working-class education. Having a brilliant analysis counted little without the effort to explain, in the clearest terms, what was happening to capital and to labor, metropolitan and rural, not only in the U.S. but as far as could be grasped, worldwide. Kerr books and pamphlets as well as the ISR were cheaply priced and reached everywhere an English-language publication could, not only in the U.S. but Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, not to mention territorial Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Ordinary workers found them readable and put them to work in the project of solidarity.
The upthrust of socialists and their partners, Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World), was blunted and then destroyed by repression, especially severe under the liberal Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson. Its small staff struggled onward and then receded into a holding game from the late 1920s until the early 1980s.
Ruff’s study carries us to that latter point and hints beyond. The bulk of this introduction will seek to bring us up to the present day, but the story of Kerr’s last quarter century or so cannot be told without a bit of Chicago radical pre-history. The renewed Kerr spirit belongs, largely, to Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, and also to the local and state labor history growing in many places, but vivid in Chicago (and Illinois).
Franklin Rosemont, born in 1943, was named after typographic pioneer Benjamin Franklin by Henry Rosemont, a leading typographical unionist in Chicago since the 1930s and leader of the 1949 newspaper strike. The younger Rosemont thus grew up in a milieu of labor history and labor activity, but also Chicago cultural moods (his mother was a "character" on local radio in the inventive media era of the 1920s and a jazz musician). He initiated the surrealist movement in the U.S. after visiting André Breton in Paris in 1965, and with Penelope, among others, published the Rebel Worker, a voice for the younger members of the Industrial Workers of the World, from the Solidarity Bookshop in Chicago. Perhaps no more beautiful mimeographed magazine had ever been published in the U.S. Left.
Rosemont had meanwhile connected with historical interests by enrolling at Roosevelt University, in downtown Chicago, and studying with the notable African American historian of black and urban culture, St. Clair Drake. An extended series of activities and events including provocative flyers, broadsheets, exhibits, and demonstrations would connect surrealist concerns with revolutionary aspirations, foreshadowing the Kerr list decades later. Meanwhile, Penny Rosemont worked as a printer at the Students for a Democratic Society office, linking the Rosemonts’ sympathies to the vibrant movements of the day and the particular syndicalist perspective that seemed to carry the youth Left beyond the boundaries of the old internecine conflicts and distractions.
Black Swan Press, the surrealist imprint (it has continued intermittently since 1983, distributed by Kerr) proceeded with various books of poetry and polemics, while the Rosemonts’ extended circle brought out several issues of the lavish journal Arsenal. An issue of Cultural Correspondence (1982) on radical cultural currents in the U.S., reprinted by City