Customer Reviews

We Called Each Other Comrade: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publisher (History of Communication)

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Allen Ruff takes on a complex subject, the place of a radical publisher in the context of the turn of the 19th century and run up to the Great War and socialist squabbles brought on by varying degrees of belief in electoral politics and bread and butter unionism. The time of the War to End All Wars, or Peace to End All Peaces, may well remind many that once in their life IRA meant something Irish, SDS was not a syndrome, and Days of Rage in Chicago had noting to do with shopping or snowstorms. Whirlwind events gentled to today's moans, just as the Socialist Party, once millennialist, became quadrennialist Democratic Party goers, or fixated on behaviors acceptable to this or that exclusive sect, sex, race, or occupation.

Unifying the fact-packed discussion are the chronological presentation, the author's critical loyalty to the changing, deepening insight of his subject, and the amazing subject himself, Charles H. Kerr. Kerr developed the radical among radicals idea that the movement he served should be lead and of service to the country's productive population. He was no sectarian or office-seeker. His books, pamphlets, and magazines meant to reach any concerned and even curious person, to present to them the ideas of European and home-grown thinkers, comrades in the struggle for social equity. He opposed anarchic violence as well as those who would work join the mainstream and "work within for change", which usually meant selling out.

And oddly enough, Kerr kept the publishing house and publications financially afloat, an amazing story in itself, which Ruff has as one thread in his history. It would take J. Edgar Hoover and his ilk and the nationalism infecting socialists as the war came on to cripple the publishing company. It exists yet and probably among the ashes of the left are sparks that Kerr and others could have fanned into signal flares if not bonfires of revolution.

At any rate, some readers will be intrigued by the reach of the hope and plans for a new society, others will reminded of the insurrections of their own youth, and all can appreciate the clear style, absence of pretense or preachiness in Ruff's work. Even better the book may inspire some to emulate Kerr's effort. Kerr himself would have approved.