ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the cultural limitations of radical literacy by examining an annotated copy of John Spargo's 1906 textbook, socialism, and the unique and invaluable insight it provides into the intimate relationship between author, text and reader. Historians posited two explanations for socialism's failure: the historians who blames the failure of American socialism on its inconsequential impact on the real world of party politics, the historians who acknowledge that a viable culture of dissent existed in American history, but that it was a political counter-tradition that lost out to the apikorista of corporate liberalism in the late nineteenth century. Socialists intended their print culture to convince readers of socialism's efficacy. Cultural conservatism prevents the annotator from seeing socialisms efficacy. Annotations offer access to mental universe of the individual reader and the society in which they lived, but aside from being hard to come by, scholars have been reluctant to use them.
