ABSTRACT
He marked the bindings of his publishing company’s hard-cover books with his monogram – CHK. In the Progressive Era, these letters meant one thing to American socialists, ‘Charles H. Kerr’, whose eponymous company served as the de facto publisher of the Socialist Party. e embossed image of a hand holding a torch on many of the hard-cover volumes symbolized Kerr’s central purpose, which was to lead readers from darkness to light. He truly believed that reading was revolutionary, just as it had been in his case. Time and time again, he made this message clear. As he put it in 1907, ‘[R]evolutionists will not evolve without study. ey cannot study without books.’1 Of his forty years in the publishing industry, Kerr spent thirty of them providing radical books and pamphlets to grow the socialist movement, hoping to lead readers into the light of the Cooperative Commonwealth. More than anything, he wanted to Americanize socialism and help make Marx a household name in the United States. is chapter tells the story of Kerr and his e orts to develop a literature of dissent that articulated socialist ideas through a distinctly American idiom. In the process the socialist movement became an instrument of Americanization itself, albeit Americanization from the ‘bottom up’.2
