Early life and education Charles Hope Kerr was born in
LaGrange, Georgia, on April 23, 1860. He was the son of Katharine Brown—a teacher and daughter of a
Congregationalist minister—and Alexander Kerr, a
Scottish immigrant who taught mathematics and Latin at private academies in
Georgia. they were suspected of circulating antislavery tracts and conducting a clandestine school for slaves. When the
Civil War broke out, the Kerr family escaped to safety in
Rockford, Illinois via the
Underground Railroad. Charles spent his early childhood in Rockford. In 1871 his family moved to
Madison, Wisconsin when Alexander was appointed chairman of the Classics Department at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. Charles graduated from that university in 1881, with a degree in
Romance languages. He later settled in
Chicago. In 1886—a year after he edited a book of religious poetry,
Unity Songs Resung, for the Colegrove Book Company—he leveraged his magazine connections to form an independent publishing house,
Charles H. Kerr & Company, whose initial mission was to handle the printing and distribution of
Unity. In the 1890s, Kerr's politics shifted left, which was reflected in his publishing choices. Among the factors cited for his radicalization were his sympathy for the U.S. agrarian populist movement embodied in the
People's Party, his fascination with
Edward Bellamy's 1888 utopian socialist novel
Looking Backward, In January 1900, Kerr hired
Algie Martin Simons to launch a more explicitly socialist magazine, the
International Socialist Review (ISR). In 1908, after growing dissatisfied with the magazine's direction, Kerr fired Simons and took over primary editorial responsibility for
ISR, which until its demise in 1918 would remain loyal to the
Socialist Party of America. Kerr utilized his college training in Romance languages to translate into English such works as
Paul Lafargue's
The Right to Be Lazy, and
Antonio Labriola's
Essays on the Materialist Conception of History. and was widely circulated in the many editions of the
IWW's
Little Red Songbook. and
Bill Haywood, published by Charles Kerr in 1911 In the early 1900s, Kerr's company grew into a leading publisher of socialist, communist, anarchist, and IWW works. In his autobiography, the IWW artist and writer
Ralph Chaplin recalled being a teenager back in 1905 when he was introduced to Kerr in the Chicago publishing office: In addition to book publishing and magazine editing, Kerr was active in partisan politics. He served on the National Campaign Committee of the
Social Democratic Party of America and later the
Socialist Party of America. He was also on the executive committee of the
Socialist Party of Chicago, including a brief stint as its treasurer. In 1902 he was secretary of the
Socialist Party of Illinois. Kerr faced difficult times during and immediately after
World War I. Socialists had agitated against U.S. entry into the war, which was considered seditious talk. It prompted "the
postmaster general to refuse to send the
International Socialist Review through the mails in adherence to the
Espionage Act, which forbade any materials inciting 'treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.'" According to Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, the decades of "[government] repression, splits in the Socialist Party and the decimation of the IWW all took their toll and, by 1928, an exhausted Charles H. Kerr retired from the company he had directed for 42 years." He sold his controlling shares to
John Keracher and the American
Proletarian Party.
Vegetarianism Kerr was a vegetarian and his company published
J. Howard Moore's
The Universal Kinship.
Death Kerr spent his last years in
Los Angeles. He died there on June 1, 1944. He was 84. ==Works==