"We called each other comrade" Book

A good, clear, if not particularly exciting, account of the 19th–20th century Chicago socialist publisher. Its founder started as a Unitarian reformer and slowly swayed leftward under the influence of utopian/scientific socialism before the turn of the century. He exemplified a shift from avant-garde educating the masses to a rank-and-file–centered, working class media, where union organizing and political action were seen as supremely practical things. The company's connection to Bill Haywood and its popular proletarian periodicals kept it going, even as it tried to escape sectarian socialist conflict.

In the end, its anti-war stance, economic depression, and the active suppression of socialists in the 1910s and 1920s reduced the company and the socialist movement it depended on to shadows of their former selves. The company continued to exist up through the 1980s, stewarded by later activists.