"The Workingman's Bible": Robert
Blatchford's Merrie England, Radical
Literacy, and the Making of
Debsian Socialism, 1895-1900

Jason D. Martinek
Carnegie Mellon University

Turn-of-the-century socialists radicalized literacy. Unlike middle-class reformers, whose desire for mass literacy arose from the need for a hardworking, compliant workforce, socialists used it to undermine capitalism. Through their printed culture of dissent, they not only sought to transform individual lives, but an entire social system. They took up the task of using literacy to convert workers with a missionary zeal. Moral indignation fueled their crusade. In a nation of such wealth, they asked, why was it that so many industrious people did not have enough to provide themselves and their families with adequate food, clothing, and shelter? Their answer was that America's political and economic institutions had been corrupted by the nation's monied power. In their minds, only an enlightened, educated working-class could challenge the prerogatives of capital and make these institutions fully socially accountable to the people. Literacy could emancipate workers from wage slavery. An 1895 article in the popular socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, underscored literacy's importance to the socialist movement: "Read the books on political economy that your masters do not want you to read. The truth will make you free Ð a condition you do not even know of."1 For socialists, literacy was a revolutionary act. It subverted dominant values, promoted working-class self-activity, and provided a viable means of securing a new moral order, one in which human beings came before the almighty dollar.	1
Radical literacy shaped American history at a crucial juncture, the moment that marked the heyday of the book as well as organized socialism in the United States. At no time did print have as much potential to shape workers' lives as it did between 1880 and 1917. In "New Readers in the Nineteenth Century," Martyn Lyons called the late nineteenth century the "'golden age' of the book in the West." He argued that this period signaled the "first generation which acceded to mass literacy" and "the last to see the book unchallenged as a communications medium, by either radio or the electronic media of the twentieth century."2 The primacy of print was not lost on socialists: "Who of us does not trace his own conversion to printed words that have all at once aroused him from apathy and heartlessness, and have given us new, soul-stirring hopes?" asked another Appeal to Reason article.3 Print was socialists' chief weapon in their battle against capital. The printed word, declared an advertisement from the period's most successful radical publisher, Charles H. Kerr and Company, "is a real explosive, a weapon far more powerful than dynamite bombs! Socialists must win in a battle of brains Ð and here is ammunition for them."4 They truly believed that in the struggle against capitalism the pen was mightier than the sword.	2
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