Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Workers of the World, Read!’
- 1 ‘The Workingman's Bible’ and the Making of American Socialism
- 2 Charles H. Kerr & Company and the Americanization of Marxian Socialism
- 3 Activist Readers and American Socialists' Print Culture of Dissent
- 4 How the Socialist Party Created a Print Culture of Dissent without a Party-Owned Press
- 5 Information Management and the Socialist Party's Information Department and Research Bureau
- 6 Annotations on the Failure of Socialism in America
- 7 Conclusion: What a Book Cannot Do
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - Conclusion: What a Book Cannot Do
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Workers of the World, Read!’
- 1 ‘The Workingman's Bible’ and the Making of American Socialism
- 2 Charles H. Kerr & Company and the Americanization of Marxian Socialism
- 3 Activist Readers and American Socialists' Print Culture of Dissent
- 4 How the Socialist Party Created a Print Culture of Dissent without a Party-Owned Press
- 5 Information Management and the Socialist Party's Information Department and Research Bureau
- 6 Annotations on the Failure of Socialism in America
- 7 Conclusion: What a Book Cannot Do
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Historian Priscilla Coit Murphy titled her book about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, What a Book Can Do. In it, she explores the significant role that the book played in the modern environmental movement. She is part of a larger scholarly tradition that frames books as ‘agents of change’. Indeed, book historians have tended to share Murphy's optimism about the transformational power of books. Historians of the French Revolution, in particular – Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier – have been especially open to the revolutionary potential of reading and literacy. But, as I have shown, there is a lot that books cannot do. Indeed, nowhere is that clearer than in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American socialist movement.
I.
As much as government officials at the federal, state and local levels viewed socialist publications as a threat to the status quo during World War I and after, they, as well as socialists themselves, overstated the extent to which socialists' literature of dissent could undermine the dominant culture. Everyone seemed to buy into the revolutionary hype, not fully realizing just how limited an impact socialist ideas had on mainstream American society, especially after 1915. Indeed, the socialist movement already was in, at best, a state of stasis and, at worst, decline. Admittedly, 1919 was a turbulent year; nonetheless, there were many signs that the socialist movement's heyday had passed.
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- Information
- Socialism and Print Culture in America, 1897–1920 , pp. 135 - 150Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014