| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Allen Ruff. "We Called Each Other Comrade": Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers. (The History of Communication.) Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 1997. Pp. xvii, 312. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

Allen Ruff's study focuses on what he considers the American socialist movement's most important publishing venture during its peak years in the early twentieth century: Charles H. Kerr and Company, which the major scholarly studies of the Socialist Party have largely overlooked. At the turn of the century, Kerr and Company began publishing English translations of the classic works of European Marxism, often for the first time. It also published International Socialist Review (ISR) from 1900 to 1918. Initially a theoretical organ, the ISR after 1908 became the principal voice of the Socialist Party's (SP) left wing. To reach a wider, grass-roots readership, Kerr used a format resembling that of mass circulation magazines, shortening article length and emphasizing illustrations, photographs, and cartoons. 1

Kerr embraced Marxism in 1899, following a long-term involvement with radical Unitarianism that began after he entered the University of Wisconsin in 1877. Influenced by the teachings of abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, radical Unitarians rejected an otherworldly outlook, preferring to combat "the sins of Boston, not of Babylon" (p. 24). Ruff explores radical Unitarianism's impact on Kerr's becoming a socialist, emphasizing its adherents' involvement in campaigns for labor and women's rights, its stress on education for uplift, its faith in humanity's capacity for improvement, and its origins in a factional conflict with Unitarianism's conservative wing. In 1886, in Chicago, Kerr established the Midwest's major Unitarian publishing house. The depression of 1893–1897 drew Kerr away from Unitarianism and into more direct political involvement; he published Populist magazines between 1893 and 1898. . . .

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