Charles H. Kerr: Early Years, Early Influences

In the prime of his life during the decade preceding World War I, Charles H. Kerr moved into the left wing of the socialist movement in the United States and aligned himself with the most radical, militant, class-conscious elements of the cause. Solidly middle class in background, highly educated and well situated, and in some ways destined for a position of comfort, a place in society regularly bestowed upon one of his background and credentials, Kerr nevertheless had long since turned toward radicalism. He had thrown in his lot with the socially disenfranchised and economically hard-pressed and sacrificed virtually everything he had to a cause that promised little in immediate return — nothing, certainly, in material terms. What caused this son of the middle class to reject that birthright of relative comfort, privilege, and prestige that could have easily been his? What compelled him to take a class stand in some ways antithetical to his own immediate interest?

Although the origins of the publisher's class-conscious radicalism lay shrouded in the past, the roots of his particular radical trajectory tapped into a longer dissenting tradition anchored deeply in the social and intellectual subsoil of nineteenth-century American culture. His early environment was certainly a key factor, and Kerr's parents also played an important role. The moral and social perspectives and the dedication to service of both Alexander and Katharine Kerr had an inestimable effect on their son.

Alexander Kerr was born at Fetter Angus near Aberdeen, Scotland, in August 1828, the son of George and Helen Legge Kerr. The third of five children, he sailed with his family from Aberdeen to Quebec in April 1835. The immigrant family first settled in Comwell, Ontario, where George Ken-carried on his tailor's trade alongside his elder brother James, an earlier émigré. In 1838 they moved by way of the Great Lakes water route to Illinois. After landing at Chicago, they made their way to Joliet, where they remained another three years. Finally, in 1841, George Kerr purchased a farm near Rockford where he and his wife spent the rest of their lives.

Alexander Kerr attended the district schools around Rockford during the winter and helped on the family farm during the summer months. In 1851 he enrolled at the Rockford Scientific and Classical Institute in preparation for Beloit College, which he entered the following year as a sophomore. Following his graduation from Beloit with highest honors in 1855, he moved to Georgia, where he taught Latin and mathematics at several small private academies.

During the Christmas holidays of 1856, Kerr returned to Rockford to marry his college sweetheart, Katharine Fuller Brown. Kate, as she was more affectionately known, was the daughter of a graduate of Amherst College, the Congregational minister Hope Brown. Born in Shirley, Massachusetts, on August 23,1832, her formal education began at the Ipswich Academy at Ipswich, New Hampshire. The Brown family moved to Napierville (now Naperville), Illinois, in 1845. While serving as minister at the First Congregational Church at Napierville, Reverend Brown became affiliated with the Rockford Female Seminary, the "sister school" of nearby Beloit College, and Kate Brown enrolled there.

Founded in 1847 to send "cultivated Christian Women [out] in the various fields of usefulness," the Rockford school developed under the disciplining guidance of Anna Peck Sill, an eastern-bred evangelical "possessed of a most passionate earnestness for Christianity in general, for the development of Christian missionaries in particular." Under Sill's tutelage, the curriculum and daily regimen combined "to inspire a missionary spirit of self-denying benevolence toward all, but toward the ignorant and the sinful." The purpose of life, as laid out by the moral and spiritual architects of the seminary, was giving oneself for the good of others.

Katharine Brown came away deeply imbued with that ethic of self-sacrifice and service. After graduation in 1855, she remained at the seminary, where she worked as an instructor for the next year and a half. She had met Alexander Kerr while she was still a student at Rockford, and the two became engaged in April 1855. The bride and groom journeyed back southward to Georgia after their wedding on New Years Day 1857.

Kerr resumed his teaching and became professor of mathematics at Brownwood Institute, a boys' school near LaGrange, Georgia, in 1858. Following a stay at Brownwood, he became principal of another private school nearby. There was much more to Kate and Alexander Kerr's life than the teaching of math and Latin to the white sons of Georgia, however. Unbeknown to local authorities, the young couple was committed to the abolitionist cause. They circulated antislavery tracts and conducted a clandestine school for slaves in their spare time.

Charles Hope Kerr was born in LaGrange on April 23,1860. Within a year of his arrival, animosities between the North and South flared into open conflict at Fort Sumter. Fearful that Alexander Kerr might be forced to serve in Confederate army and concerned as well for their safety and that of their young son, the Kerrs fled northward after the first battle of Bull Run in July 1861. Passing through Confederate lines by using stops along the Underground Railroad and staying with sympathetic abolitionist colleagues, the Kerr family made its way back to Rockford.

Resettled in northern Illinois, Alexander Kerr became superintendent of schools for Winnebago County in 1862 to fill out the term of his brother James, who had enlisted in the Union cause. In February 1863 the family moved to Beloit, where Kerr took on the task of reorganizing that city's school system. He became president of the Wisconsin Teacher's Association in 1868. In recognition of his work as a state educator, the Board of Regents of what was then the State University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1871 elected him to fill a newly established chair in Greek. The Kerrs moved to the Wisconsin capital that year and took up residence in a large, comfortable lake-front house on Langdon Street, a thoroughfare of "quiet charm" with an "atmosphere of calm and unhasting serenity" close to campus. It was there that they raised their two sons, Charles and his younger brother James.

Home of the university and the state legislature, late-nineteenth-century Madison provided an exceptional intellectual environment for one as well situated as the young Kerr. The city had already become a midwestern oasis for a broad array of innovative, progressive educators. Comfortable in their new surroundings, both Alexander and Kate Kerr became active in local...