Charles H. Kerr & Company
| Founded | 1886 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Charles Hope Kerr |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Chicago |
| Distribution | Small Press Distribution |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | www |
The Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company was established in Chicago, Illinois in 1886 as Charles H. Kerr & Co. by Charles Hope Kerr, originally to promote his Unitarian views. As Kerr's personal interests moved from religion to populism to Marxism and he became interested in the labor movement, the company's publications took a similar turn. During the 1920s Kerr ceded control of the firm to the impossibilist Proletarian Party of America, which continued the imprint as its official publishing house throughout its four decades of organized existence.
Control moved again during the decade of the 1960s, this time to a circle of Chicago radicals with close affinity to the ideas of the Industrial Workers of the World, who gave the company its current operating moniker. The Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company remains in operation in the second decade of the 21st century, making it the oldest radical book publisher in America.
In March 1878 a magazine called Unity had been launched by liberal supporter of the Western Unitarian Conference. The wing of the Unitarian movement represented by the new semi-monthly magazine argued that personal character rather than literal belief in a body of written dogma marked the true "test and essence of religion." These so-called "Unity Men" sought wider acceptance among Unitarians for this fundamental idea of the primacy of ethics over belief — a matter of no little controversy among the more conservative church mainstream of the day. A monthly magazine called Unitarian was established in January 1886 in an attempt to combat the ideas of the "Unity men" — who were seen as undermining Christianity in favor of what was characterized as a new "Ethical Culture."
As the controversy between the dissident "ethical" Unitarians and the more conservative "doctrinal" church mainstream heated up, the former felt the need for centralized and expeditious publication of books and other materials reflecting their views. The Georgia-born Charles Hope Kerr, a young man born in 1860 who had joined the staff at Unity magazine in the middle 1880s, obliged by establishing in Chicago in 1886 a publishing house for the "Unity men" called "Charles H. Kerr & Co." The Unity men aspired to promote a sound relationship between the emerging evolutionary science of the day and enlightened religious belief — or, as Kerr himself put it, "a religion that is rational and a rationalism that is religious."
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